to how they got up straight, and investigation showed me
that many of them were carried up with a growing tree. The
only true climbers were the calamus and the rubber vine
(Landolphia), both of which employ hook tackle.
Some stretches of this forest were made up of thin, spindly
stemmed trees of great height, and among these stretches I
always noticed the ruins of some forest giant, whose death by
lightning or by his superior height having given the demoniac
tornado wind an extra grip on him, had allowed sunlight to
penetrate the lower regions of the forest; and then evidently
the seedlings and saplings, who had for years been living a
half-starved life for light, shot up. They seemed to know that
their one chance lay in getting with the greatest rapidity to the
level of the top of the forest. No time to grow fat in the stem.
No time to send out side branches, or any of those vanities.
Up, up to the light level, and he among them who reached it
first won in this game of life or death ; for when he gets there
he spreads out his crown of upper branches, and shuts off
the life-giving sunshine from his competitors, who pale off
and die, or remain dragging on an attenuated existence waiting
for another chance, and waiting sometimes for centuries.
There must be tens of thousands of seeds which perish
before they get their chance; but the way the seeds of the
hard wood African trees are packed, as it were, in cases
specially made durable, is very wonderful. Indeed the ways
of Providence here are wonderful in their strange dual intention
to preserve and to destroy; but on the whole, as Peer
Gynt truly observes, “ Ein guter Wirth— nein das 1st er nicht!'
We saw this influence of light on a large scale as soon as
we reached the open hills and mountains of the Sierra del
Cristal, and had to pass over those fearful avalanche-like
timber’ falls on their steep sides. The worst of these lay
between Efoua and Egaja, where we struck a part of the
range that was exposed to the south-east. These falls had
evidently arisen from the tornados, which from time to time
have hurled down the gigantic trees whose hold on the superficial
soil over the sheets of hard bed rock was insufficient, in
spite of all the anchors they had out in the shape of roots and
buttresses, and all the rigging in the shape of bush ropes.
Down they had come, crushing and dragging down with them
those near them or bound to them by the great tough climbers.
Getting over these falls was perilous, not to say scratchy
work. One or another member of our party always went
through ; and precious uncomfortable going it was I found,
when I tried it in one above Egaja ; ten or twelve feet of
crashing creaking timber, and then flump on to a lot of rotten,
wet débris, with more snakes and centipedes among it than you
had any immediate use for, even though you were a collector ;
but there you had to stay, while Wiki, who was a most critical
connoisseur, selected from the. surrounding forest a bush-rope
that he regarded as the correct remedy for the case, and then
up you were hauled, through the sticks you had turned the
wrong way on your down journey.
The Duke had a bad fall, going twenty feet or so before he
found the rubbish heap ; while Fika, who went through with
a heavy load on his back, took us, on one occasion, half an
hour to recover ; and when we had just got him to the top, and
able to cling on to the upper sticks, Wiki, who had been
superintending operations, slipped backwards, and went
through on his own account. The bush-rope we had been
hauling on was too worn with the load to use again, and we
just hauled Wiki out with the first one we could drag down
and cut ; and Wiki, when he came up, said we were reckless,
and knew nothing of bush ropes, which shows how ungrateful
an African can be. It makes the perspiration run down my
nose whenever I think of it. The sun was out that day ; we
were neatly situated on the Equator, and the air was semi-
solid, with the stinking exhalations from the swamps with
which the mountain chain is fringed and intersected ; and
we were hot enough without these things, because of the
violent exertion of getting, these twelve to thirteen-stone
gentlemen up among us again, and the fine varied exercise
of getting over the fall on our own account.
When we got into the cool forest beyond it was delightful ;
particularly if it happened to be one of those lovely stretches of
forest, gloomy down below, but giving hints that far away above
us was a world of bloom and scent and beauty which we saw as
much of as earth-worms in a flower-bed. Here and there the