The rivers which everywhere feed the African forest, coupled with the tropical sun, give luxuriance to all nature. Vines are there as much as three feet in circumference, moss-grown and gnarled with age, born perhaps when the parent acorns of our oldest oaks were yet unformed. Sometimes like huge serpents they coil themselves in a tortuous grip round two or three trees, each of which may be ten times their own size.
There is beauty too in these silent forests, when at intervals on the march the traveller, almost unconsciously at first, begins to inhale the fragrant odour of some delicious perfume sent forth by modest blooms that shun the gaze of man. A little searching beneath the undergrowth, or in the tree tops overhead, reveals a bloom upon which the eye gladly lingers—trails of waxen jasmine hanging from the bush in exquisite profusion.
BEAUTY IN DECAY
There is beauty, too, in the forest decay, in the fallen tree trunk, whose rotting bark and ugly torn stump are transformed by tufts of gracefully drooping fern, while tiny rootlets smile from out every crevice. There is beauty, too, in the fungus growths, tinted and white, or the perfection of coral, or blooms whose purple depths suggest some cherished hot-house flower.
The experienced traveller is quick to note signs of a change; the pathway leads uphill and the absence of giant tree trunks denotes that he is treading a once cleared and populated region. That hill, whose summit is capped with foliage, was once a village landmark, beneath it, myriad termites live and pursue their daily toils through tunnels and chambers that they have shaped by their countless thousands. Were man’s three-score years and ten twice told devoted to the study of the ways and purposes of the unheeded occupants of our earth, he had but then begun to learn the alphabet of nature’s infinite resources.
THE “ELEPHANT EAR” IN THE WET SEASON.
WILD FOREST FRUIT.