There were also many kinds of flies—called by the natives the mboco, ntchoona, the eloway. The mosquitoes will often plague us. We shall meet the terrible bashikonay ants. When they spread in the forest, they attack every living animal. All flee before them—gorilla, leopard, and elephant.
In that great forest are many tribes of men; some of them wear no clothing whatever. These people worship idols, good and evil spirits; dread witchcraft, and put to death all those who they think are wizards or witches. They are constantly engaged in warfare against each other. The most fierce looking of all are the cannibal tribes. How horrid they look with their sharp-pointed teeth, which have been made so by being filed! What magnificent-looking warriors they are! What brave hunters! It was in their country that I shot my first gorilla.
The strangest people I discovered were the dwarfs or pygmies, a race of people very diminutive in size. They looked so queer, especially the white-headed old folks. None of their houses is more than three feet in height. These pygmies, like the monkeys, lived chiefly on the fruits, berries, and nuts of the forest; they never cultivated the soil. But they knew the use of fire, knew how to trap game and cook their meat.
All these tribes thought Friend Paul was a Moguizic, a supernatural being who had come from some part of the sky. Many believed that I had descended from the moon, and that I came to see the world and its inhabitants. They believed that I could do all kinds of supernatural things, and in many tribes where guns were unknown they thought I held thunder and lightning in my hands, and when I fired a gun they all fell low on the ground.
Highways of communication and roads are unknown in this great dark Africa. But there are numerous paths going in every direction, so the traveller, if the natives are willing to guide him, can go from the west coast to the east coast, and from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt, Morocco, and Algeria, or vice versa, for every village and tribe has paths leading towards the other. Often the paths leading from one village to another are very difficult to follow, for the jungle is so rank; and often they are closed for months on account of wars among different tribes.
Such paths you have never seen—narrow, just wide enough for a man to go through the thick jungle. The branches of trees often join together. Here a big tree has fallen across the path, and you must either bend yourself to pass under it, or climb over it. If you cannot do either, then you must go around it. You have to walk over the roots of trees until your feet are sore. Sometimes then you fall in the midst of sword-grass, or under the canelike bamboos or palms, or have to walk in swamps filled with aloes. I still walk in a stooping manner, the result of my being obliged to bend constantly under branches of trees, or under fallen ones. Often a stream is your only path.
Day after day, my dear young folks, Friend Paul spent travelling in that forest without hearing the chatter of a monkey or the shrill cry of a parrot. The only noise he could hear was now and then the falling of a leaf or the gentle murmur of a little stream wending its way towards some big unknown river which he hoped some day to find.
I walked thousands and thousands of miles on foot under its shady trees. The foliage was so thick that sometimes I was several weeks without being able to see the sun, the moon, or the stars, for my eyes could not penetrate the dense and thick leaves. How glad I was when I came to a river or an open space, and could see once more the sun, the moon, and the stars! I loved the stars, for without them and the moon I could not have known where I was; they showed me the way all through my travels.
Not only had I to travel on foot, but everything I had to take with me had to be carried on the backs of men, for no beasts of burden are to be found in the big forest. There are no camels, no donkeys, no horses, no oxen; and had I taken some with me they would have died of starvation, for there were no pastures, and they could not have lived on the different leaves of the trees or of the jungle. Besides, they could not have gone through the narrow crooked path of the great forest.
Rain falls almost every night for hours, accompanied by such thunder and lightning as you have never heard or seen in our country. The claps of thunder are so terrific that often they made me jump from my bed of leaves. The lightning at times is so vivid that it pierces the foliage of the trees; and as to the heavy rain, it often falls like a solid sheet of water for hours, and this happens almost every night for nine months of the year. After the rainy season comes the dry season—cold, for sometimes the thermometer falls to 66° Fahrenheit. I felt then this low temperature very much. Not a drop of rain falls during the dry season; but far in the interior, in the mountain regions, it rains twelve months of the year, but during three months of that time no thunder is heard.