Among other matters, the men from different villages had discussed what goods were most likely to be profitable in trading. They all agreed that the traders were not like the Bantu people, who prefer to do the same things and follow the same customs year in and year out; the traders were forever changing their minds. Things which used to be much in demand were now not wanted. The older men, for example, could remember how, when they were boys, camwood and barwood and African mahogany were asked for. It was said that in some parts of the forest it paid even now to take ebony and teak and other kinds of lumber to the coast. But this was only where the logs could go down by water. There were too many rapids and the distance was too great to make any such trade profitable for this village.
Camwood is very good for cabinet work; it is light brown when cut, and with exposure to the air turns a beautiful deep red-brown. Barwood is sometimes used for violin bows. Both these trees are cousins of the California redwoods, though they do not grow to be giants. But in the days when the traders bought the wood, it was not for cabinet work; it was for dyestuffs. Before aniline dye was invented, the rich dull red of Madras handkerchiefs was made by boiling the chips of these woods in water. Such a dye would not fade like the colors in the cloth now sold by the traders.
The most profitable thing found in the great forest storehouse was rubber. Mpoko himself had helped get some of the supply of it that was waiting to go down to the coast. This work of getting rubber is done usually in August, or from October to March during the dry season, when there is not so much to do on the farms and it is pleasanter to work in the woods. The women prepare about three weeks’ food for the rubber gatherers, who camp in the woods while the work goes on.
The latex, or sap, is collected in various ways. A cut may be made in the tree and a broken bottle, a large snail shell, or a gourd fastened below to receive the sap. Rubber is also obtained from lianas or vines which are sometimes cut up to let the sap drain into basins from both ends of the stem at once. Toward evening or in the early morning the sap is collected and put into iron pots. It is a rather thick, milky juice, and the rubber is separated from the watery fluid either by boiling or by adding lime juice or tannin squeezed from wild fruits. Then it is dried, in the form of strips, or strips rolled into a ball, or flat cakes, over the smoke of a wood fire. Sometimes it is soaked in streams to clear out the impurities, a practice which adds to its weight but is not honest. One man can collect three or four pounds a day, for which the trader will pay a shilling a pound.
Another thing that was going into the packs of the porters now was raffia. In the old days this was never valuable. Now there seemed to be a market for it. It was first exported in 1890, the price then being from $300 to $350 a ton. Later it was about $100. Long before it was known to our schools for basket making and mat making, the Bantu people used the long, tough strips for netting, weaving, and many other purposes.
When the men went into the forest to add raffia and some other things to their stock for the trading journey, Mpoko and Nkula went with them. The forest was a wonderful place even to them, who had never known any other country, and to a civilized boy it would have looked like fairyland. Monkeys leaped and chattered in the branches, and birds of many sorts, many of them splendid in coloring, hopped and flew among the trees. There were wild canaries, waxbills, crows, now and then a red-tailed gray parrot, and the bright-colored plantain-eater, or touraco, as the boys called it. This bird, a distant cousin of the cuckoo, has a crest like a jay’s, which it can raise or lower, and its call sounds almost exactly like “touraco, tu-ra-co!” The queerest-looking bird of all, perhaps, was the ground hornbill, which is as common about African villages as a crow. This bird looks as if it had been trying to imitate the rhinoceros, for it has a great horny bill with a thick lump on what might be called the bridge of the nose. It is useful to the villager, for it is a sort of street cleaner in feathers, and eats garbage, rats, snakes, lizards, and other small creatures, with great relish.
Mpoko and Nkula caught a bunting to take home and tame, and they came upon a little group of the dome-shaped huts of the weaver bird. On the way home the party went out of its way to the Red Rocks. This was the name the boys had for them, but the place was really an outcrop of iron ore, red with rust from the air and the dampness. While the men were getting out some lumps of ore to be made into weapons, the boys went exploring and found something surprising on their own account.
In a little clearing farther up the mountain, great yellow globes were shining on the ground among coarse vines. They were pumpkins. But how came pumpkins away up there, miles away from any farm or house? It really looked like witchery. But when the hunters saw them they laughed and said that the boys had happened on the Elephant’s Garden. These had sprung up from seeds of the pumpkins carried off by elephants from some settlement.