One who is accustomed to the maple, beech, oak and pine, finds the African forest strangely unfamiliar. There are extremes of soft and hard woods; and one will soon observe that as a rule the soft woods have large leaves, while most of the hard woods have small leaves. Teak, mahogany, lignum vitæ, ebony and camwood are characteristic. The most striking and beautiful tree of the forest is a species of cotton wood. It grows an enormous height, with a silver-gray trunk like a column of granite, and is supported by immense buttresses. In the primeval forest, that which has not at any time been cut down for man’s habitation, the foliage is very high and the gray trunks suggest the columns of a cathedral. The branches above interlace, forming a canopy of foliage and excluding the sun. Cable vines of various sizes, many of them six or eight inches in diameter, lash the trees together, ascending the tree trunks in a spiral coil like an endless python and sometimes strangling them to death, then swinging from tree to tree in loops and coils, gnarled and twisted. The foliage and flowers of these spread through the tree tops, making the dim light below more dim, and from the swinging cables an undisciplined profusion of other vines and various hanging plants depend in festoons and draperies, all interwoven in bewildering confusion. The ground is covered with a thick compost of rotting leaves and branches and insects. Every few yards a giant tree trunk lies prostrate and is filled with myriad insects that will soon devour it.
Lightning sometimes strikes the tallest trees, which come crashing down bringing half a dozen others with them. Then in this open place where the sunlight reaches the ground there shoots up with amazing rapidity a tangled undergrowth, from which young trees race upwards to secure the light and air in such rivalry and struggle that the weak are soon strangled or crowded to death, and the battle is to the swift.
The poet William Watson in melodious verses prays for—
“The advent of that morn divine
When nations may as forests grow,
Wherein the oak hates not the pine,
Nor beeches wish the cedars woe,
But all in their unlikeness blend
Confederate to one golden end.”
No one will deny that this is beautiful poetry; but it is deplorably false science. Nothing could be more untrue to the facts. The oak, the pine and the cedar, considered as living things with conscious aims and individual interests (for that is how the poet would have us consider them), do hate each other with a hatred to which there is no parallel in human society. Men sacrifice for each other, and we even have martyrs. But in the forest there is no sacrifice, no martyrdom, nor do trees ever confederate; but each fights for itself in a ceaseless and savage struggle. And nowhere else in the forest world is the struggle for existence so remorseless as in the tropic zone of Africa; for nowhere else is variety so profuse and growth so rapid.