My African Journey

by Winston Churchill

The heat grows as the altitude dwindles, and even in the early morning the sun sits hard and heavy on the shoulders. At ten o'clock its power is tremendous. So long as the roadway consisted of nobbly lumps of black cotton soil bicycling, though possible in places, was scarcely pleasant. But the change in the landscape arises from the change in the soil. The fields are now of bright red earth, the paths of red sandstone washed in places almost as smooth and as firm as asphalt by the rains and sparkling with crystalline dust; and when the ridges which form the watershed between Lake Chioga and Lake Albert had been topped, my bicycle glided almost without impulsion down four miles of gradual descent into Masindi. This station—which is the residence of a collector—lies embosomed in a wide bay of gently-sloping hills clothed with noble trees. It is indeed a pleasant spot. There are real houses, standing on high stone platforms, with deep verandas and wire gauze windows. The roads are laid out in bold geometry of broad red lines. There are avenues of planted trees, delicious banks of flowers, a prepared breakfast, cold, not cool, drinks, a telegraph office, and a file of the Times. What more could an explorer desire or the Fates accord?

We were now to strike northwards to the Nile at Fajao in three long marches (for the porters) of about sixteen miles each. Upon the Hoima road some preparations had been made to make the journey easier by clearing the encroaching jungle from the track and constructing rest-houses. But my change of plan had disconcerted these arrangements, and on the new route we had to clear our own paths from the overgrowth by which even in a season, if unused, they are choked, and to trust to tents and improvised shelters. Progress was therefore slow and camps unpretentious. But all was redeemed by the wonders of the scene.

For a whole day we crept through the skirts of the Hoima forest, amid an exuberance of vegetation which is scarcely describable. I had travelled through tropical forests in Cuba and India, and had often before admired their enchanting, yet sinister, luxuriance. But the forests of Uganda, for magnificence, for variety of form and colour, for profusion of brilliant life—plant, bird, insect, reptile, beast—for the vast scale and awful fecundity of the natural processes that are beheld at work, eclipsed, and indeed effaced, all previous impressions. One becomes, not without a secret sense of aversion, the spectator of an intense convulsion of life and death. Reproduction and decay are locked struggling in infinite embraces. In this glittering Equatorial slum huge trees jostle one another for room to live; slender growths stretch upwards—as it seems in agony—towards sunlight and life. The soil bursts with irrepressible vegetations. Every victor, trampling on the rotting mould of exterminated antagonists, soars aloft only to encounter another host of aerial rivals, to be burdened with masses of parasitic foliage, smothered in the glorious blossoms of creepers, laced and bound and interwoven with interminable tangles of vines and trailers. Birds are as bright as butterflies; butterflies are as big as birds. The air hums with flying creatures; the earth crawls beneath your foot. The telegraph-wire runs northward to Gondokoro through this vegetable labyrinth. Even its poles had broken into bud!

As we advanced, continually rising or falling with the waves of the land, and moving in rapid alternations from a blazing patch of sunshine into a cloistered dimness, every now and then the path became smooth, broad, and of firm sandstone. And here one could watch the columns of marching soldier-ants. Perhaps in a hundred yards the road would be crossed four times by these fierce armies. They move in regular array, and upon purposes at once inscrutable and unswerving. A brown band, perhaps two inches broad and an inch and a half deep, is drawn across your track. Its ends are lost in the recesses of the jungle. It moves unceasingly and with a multiplied rapidity; for each ant runs swiftly forward, whether upon the ground or upon the backs of his already moving comrades. About a yard away, on each side of the main column, are the screening lines of the flank-guards, and for five yards beyond this every inch is searched, every object is examined by tireless and fearless reconnoitring patrols. Woe to the enemy who is overtaken by these hordes. No matter what his size or nature, he is attacked at once by an ever-increasing number of assailants, each one of whom, upon remorseless instinct, plunges his strong mandibles in the flesh, and will have his head pulled off his shoulders rather than let go.

These ant armies fascinated me. I could not resist interfering with them. With my walking-stick I gently broke the column and pushed the swarming rope off its line of march. Their surprise, their confusion, their indignation were extreme. But not for an instant did they pause. In a second the scouts were running all over my boots eagerly seeking an entry, and when I looked back from this to the walking-stick I held it was already alive. With a gesture so nimble that it might have been misunderstood, I cast it from me and jumped back out of the danger circle until I found refuge on a large rock at a respectful distance. The Soudanese sergeant-major of the escort, a splendid negro, drilled as smart as a Grenadier Guardsman and with a good long row of medal ribbons on his khaki tunic, so far forgot himself as to grin from ear to ear. But his gravity was fully restored when I invited him to rescue my walking-stick, which lay abandoned on the field in the mandibles of the victorious enemy. The devoted man was, however, equal to the crisis.

I have a sad tale also to tell of the perversity of butterflies. Never were seen such flying fairies. They flaunted their splendid liveries in inconceivable varieties of colour and pattern in our faces at every step. Swallow-tails, fritillaries, admirals, tortoise-shells, peacocks, orange-tips—all executed in at least a dozen novel and contrasted styles, with many even more beautiful, but bearing no resemblance to our British species—flitted in sunshine from flower to flower, glinted in the shadow of great trees, or clustered on the path to suck the moisture from any swampy patch. The butterfly is a dirty feeder, and if ever some piece of putrescent filth lay odorous on the ground, be sure it would be covered with a cloud of these greedy insects, come in such gay attire to eat such sorry meat. I found them sometimes so intoxicated with feasting that I could pick them up quite gently in my fingers without the need of any net at all.

To any one who has ever tried to collect the modest and now all too rare and scattered butterflies of Britain, these sights could not but be a hard temptation. For a week I had resisted it, not because it was not easy enough to make a net, but because of the difficulty of setting and preserving the prizes; and it was not until the end of our first day's march out from Masindi that I was told that much the best way of sending butterflies home from Africa was to enclose them in neatly-folded triangles of paper and leave them to be set in London. Forthwith, out of telegraph-wire and mosquito-curtain, a net was made, and before another dawn I was fully equipped. It is almost incredible to state that from that very moment, except near the Murchison Falls, I scarcely ever saw a really fine butterfly again all the way to Gondokoro. Whether this was due to the intelligent perversity of these insects, or to the fact that we had left the deeper recesses of the forest region, I do not inquire; but the fact remains, and I carry away from the butterflies of Uganda only the haunting memories of unrealized opportunity.

This first day's march from Masindi was a long one, and our porters panted and toiled under their loads through the heat of the day. It was not till the afternoon that the main body came into camp, and stragglers trickled through into the dusk. Meanwhile the local natives built under our eyes, with extraordinary speed and cleverness, a spacious dining-hall and two or three quite excellent bedrooms from the surrounding elephant-grass and bamboo groves; and we fared as comfortably in these two humble dwellings as if we dwelt in kings' palaces. The forest was a little thinner on the second day, although the jungle was of the same dense and tangled fertility. We started an hour before sunrise, and by eight o'clock had climbed to the saddle of the high rocky wall which contains the valley of the Victoria Nile. From this elevation of, perhaps, six hundred feet above the general level of the plain a comprehensive view of the landscape was for the first time possible. In every direction spread a wide sea of foliage, thinning here into bush, darkening there into forest, rising and falling with the waves of the land, and broken only by occasional peaks of rock. Far away to the north-west a long silver gleam, just discernible through the haze of the horizon, revealed to our eyes the distant prospect of the Albert Nyanza. The camera cannot do justice to such a panorama. In photographs these vast expanses look like mere scrubby commons, inhospitable and monotonous to the eye, melancholy to the soul. One has to remember that here are Kew Gardens and the Zoo combined on an unlimited scale; that Nature's central productive laboratory is here working night and day at full blast; and that the scrubby common of the picture is really a fairyland of glades and vistas, through which an army of a hundred thousand men might march without the glint of a bayonet, or even the dust of an artillery column, betraying their presence to the watcher on the crag.

Our camp this night lay in a tiny patch cleared in the heart of this wild world. The cluster of tents under a canopy of palms, illumined by the watch-fires, bright with lanterns, and busy with the moving figures of men and the hum of human activity, seemed at a hundred yards' distance an island of society amid an ocean of Nature. To what strange perils—apart altogether from the certainty of losing your way—would a walk of a quarter of a mile in any direction expose the wanderer? To withdraw from the firelight was to be engulfed in the savage conditions of prehistoric time. Advance, and the telegraph-wire would tell you the latest quotations of the London markets, the figures of the newest by-election. An odd sensation!