one did it again. I should think that crocodile was eight feet
J but don t go and say I measured him, or that this is my
outside measurement for crocodiles. I have measured them
when they have been killed by other people, fifteen, eighteen,
and twenty-one feet odd. This was only a pushing young,
creature who had not learnt manners.
Still, even if your own peculiar tastes and avocations do
not take you in small dug-out canoes into the heart of the
swamps, you can observe the difference in the local scenery
made by the flowing of the tide when you are on a vessel
stuck on a sand-bank, in the Rio del Rey for example.
Moreover, as you will have little else to attend to, save
mosquitoes and mangrove flies, when in such a situation, you
may as well pursue the study. At the ebb gradually the
foliage of the lower branches of the mangroves grows wet
and muddy, until there is a great black band about three feet
deep above the surface of the water in all directions ; gradually
a network of gray-white roots rises up, and below this again,
gradually, a slope of smooth and lead-brown slime. The
effect is not in the least as if the water had fallen, but as if
the mangroves had, with one accord, risen up out of it, and
into it again they seem silently to sink when the flood comes:
But by this more safe, if still unpleasant, method of observing
mangrove-swamps, you miss seeing in full the make of them,
for away in their fastnesses the mangroves raise their branches
far above the reach of tide line, and the great gray roots of
the older trees are always sticking up in mid-air. But, fringing
the rivers, there is always a hedge of younger mangroves
whose lower branches get immersed.
A t corners here and there from the river face you can see
the land being made from the waters. A mud-bank forms
off it, a mangrove seed lights on it, and the thing’s done.
W e ll! not done, perhaps, but begun; for if the bank is
high enough to get exposed at low water, this pioneer mangrove
grows. He has a wretched existence though. You have
only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form to see this.
He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they struggle
on together, their rletwork of roots stopping abundance of
mud, and by good chance now and then a consignment of
miscellaneous débris of palm leaves, or a floating tree-trunk,
but they always die before they attain any considerable height.
Still even in death they collect. Their bare white sticks remaining
like a net gripped in the mud, so that these pioneer
mangrove heroes may be said to have laid down their lives to
make that mud-bank fit for colonisation, for the time gradually
comes when other mangroves can and do colonise on it, and
flourish, extending their territory steadily ; and the mud-bank
joins up with, and becomes a part of, Africa.
Right away on the inland fringe of the swamp— you may
go some hundreds o f miles before you get there— you can see
the rest of the process. The mangroves there have risen up,
and dried the mud to an extent that is more than good for
themselves, have over civilised that mud in fact, and so the
brackish waters of the tide— which, although their enemy when
too deep or too strong in salt, is essential to their existence—
cannot get to their roots. They have done this gradually, as
a mangrove does all things, but they have done it, and- down
on to that mud come a whole set of palms from the old
mainland, who in their early colonisation days go through
similarly trying experiences. First the screw-pines come and
live among them ; then the wine-palm and various creepers,
and then the oil-palm ; and the débris of these plants being
greater and making better soil than dead mangroves, they
work quicker and the mangrove is doomed. Soon the salt
waters are .shut right out, the mangrove dies, and that bit of'
Africa is made. It is very interesting to get into these regions ;
you see along the river-bank a rich, thick, lovely wall of soft-
wooded plants, and behind this you find great stretches of
death;— miles and miles sometimes of gaunt white mangrove
skeletons standing on gray stuff that is not yet earth and is no
longer slime, and through the crust of which you can sink into
rotting putrefaction. Yet, long after you are dead, buried, and
forgotten, this will become a forest of soft-wooded plants and
palms ; and finally of hard-wooded trees. Districts of this
description you will find in great sweeps of Kama country for
example, and in thè rich low regions up to the base of the Sierra
del Cristal and the Rumby range.
You often hear the utter lifelessness of mangrove-swamps