CHAPTER XXIII. THE GREAT CENTRAL AFRICAN FOREST.
Professor Drummond’s statements respecting Africa—Dimensions of the great forest—Vegetation—Insect life—Description of the trees, &c.—Tribes and their food—The primæval forest—The bush proper—The clearings: wonders of vegetable life—The queer feeling of loneliness—A forest tempest—Tropical vegetation along the banks of the Aruwimi—Wasps’ nests—The forest typical of human life—A few secrets of the woods—Game in the forest—Reasons why we did not hunt the animals—Birds—The Simian tribe—Reptiles and insects—The small bees and the beetles—The “jigger”—Night disturbances by falling trees, &c.—The Chimpanzee—The rainiest zone of the earth—The Ituri or Upper Aruwimi—The different tribes and their languages—Their features and customs—Their complexion—Conversation with some captives at Engweddé—The Wambutti dwarfs: their dwellings and mode of living—The Batwa dwarfs—Life in the forest villages—Two Egyptians captured by the dwarfs at Fort Bodo—The poisons used for the arrows—Our treatment for wounds by the arrows—The wild fruits of the forest—Domestic animals—Ailments of the Madis and Zanzibaris—The Congo Railway and the forest products.
1888.
Dec.
Forest.
An English Professor, qualified to write F.R.S.E., F.G.S., after his name, who is a talented writer, and gifted with first-class descriptive powers, while confessing that he was but a “minor traveller, possessing but few assets,” ventured upon the following bold statements respecting Africa:—
“Cover the coast belt with rank yellow grass, dot here and there a palm, scatter through it a few demoralised villages, and stock it with the leopard, the hyena, the crocodile, and the hippopotamus; clothe the mountainous plateaux next, both of them with endless forest, not grand umbrageous forest, like the forests of South America, nor matted jungle like the forests of India, but with thin, rather weak forest, with forest of low trees, whose half-grown trunks and scanty leaves offer no shade from the tropical sun,”—but you will find nothing in all these trees to remind you that you are in the tropics. “Day after day you may wander through these forests with nothing except the climate to remind you where you are * * * * *.” “The fairy labyrinth of ferns and palms, the festoons of climbing plants blocking the paths and scenting the forests with their resplendent flowers, the gorgeous clouds of insects, the gaily plumaged birds, the parraquets, the monkey swinging from his trapeze in the shaded bowers—these are unknown to Africa.”
“Once a week you will see a palm; once in three months the monkeys will cross your path; the flowers on the whole are few, the trees are poor, and, to be honest”—but enough; if this is honest description, the reader had better toss my books aside, for this chapter goes to prove that I differ in toto with the learned Professor’s views respecting tropical Africa.
We have travelled together thus far 1670 miles through the great central African forest, and we can vouch that the above description by Professor Drummond bears no more resemblance to tropical Africa than the tors of Devon, or the moors of Yorkshire, or the downs of Dover represent the smiling scenes of England, of leafy Warwickshire, the gardens of Kent, and the glorious vales of the isle. Nyassaland is not Africa, but itself. Neither can we call the wilderness of Masai Land, or the scrub-covered deserts of Kalahari, or the rolling grass land of Usukuma, or the thin forests of Unyamwezi, or, the ochreous acacia-covered area of Ugogo, anything but sections of a continent that boasts many zones. Africa is about three times greater than Europe in its extent, and is infinitely more varied. You have the desert of deserts in the Sahara, you have the steppes of Eastern Russia in Masai Land and parts of South Africa, you have the Castilian uplands in Unyamwezi, you have the best parts of France represented by Egypt, you have Switzerland in Ukonju and Toro, the Alps in Ruwenzori—you have Brazil in the Congo basin, the Amazon in the Congo River, and its immense forests rivalled by the Central African forest which I am about to describe.
The greatest length of this forest, that is from near Kabambarré in South Manyuema to Bagbomo on the Welle-Makua in West Niam-niam, is 621 miles; its average breadth is 517 miles, which makes a compact square area of 321,057 square miles. This is exclusive of the forest areas separated or penetrated into by campo-like reaches of grass land, or of the broad belts of timber which fill the lower levels of each great river basin like the Lumani, Lulungu, Welle-Mubangi, and the parent river from Bolobo to the Loika River.
The Congo and the Aruwimi rivers enabled us to penetrate this vast area of primeval woods a considerable length. I only mean to treat, therefore, of that portion which extends from Yambuya in 25° 3½′ E. L. to Indesura, 29° 59′ = 326½ English miles in a straight line.
Now let us look at this great forest, not for a scientific analysis of its woods and productions, but to get a real idea of what it is like. It covers such a vast area, it is so varied and yet so uniform in its features, that it would require many books to treat of it properly. Nay, if we regard it too closely, a legion of specialists would be needed. We have no time to examine the buds and the flowers or the fruit, and the many marvels of vegetation, or to regard the fine differences between bark and leaf in the various towering trees around us, or to compare the different exudations in the viscous or vitrified gums, or which drip in milky tears or amber globules, or opaline pastils, or to observe the industrious ants which ascend and descend up and down the tree shafts, whose deep wrinkles of bark are as valleys and ridges to the insect armies, or to wait for the furious struggle which will surely ensue between them and yonder army of red ants. Nor at this time do we care to probe into that mighty mass of dead tree, brown and porous as a sponge, for already it is a mere semblance of a prostrate log. Within it is alive with minute tribes. It would charm an entomologist. Put your ear to it, and you hear a distinct murmurous hum. It is the stir and movement of insect life in many forms, matchless in size, glorious in colour, radiant in livery, rejoicing in their occupations, exultant in their fierce but brief life, most insatiate of their kind, ravaging, foraging, fighting, destroying, building, and swarming everywhere and exploring everything. Lean but your hand on a tree, measure but your length on the ground, seat yourself on a fallen branch, and you will then understand what venom, fury, voracity, and activity breathes around you. Open your notebook, the page attracts a dozen butterflies, a honey-bee hovers over your hand; other forms of bees dash for your eyes; a wasp buzzes in your ear, a huge hornet menaces your face, an army of pismires come marching to your feet. Some are already crawling up, and will presently be digging their scissor-like mandibles in your neck. Woe! woe!
And yet it is all beautiful—but there must be no sitting or lying down on this seething earth. It is not like your pine groves and your dainty woods in England. It is a tropic world, and to enjoy it you must keep slowly moving.
Imagine the whole of France and the Iberian peninsula closely packed with trees varying from 20 to 180 feet high, whose crowns of foliage interlace and prevent any view of sky and sun, and each tree from a few inches to four feet in diameter. Then from tree to tree run cables from two inches to fifteen inches in diameter, up and down in loops and festoons and W’s and badly-formed M’s; fold them round the trees in great tight coils, until they have run up the entire height, like endless anacondas; let them flower and leaf luxuriantly, and mix up above with the foliage of the trees to hide the sun, then from the highest branches let fall the ends of the cables reaching near to the ground by hundreds with frayed extremities, for these represent the air roots of the Epiphytes; let slender cords hang down also in tassels with open thread-work at the ends. Work others through and through these as confusedly as possible, and pendent from branch to branch—with absolute disregard of material, and at every fork and on every horizontal branch plant cabbage-like lichens of the largest kind, and broad spear-leaved plants—these would represent the elephant-eared plant—and orchids and clusters of vegetable marvels, and a drapery of delicate ferns which abound. Now cover tree, branch, twig, and creeper with a thick moss like a green fur. Where the forest is compact as described above, we may not do more than cover the ground closely with a thick crop of phrynia, and amoma, and dwarf bush; but if the lightning, as frequently happens, has severed the crown of a proud tree, and let in the sunlight, or split a giant down to its roots, or scorched it dead, or a tornado has been uprooting a few trees, then the race for air and light has caused a multitude of baby trees to rush upward—crowded, crushing, and treading upon and strangling one another, until the whole is one impervious bush.
But the average forest is a mixture of these scenes. There will probably be groups of fifty trees standing like columns of a cathedral, grey and solemn in the twilight, and in the midst there will be a naked and gaunt patriarch, bleached white, and around it will have grown a young community, each young tree clambering upward to become heir to the area of light and sunshine once occupied by the sire. The law of primogeniture reigns here also.
There is also death from wounds, sickness, decay, hereditary disease and old age, and various accidents thinning the forest, removing the unfit, the weakly, the unadaptable, as among humanity. Let us suppose a tall chief among the giants, like an insolent son of Anak. By a head he lifts himself above his fellows—the monarch of all he surveys; but his pride attracts the lightning, and he becomes shivered to the roots, he topples, declines, and wounds half a dozen other trees in his fall. This is why we see so many tumorous excrescences, great goitrous swellings, and deformed trunks. The parasites again have frequently been outlived by the trees they had half strangled, and the deep marks of their forceful pressure may be traced up to the forks. Some have sickened by intense rivalry of other kinds, and have perished at an immature age; some have grown with a deep crook in their stems, by a prostrate log which had fallen and pressed them obliquely. Some have been injured by branches, fallen during a storm, and dwarfed untimely. Some have been gnawed by rodents, or have been sprained by elephants leaning on them to rub their prurient hides, and ants of all kinds have done infinite mischief. Some have been pecked at by birds, until we see ulcerous sores exuding great globules of gum, and frequently tall and short nomads have tried their axes, spears, and knives, on the trees, and hence we see that decay and death are busy here as with us.
To complete the mental picture of this ruthless forest, the ground should be strewn thickly with half formed humus of rotting twigs, leaves, branches; every few yards there should be a prostrate giant, a reeking compost of rotten fibres, and departed generations of insects, and colonies of ants, half veiled with masses of vines and shrouded by the leafage of a multitude of baby saplings, lengthy briars and calamus in many fathom lengths, and every mile or so there should be muddy streams, stagnant creeks, and shallow pools, green with duckweed, leaves of lotus and lilies, and a greasy green scum composed of millions of finite growths. Then people this vast region of woods with numberless fragments of tribes, who are at war with each other and who live apart from ten to fifty miles in the midst of a prostrate forest, amongst whose ruins they have planted the plantain, banana, manioc, beans, tobacco, colocassia, gourds, melons, &c., and who, in order to make their villages inaccessible, have resorted to every means of defence suggested to wild men by the nature of their lives. They have planted skewers along their paths, and cunningly hidden them under an apparently stray leaf, or on the lee side of a log, by striding over which the naked foot is pierced, and the intruder is either killed from the poison smeared on the tops of the skewers, or lamed for months. They have piled up branches, and have formed abattis of great trees, and they lie in wait behind with sheaves of poisoned arrows, wooden spears hardened in fire, and smeared with poison.
The primeval forest, that is that old growth untouched by man, and left since the earliest time to thrive and die, one age after another, is easily distinguishable from that part which at some time or another afforded shelter for man. The trees are taller and straighter, and of more colossal girth. It has frequently glades presenting little difficulty for travel, the invariable obstructions being the arum, phrynia, and amoma. The ground is firmer and more compact, and the favourite camping ground for the pigmy nomads are located in such places. When the plants and small bushes are cut down, we have an airy, sylvan, and cool temple, delightful for a dwelling.
Then comes the forest which during a few generations has obliterated all evidences of former husbandry. A few of the trees, especially of the soft-wooded kind, have grown to equal height with the ancient patriarchs, but as soon as man abandoned the clearing, hosts of nameless trees, shrubs, and plants have riotously hastened to avail themselves of his absence, and the race for air and light is continued for many years; consequently the undergrowth by the larger quantity of sunshine becomes luxuriant, and there are few places penetrable in it without infinite labour. Among these a variety of palms will be found, especially the Elais and Raphia vinifera.
And after this comes the bush proper, the growth of a few years, which admits no ingress whatever within its shade. We are therefore obliged to tunnel through stifling masses of young vegetation, so matted and tangled together that one fancies it would be easier to travel over the top were it of equal and consistent thickness and level. Vigorous young trees are found imbedded in these solid and compact masses of vegetation, and these support the climbing plants, the vines, and creepers. Under these, after a pathway has been scooped out, the unshod feet are in danger from the thorns, and the sharp cut stalks, which are apt to pierce the feet and lacerate the legs.
This last was the character of the bush mostly near the river. Both banks presented numberless old clearings and abandoned sites; and as the stream was the only means of communication employed by the tribes, the only way of effecting any progress was by laborious cutting.
The clearings which had been abandoned within a year exhibited veritable wonders of vegetable life, of unsurpassed fecundity, and bewildering variety of species. The charred poles of the huts became the supports of climbers whose vivid green leaves soon shrouded the ugliness of desolation, and every upright and stump assumed the appearance of a miniature bower, or a massive piece of columned ruin. As the stumps were frequently twenty feet high, and were often seen in twins, the plants had gravitated across the space between, and after embracing had continued their growth along the length of one another, and had formed in this manner an umbrageous arch, and had twisted themselves in endless lengths around the supports until it became difficult to find what supported such masses of delicate vines. In some instances they had formed lofty twin towers with an arched gateway between, resembling a great ruin of an old castle, and the whole was gay with purple and white flowers. The silvered boles of ancient primeval giants long ago ringed by the axe and doomed to canker and decay, and the great gaunt far-spreading arms and branchlets had been clothed by vines a hundred-fold until they seemed like clouds of vivid green, which, under the influence of sudden gusts, streamed with countless tendrils, or swayed like immense curtains.
When marching along with the column, or encamped for the night, the murmur of voices was not congenial to nourishing any fine sentiments about the forest. We suffered too much hunger, and sustained such protracted misery; we were preyed upon too often in patience, and temper, and forbearance. Our clothes, suited well enough for open country, were no protection against the hostilities of the bush. But if once we absented ourselves from camp, and the voices of the men died away, and we forgot our miseries, and were not absorbed by the sense of the many inconveniences, an awe of the forest rushed upon the soul and filled the mind. The voice sounded with rolling echoes, as in a cathedral. One became conscious of its eerie strangeness, the absence of sunshine, its subdued light, and marvelled at the queer feeling of loneliness, while inquiringly looking around to be assured that this loneliness was no delusion. It was as if one stood amid the inhabitants of another world. We enjoyed life—the one vegetable, the other human. Standing there so massive and colossal, so silent and still, and yet with such solemn severity of majesty, it did seem curious that the two lives, so like in some sense, were yet so incommunicable. It would have suited the fitness of things, I thought, had a wrinkled old patriarch addressed me with the gravity and seriousness of a Methuselah, or an Achillean and powerful bombax, with his buttressed feet planted firm in the ground, had disdainfully demanded my business in that assembly of stately forest kings.
But what thoughts were kindled as we peeped out from an opening in the woods and looked across the darkening river which reflected the advancing tempest, and caught a view of the mighty army of trees—their heights as various as their kind, all rigid in the gloaming, awaiting in stern array the war with the storm. The coming wind has concentrated its terrors for destruction, the forked lightning is seen darting its spears of white flame across the front of infinite hosts of clouds. Out of their depths issues the thunderbolt, and the march of the winds is heard coming to the onset. Suddenly the trees, which have stood still—as in a painted canvas—awaiting the shock with secure tranquillity, are seen to bow their tops in unison, followed by universal swaying and straining as though a wild panic had seized them. They reel this way and that, but they are restrained from flight by sturdy stems and fixed roots, and the strong buttresses which maintain them upright. Pressed backward to a perilous length they recover from the first blow, and dart their heads in furious waves forward, and the glory of the war between the forest and the storm is at its height. Legion after legion of clouds ride over the wind-tost crests, there is a crashing and roaring, a loud soughing and moaning, shrill screaming of squalls, and groaning of countless woods. There are mighty sweeps from the great tree-kings, as though mighty strokes were being dealt; there is a world-wide rustling of foliage, as though in gleeful approval of the vast strength of their sires; there are flashes of pale green light, as the lesser battalions are roused up to the fight by the example of their brave ancients. Our own spirits are aroused by the grand conflict—the Berserker rage is contagious. In our souls we applaud the rush and levelling force of the wind, and for a second are ready to hail the victor; but the magnificent array of the forest champions, with streaming locks, the firmness with which the vast army of trees rise in unison with their leaders, the rapturous quiver of the bush below inspire a belief that they will win if they but persevere. The lightning darts here and there with splendour of light and scathing flame, the thunders explode with deafening crashes, reverberating with terrible sounds among the army of woods, the black clouds roll over and darken the prospect; and as cloud becomes involved within cloud, in the shifting pale light, we have a last view of the wild war, we are stunned by the fury of the tempest, and the royal rage of the forest, when down comes the deluge of tropic rain—which in a short time extinguishes the white heat wrath of the elements, and soothes to stillness the noble anger of the woods.
Along the banks of the Aruwimi, a better idea of tropical vegetation may be obtained than in any part of Africa, outside of the eastern half of the Congo basin. The banks are for the most part low, though no one could guess what height they were, because of the lofty hedges of creeping plants, which cover every inch of ground from the water’s edge to as high as fifty feet above in some places, while immediately behind them rises the black-green forest to the towering height of from 150 to 200 feet above the river. The aspects of the banks vary considerably however. Abandoned sites of human dwellings possess their own peculiar wilderness appearance, the virgin forest its own, and as the soil varies so do its growths.
Lately abandoned clearings will show, besides inordinate density of vegetation, gorgeous flowering sections. Above these will probably rise a few trees with masses of thick, shining leaves, and a profusion of blood-red flowers, whose petals have been showered on the impervious mass of leguminous vines of creepers and shrubs below, and strongly contrast to their own light purple, yellow, or white flowerets. The amoma show snowy flower-goblets, edged with pink; a wild vine will have its light purple; a creeper, with pinnate leaves, though flowerless at the time, will have its foliage tinted auburn; a pepper bush with its red pods, or a wild mango, attracts attention by myriads of bead-like flowerets; or an acacia effuses overpowering fragrance from its snowy buds, or a mimosa with its sweet-smelling yellow blossoms. Different shades of green are presented by ferns, protruding leaves of sword grass, a young Elais palm, or the broad and useful leaf of the phrynium. A young fig-tree, with silver stem, and branching widely, mixes its leaves with those of the tender leaflets of the sensitive plant and the palmate calamus; below is a multitude of nettles, and nettle-leafed plants with stalks and leaves, making a mass of vegetation at once curious and delightful. Perhaps the base of all this intricate and inextricable confusion of plants and impervious hill of verdure and beauty, is a prostrate tree, long ago fallen, fast decaying, black with mould, spread thinly with humus, fungous parasites abounding, and every crack, cranny, and flaw in it nesting all kinds of insatiable insects, from the tiny termite to the black centipede or mammoth beetle.
Further on we see something different. Numberless giant trees, pressing right up to the edge of the river bank, have caused some to grow horizontally to the length of fifty feet over the river. Under their shade a hundred canoes find shelter from a scorching sun. The wood is yellow and hard as iron. To cut one of these trees would require a score of American axes. It bears clusters of fruit which when unripe are russet, and afterwards resemble beautiful damsons. Others of the same species produce a fruit like ripe dates, but neither are edible.
These widely-spreading trees are favourites with the black wasps, to which they attach their pensile nests. Externally the nests are like fancifully cut brown-paper sacks, or a series of such sacks arranged one above another, with frills and ornate cuttings, like the fancy paper grate-covers in English parlours in summer time.
We avoided such trees religiously, and when there was no such terror as a big nest of wasps near, we could rest in comfort and examine the forest at leisure. We first saw besides countless grey columns, thousands of pendent slender threads and wavy lines, loops, festoons, clustered groups and broad breadths of grey mingled with more than studied disorder with darkest depths of green, lightened only by broad damp leaves reflecting stray glints of sunshine or sprays, and a magic dust of softened light perpetually shifting and playing, profound spaces of darkness relieved by a breadth of grey tree trunk, silvered rods of parasites, or fancy grey filigree of vine stems. As we surveyed the whole, the eye caught various crimson dots of phrynia berries, or red knots of amoma fruit, outer fringes of auburn leaves, a cap of a mushroom staring white out of a loose sheaf of delicate ferns, or snowy bits of hard fungi clinging like barnacles to a deeply-wrinkled log; the bright green of orchid leaves, the grey green face of a pendent leaf of an elephant-eared plant—films of moss, tumorous lumps on trees exuding tears of gum, which swarmed with ants, length after length of whiplike calamus—squirming and twisting lianes, and great serpent-like convolvuli, winding in and out by mazy galleries of dark shadows, and emerging triumphant far above to lean their weight on branches, running coils at one place, forming loops at another place, and then stretching loosely their interminable lengths out of sight.
As I have already said, the forest is typical of the life of humanity. No single glance can be taken of it without becoming conscious that decay, and death, and life, are at work there as with us. I never could cast a leisurely look at it but I found myself, unconsciously, wondering at some feature which reminded me of some scene in the civilised world. It has suggested a morning when I went to see the human tide flowing into the city over London Bridge between half-past seven and half-past eight, where I saw the pale, overworked, dwarfed, stoop-shouldered, on their way to their dismal struggle for existence. They were represented here faithfully, in all their youth, vigour, and decrepitude; one is prematurely aged and blanched, another is goitrous, another is organically weak, another is a hunchback, another suffers from poor nutrition, many are pallid from want of air and sunshine, many are supported by their neighbours because of constitutional infirmity, many of them are toppling one over another, as though they were the incurables of a hospital, and you wonder how they exist at all. Some are already dead, and lie buried under heaps of leaves, or are nurseries of bush families and parasites, or are colonised by hordes of destructive insects; some are bleached white by the palsying thunderbolt, or shivered by the levin brand, or quite decapitated; or some old veteran, centuries old, which was born before ever a Christian sailed south of the Equator, is decaying in core and vitals; but the majority have the assurance of insolent youth, with all its grace and elegance of form, the mighty strength of prime life, and the tranquil and silent pride of hoary old aristocrats; and you gather from a view of the whole one indisputable fact—that they are resolved to struggle for existence as long as they may. We see all characters of humanity here, except the martyr and suicide. For sacrifice is not within tree nature, and it may be that they only heard two precepts, “Obedience is better than sacrifice,” and “Live and multiply.”
And as there is nothing so ugly and distasteful to me as the mob of a Derby day, so there is nothing so ugly in forest nature as when I am reminded of it by the visible selfish rush towards the sky in a clearing, after it has been abandoned a few years. Hark! the bell strikes, the race is about to begin. I seem to hear the uproar of the rush, the fierce, heartless jostling and trampling, the cry, “Self for self, the devil take the weakest!” To see the white-hot excitement, the noisy fume and flutter, the curious inequalities of vigour, and the shameless disregard for order and decency!
It is worth pausing also to ask why small incidents in such an out of the way place as the trackless depths of a primeval forest should remind one of thoughts of friends and their homes in England. The melancholy sound of the wind fluttering the leafy world aloft, and the sad rustle of the foliage reminded me vividly of a night spent at —— House, where I passed half the time listening to the dreadful sighing of the rooky grove, which filled my mind with forlornness and discomfort. Here again, as I lay in my tent, were suggested memories of ocean gales, and general cold, pitiful wretchedness, and when the rain fell in an earnest shower and the heavy fall of raindrops roused the deep and funereal dirge that sounded round about me, it seemed to me I heard sad and doleful echoes of sad and unsatisfied longings, and crowds of unworded thoughts, and past aspirations, unbreathed sentiments of love, friendship, and unuttered sympathies advancing with awful distinctness to the sharpened imagination, until one seemed ready to dissolve in tears and gasp sobbingly, “Oh, my friends, the good God is above all, and knows all things!”
These are a few secrets of the woods that one learns in time, even without a mentor in forestry. To know that the Elais palm while requiring moisture requires plenty of sunshine to flourish, that the Raphia palm flourishes best by the sedge-lined swamp and stenchful sewery ooze, that the Calamus palm requires a thick bush for its support, that the Phœnix spinosa thrives best by the waterside, and that the Fan palm is killed by excessive moisture, is not difficult to learn. But for a stranger in tropic woods, accustomed to oak, beech, poplar, and pine, he is somewhat mazed at the unfamiliar leafage above him. By-and-by, however, he can tell at a glance which are the soft and hard woods. There are several families of soft woods, which stand in place of the pine and fir in the tropics, and these have invariably large leaves. It seems to be a rule that the soft woods shall have large leaves, and the hard woods shall have smaller leaves, though they vary according to their degrees of strength and durability. The trees of the Rubiaceæ order, for instance, have leaves almost similar in form and size to the castor-oil plant. The wood is most useful and workable, fit to build fleets of wooden vessels, or to be turned into beautiful domestic utensils—trays, benches, stools, troughs, wooden milk-pots, platters, mugs, spoons, drums, &c. It serves for boarding, ceiling, doors, fences, and palisades. Though it is brittle as cedar it will stand any amount of weather without splitting. There are more than one species of what is known as cotton-wood, but you may know them all by the magnificent buttresses, and their unsurpassed height, by the silver grey of their bark, and by the stiff thorns on their stems, by the white floss of their flowering and grey-green leaves.
Then there is the strong African teak, the camwood, the African mahogany, the green-heart, the lignum vitæ, the everlasting iron-wood, the no less hard yellow wood by the riverside, infinitely harder than an oak; the stink-wood, the ebony, the copal-wood tree with its glossy and burnished foliage, the arborescent wild mango, the small-leaved wild orange, the silver-boled wild fig, the butter tree, the acacia tribes, the stately mpafu, and the thousands of wild fruit-trees, most of which are unknown to me. Therefore, to understand what this truly tropical forest is like you must imagine all these confusedly mixed together, and lashed together by millions of vines, creepers, and giant convolvuli, until a perfect tangle has been formed, and sunshine quite shut out, except a little flickering dust of light here and there to tell you that the sun is out in the sky like a burning lustrous orb.
Considering how many months we were in the forest, the hundreds of miles we travelled through and through it, it is not the least wonder that an accident never befell one of the Expedition from the beginning to the end of our life in it, from the fall of a branch or a tree. Trees have fallen immediately before the van, and directly after the rear guard had passed; they have suddenly crashed to the earth on our flanks, and near the camps, by night as well as by day. The nearest escape we had was soon after we had landed from our boat one day, when a great ruin dropped into the river close to the stern, raising the boat up high with the mound of water raised by it, and spraying the crew who were at work.
Many people have already questioned me respecting the game in the forest. Elephant, buffalo, wild pig, bush antelopes, coneys, gazelles, chimpanzees, baboons, monkeys of all kinds, squirrels, civets, wild cats, genets, zebra—ichneumons, large rodents, are among the few we know to exist within the woods. The branches swarm with birds and bats, the air is alive with their sailing and soaring forms, the river teems with fish and bivalves, oysters and clams; there are few crocodiles and hippopotami also. But we must remember that all the tribes of the forest are naturally the most vicious and degraded of the human race on the face of the earth, though in my opinion they are quite as capable of improvement as the wild Caledonian, and susceptible of transformation into orderly and law-abiding peoples. The forest, however, does not admit of amicable intercourse. Strangers cannot see one another until they suddenly encounter, and are mutually paralysed with surprise at the fact. Instinctively they raise their weapons. One has a sheaf of arrows to kill game, and a poison as deadly as prussic acid; the other has a gun which sends a bullet with such force that the frontal bone is instantly smashed. Supposing that one at least of the parties is so amiable as to allow the other to kill him; his friends would dub him a fool, and nothing has been gained. The dead man’s friends must feel called upon to avenge him, and will hunt the murderer too. Fortunately, these buried peoples contrive to learn news of any strangers, and disappear generally in time before their villages are reached. But how far they have retreated, or how near they may be, is unknown; consequently as they are in the habit of eating what they kill it would not be safe for a small hunting party to set out to search for game. That is one reason why there were no animals hunted.
Secondly, it is not every person who has the gift of finding his way in a forest. A dozen times on a day’s march I had to correct the course of the van. Even such a grand landmark as a river was not sufficient to serve as a guide to the course. Within 200 yards any man in the Expedition, if he were turned about a little, would be bewildered to find his way back to the place whence he started.
Thirdly, a small party would make too much noise in breaking of twigs, in treading upon crisp leaves, in brushing against bush, or in cutting a vine or a creeper to make headway. A wild animal is warned long before the hunters know that it is near them, and bounds away to distant coverts. We have suddenly come across elephants, but when they were within ten yards of us they have crashed their way through a jungle that was impervious to pursuers. As for buffalo and other game, their tracks were very common, but it would have been madness to have pursued them for the above three reasons alone.
Fourthly, we had too serious an object in view, which was to discover food and where we were most likely to get it—not for a small party, but for all.
As for birds, they made clatter enough overhead, but we were in the basement, and they were on the roof of a fifteen-storey house. They could not be seen at all, though their whistlings, warblings, screamings, and hootings were heard everywhere. There were parrots, ibis, touracos, parraquets, sunbirds, swifts, finches, shrikes, whip-poor-wills, hoopoes, owls, guinea fowl, blackbirds, weavers, kingfishers, divers, fish eagles, kites, wagtails, bee-eaters, pipits, sandpipers, cockatoos, hornbills, jays, barbets, woodpeckers, pigeons, and unknown minute tribes, and millions of large and small bats.
The Simian tribe was well represented. I have caught sight of more than a dozen species. I have seen the colobus, dark and grey furred baboons, small black monkeys, galagos and flying squirrels, and others, but not nearer than a hundred yards. Long before we could reach them they had been alarmed by the murmur of the caravan, and commenced the retreat.
We came across a number of reptiles. The Ituri swarms with water snakes of various lengths. They continued to drop frequently very close to our boat, slender green whip-snakes, others lead colour of formidable size; others green, gold and black, six feet long. We saw pythons, puff adders, horned and fanged snakes, while small bush snakes about two feet long often fell victims during the preparation of camps.
Insects would require a whole book. Never have I seen such countless armies and species as during my various marches through this forest. I should consider it infra dig. to refer to those minute creatures after the lavish abuses I, in common with others of the Expedition, have bestowed on them. I recollect but few hours of daylight that I did not express myself unkindly towards them. Those bees, large and small, the wasps, the hordes of moths by night, the house-flies, tsetse, gadflies, gnats, and butterflies by day, the giant beetles, attracted by the light in the tent, sailing through the darkness, and dashing frantically against the canvas, rebounding in their rage from side to side, and all the time hoarsely booming, finally with roars of fury dashing themselves against my book or face, as though they would wreak vengeance on me for some reason; then the swarms of ants peering into my plate, intruding into my washy soup, crawling over my bananas, the crickets that sprang like demons, and fixed themselves in my scalp, or on my forehead; the shrill cicadæ that drove one mad, worse than the peppo-inspired Manyuema women. The Pasha professes to love these tribes, and I confess I have done as much mischief to them as possible.
The small bees of the size of gnats were the most tormenting of all the species; we became acquainted with four. They are of the Mellipona. To read, write, or eat required the devoted services of an attendant to drive them away. The eyes were their favourite points of attack; but the ears and nostrils also were sensitive objects to which they invariably reverted. The donkeys’ legs were stripped bare of hair, because of these pests. The death of one left an odour of bitter almonds on the hand.
The beetles, again, varied from the size of a monstrous two-and-a-half inches in length to an insect that would have bored through the eye of a tailor’s needle. This last when examined through a magnifying glass seemed to be efficiently equipped for troubling humanity. It burrowed into the skin. It could not be discovered by the eyes unless attention was directed by giving a cross rub with the hand, when a pain like the prick of a pin was felt. The natives’ huts were infested with three peculiar species. One burrowed into one’s body, another bored into the rafters and dropped fine sawdust into the soup, another explored among the crisp leaves of the roof and gave one a creeping fear that there were snakes about; a fourth, which was a roaring lion of a beetle, waited until night and then made it impossible to keep a candle lit for a quiet pipe and meditation.
1888.
Dec.
Forest.
Among the minor unpleasantnesses which we had to endure we may mention the “jigger,” which deposited its eggs under the toenails of the most active men, but which attacked the body of a “goee-goee” and made him a mass of living corruption; the little beetle that dived underneath the skin and pricked one as with a needle; the mellipona bee, that troubled the eyes, and made one almost frantic some days; the small and large ticks that insidiously sucked one’s small store of blood; the wasps, which stung one into a raging fever if some careless idiot touched the tree, or shouted near their haunts; the wild honey-bees, which one day scattered two canoe crews, and punished them so that we had to send a detachment of men to rescue them; the tiger-slug, that dropped from the branches and left his poisonous fur in the pores of the body until one raved from the pain; the red ants, that invaded the camp by night and disturbed our sleep, and attacked the caravan half a score of times on the march, and made the men run faster than if pursued by so many pigmies; the black ants, which infested the trumpet tree, and dropped on us when passing underneath, and gave us all a foretaste of the Inferno; the small ants that invaded every particle of food, which required great care lest we might swallow half a dozen inadvertently, and have the stomach membranes perforated or blistered—small as they were, they were the most troublesome, for in every tunnel made through the bush thousands of them housed themselves upon us, and so bit and stung us that I have seen the pioneers covered with blisters as from nettles; and, of course, there were our old friends the mosquitos in numbers in the greater clearings.
But if we were bitten and stung by pismires and numberless tribes of insects by day, which every one will confess is as bad as being whipped with nettles, the night had also its alarms, terrors, and anxieties. In the dead of night, when the entire caravan was wrapped in slumber, a series of explosions would wake every one. Some tree or another was nightly struck by lightning, and there was a danger that half the camp might be mangled by the fall of one; the sound of the branches during a storm was like the roar of breakers, or the rolling of a surge on the shore. When the rain fell no voice could be heard in the camp, it was like a cataract with its din of falling waters. Each night almost a dead tree fell with startling crackle, and rending and rushing, ending with the sound which shook the earth.
There were trees parting with a decayed member, and the fall of it made the forest echo with its crash as though it were a fusillade of musketry. The night winds swayed the branches and hurled them against each other, amid a chorus of creaking stems, and swinging cables and rustle of leaves. Then there was the never-failing crick of the cricket, and the shriller but not less monotonous piping call of the cicadæ, and the perpetual chorus of frogs; there was the doleful cry of the lemur to his mate, a harsh, rasping cry which made night hideous, and loneliness and darkness repulsive. There was a chimpanzee at solitary exercise amusing himself with striking upon a tree like the little boys at home rattle a stick against the area railings. There were the midnight troops of elephants, who no doubt were only prevented from marching right over us by the scores of fires scattered about the camp.
Considering the number of sokos or chimpanzees in this great forest, it is rather a curious fact that not one of the Expedition saw one alive. My terrier “Randy” hunted them almost every day between Ipoto and Ibwiri, and one time was severely handled. I have heard their notes four several times, and have possessed a couple of their skulls, one of which I gave to the Pasha; the other, that I was obliged to leave at the time, was monstrously large.
In 1887 rain fell during eight days in July, ten days in August, fourteen days in September, fifteen days in October, seventeen days in November, and seven days in December, = seventy-one days. From the 1st of June, 1887, to the 31st of May, 1888, there were 138 days, or 569 hours of rain. We could not measure the rain in the forest in any other way than by time. We shall not be far wrong if we estimate this forest to be the rainiest zone on the earth.
For nine months of the year the winds blow from the South Atlantic along the course of the Congo, and up the Aruwimi. They bear the moisture of the sea, and the vapours exhaled by a course of 1400 miles of a river which spreads from half-a-mile to sixteen miles wide, and meeting on their easterly course the cold atmosphere prevailing at the high altitude they descend upon the forest almost every alternate day in copious showers of rain. This forest is also favourably situated to receive the vapours exhaled by Lakes Tanganika, the Albert Edward, and Albert Lakes. While standing in the plain on the verge of the forest, I have seen the two rain clouds, one from the westward and one from the eastward, collide and dissolve in a deluge of rain on Pisgah Mount and the surrounding country. Besides the rains, which lasted ten or twelve hours at a time during our march from Yambuya to Fort Bodo, we had frequent local showers of short duration. When these latter fell we were sure that some lofty hill was in the neighbourhood, which had intercepted a portion of the vapour drifting easterly, and liquified it for the benefit of the neighbourhood. The rear-guard of the caravan was sometimes plunged in misery by a heavy rainfall while the pioneers were enjoying the effects of sunshine above their heads. It occurred at Mabengu Rapids, and at Engweddé. Being in the depths of the forest we could not see any sign of a hill, but such sudden showers betrayed the presence of one in the vicinity. When well away from these localities we would sometimes look behind down a straight stretch of river, and hilly masses 500 feet above the river were revealed to us.
A PAGE FROM MR. STANLEY’S NOTE-BOOK.
The Ituri or Upper Aruwimi is therefore seldom very low. We have seen it in July about six feet below high-water mark. In October one night it rose a foot; it is highest in November, and lowest in December. But it is a stream that constantly fluctuates, and pours an immense volume of water into the Congo. In length of course it is about 700 miles, rising to the south of that group of hills known as the Travellers’ Group, and called Mounts Speke, Schweinfurth, and Junker. Its basin covers an area of 67,000 square miles.
On the north side of the basin we have heard of the Ababua, Mabodé, Momvu, and the Balessé, to the south are the Bakumu and Baburu. These are the principal tribes, which are subdivided into hundreds of smaller tribes. The language of the Bakumu which is to be found inland east of Stanley Falls, is known as far as Panga Falls, with slight dialectic variations among the Baburu. The language of Momvu is spoken between Panga Falls and the Ngaiyu. East of that we found that the language of the Balessé took us as far as Indenduru, beyond that was a separate and distinct language spoken by the Babusessé. But we found sub-tribes in each section who professed not to understand what was said to them from natives two camps removed from them.
All the tribes from the Atlantic Ocean to East Longitude 30° in the Equatorial region have a distant resemblance of features and customs, but I should place East Longitude 18° as the divisional line of longitude between two families of one original parent race. Across twelve degrees of longitude, we have hundreds of tribes bearing a most close resemblance to one another. What Schweinfurth and Junker, Emin and Casati, have said about the Monbuttu, Niam Niam, and Momvu, may with a few fine shades of difference, be said about the Bangala, the Wyyanzi, the Batomba, the Basoko, the Baburu, the Bakumu, and Balessé. One tribe more compact in organisation may possess a few superior characteristics to one which has suffered misfortunes, and been oppressed by more powerful neighbours, but in the main I see no difference whatever. They own no cattle, but possess sheep, goats, and domestic fowls. One tribe may be more partial to manioc, but they all cultivate the plantain and banana. Their dresses all alike are of bark cloth, their headdresses are nearly similar, though one tribe may be more elaborate in the mode of dressing theirs than another. Some of them practise circumcision, and they are addicted to eating the flesh of their enemies. Their weapons are nearly the same—the broad razor-sharp spear, the double-edged and pointed knife, the curious two-or four-bladed knives, their curved swords; their small bows and short arrows; their stools, benches, and back-rests; their ear-rings, bracelets, armlets and leglets; their great war-drums and little tom-toms, their war-horns; their blacksmiths’ and carpenters’ tools.
In the architecture of their houses there is a great difference; in the tattooing, facial marks, and their upper lip ornaments they also differ; but these are often due to the desire to distinguish tribes, though they do not show a difference of race. If one could travel in a steamer from Equatorville on the Congo to Indesura on the Upper Ituri, and see the various communities on the river banks from the deck, the passengers would be struck, not only by the similarity of dress and equipments, but also of complexion; whereas were a colony of Soudanese, Zanzibaris, Wanyamwezi to be seen accidentally among those communities, the stranger might easily distinguish them as being foreign to the soil.
This region, which embraces twelve degrees of longitude, is mainly forest, though to the west it has several reaches of grass-land, and this fact modifies the complexion considerably. The inhabitants of the true forest are much lighter in colour than those of the grass-land. They are inclined normally to be coppery, while some are as light as Arabs, and others are dark brown, but they are all purely negroid in character. Probably this lightness of colour may be due to a long residence through generations in the forest shades, though it is likely to have been the result of an amalgamation of an originally black and light coloured race. When we cross the limits of the forest and enter the grass-land we at once remark, however, that the tribes are much darker in colour.
| SPEARS. | POT. STOOL. PLAY-TABLE. STOOL. |
Among these forest tribes we have observed some singularly prepossessing faces, and we have observed others uncommonly low and degraded. However incorrigibly fierce in temper, detestable in their disposition, and bestial in habits these wild tribes may be to-day, there is not one of them which does not contain germs, and by whose means at some future date civilisation may spread, and with it those manifold blessings inseparable from it. I was much struck with the personal appearance and replies of some captives of Engweddé, with whom, as they knew the language of Momvu, I was able to converse. I asked them if they were in the habit of fighting strangers always. Said they, “What do strangers want from us? we have nothing. We have only plantains, palms, and fish.” “But supposing strangers wished to buy plantains, palm oil, and fish from you, would you sell them?” “We have never seen any strangers before. Each tribe keeps to its own place until it comes to fight with us for some reason.” “Do you always fight your neighbours?” “No; some of our young men go into the woods to hunt game, and they are surprised by our neighbours; then we go to them, and they come to fight us until one party is tired, or one is beaten.” “Well, will you be friends with me if I send you back to your village?” They looked incredulous, and when they were actually escorted out of the camp with cowries in their hands, they simply stood still and refused to go fearing some trap. It seemed incredible to them that they should not be sacrificed. One returned to my tent, and was greeted kindly as an old acquaintance, received a few bananas, deliberately went to a fire and roasted them, weighing in his mind, I suppose, meanwhile, what it all meant; after refreshing himself, he lit his pipe, and walked away with an assumed composure. Three trips past that settlement, and their confidence would have been gained for ever.
Scattered among the Balessé, between Ipoto and Mount Pisgah, and inhabiting the land situated between the Ngaiyu and Ituri Rivers, a region equal in area to about two-thirds of Scotland, are the Wambutti, variously called Batwa, Akka, and Bazungu. These people are undersized nomads, dwarfs, or pigmies, who live in the uncleared virgin forest, and support themselves on game, which they are very expert in catching. They vary in height from three feet to four feet six inches. A full-grown adult male may weigh ninety pounds. They plant their village camps at a distance of from two to three miles around a tribe of agricultural aborigines, the majority of whom are fine stalwart people. A large clearing may have as many as eight, ten, or twelve separate communities of these little people settled around them, numbering in the aggregate from 2,000 to 2,500 souls. With their weapons, little bows and arrows, the points of which are covered thickly with poison, and spears, they kill elephants, buffalo, and antelope. They sink pits, and cunningly cover them with light sticks and leaves, over which they sprinkle earth to disguise from the unsuspecting animals the danger below them. They build a shed-like structure, the roof being suspended with a vine, and spread nuts or ripe plantains underneath, to tempt the chimpanzees, baboons, and other simians within, and by a slight movement, the shed falls, and the animals are captured. Along the tracks of civets, mephitis, ichneumons, and rodents are bow traps fixed, which, in the scurry of the little animals, are snapped and strangle them. Besides the meat and hides to make shields, and furs, and ivory of the slaughtered game, they catch birds to obtain their feathers; they collect honey from the woods, and make poison, all of which they sell to the larger aborigines for plantains, potatoes, tobacco, spears, knives, and arrows. The forest would soon be denuded of game if the pigmies confined themselves to the few square miles around a clearing; they are therefore compelled to move, as soon as it becomes scarce, to other settlements.
They perform other services to the agricultural and larger class of aborigines. They are perfect scouts, and contrive, by their better knowledge of the intricacies of the forest, to obtain early intelligence of the coming of strangers, and to send information to their settled friends. They are thus like voluntary picquets guarding the clearings and settlements. Every road from any direction runs through their camps. Their villages command every cross-way. Against any strange natives, disposed to be aggressive, they would combine with their taller neighbours, and they are by no means despicable allies. When arrows are arrayed against arrows, poison against poison, and craft against craft, probably the party assisted by the pigmies would prevail. Their diminutive size, superior wood-craft, their greater malice, would make formidable opponents. This the agricultural natives thoroughly understand. They would no doubt wish on many occasions that the little people would betake themselves elsewhere, for the settlements are frequently outnumbered by the nomad communities. For small and often inadequate returns of fur and meat, they must allow the pigmies free access to their plantains, groves, and gardens. In a word, no nation on the earth is free from human parasites, and the tribes of the Central African forest have much to bear from these little fierce people who glue themselves to their clearings, flatter them when well fed, but oppress them with their extortions and robberies.
The pigmies arrange their dwellings—low structures of the shape of an oval figure cut lengthways; the doors are from two feet to three feet high, placed at the ends—in a rough circle, the centre of which is left cleared for the residence of the chief and his family, and as a common. About 100 yards in advance of the camp, along every track leading out of it, is placed the sentry-house, just large enough for two little men, with the doorway looking up the track. If we assumed that native caravans ever travelled between Ipoto and Ibwiri, for instance, we should imagine, from our knowledge of these forest people, that the caravan would be mulcted of much of its property by these nomads, whom they would meet in front and rear of each settlement, and as there are ten settlements between the two points, they would have to pay toll twenty times, in tobacco, salt, iron, and rattan, cane ornaments, axes, knives, spears, arrows, adzes, rings, &c. We therefore see how utterly impossible it would be for the Ipoto people to have even heard of Ibwiri, owing to the heavy turnpike tolls and octroi duties that would be demanded of them if they ventured to undertake a long journey of eighty miles. It will also be seen why there is such a diversity of dialects, why captives were utterly ignorant of settlements only twenty miles away from them.
As I have said, there are two species of these pigmies, utterly dissimilar in complexion, conformation of the head, and facial characteristics. Whether Batwa forms one nation and Wambutti another we do not know, but they differ as much from each other as a Turk would from a Scandinavian. The Batwa have longish heads and long narrow faces, reddish, small eyes, set close together, which give them a somewhat ferrety look, sour, anxious, and querulous. The Wambutti have round faces, gazelle-like eyes, set far apart, open foreheads, which give one an impression of undisguised frankness, and are of a rich yellow, ivory complexion. The Wambutti occupy the southern half of the district described, the Batwa the northern, and extend south-easterly to the Awamba forests on both banks of the Semliki River, and east of the Ituri.
The life in their forest villages partakes of the character of the agricultural classes. The women perform all the work of collecting fuel and provisions, and cooking, and the transport of the goods of the community. The men hunt, and fight, and smoke, and conduct the tribal politics. There is always some game in the camp, besides furs and feathers and hides. They have nets for fish and traps for small game to make. The youngsters must always be practising with the bow and arrow, for we have never come across one of their villages without finding several miniature bows and blunt-headed arrows. There must be free use of axes also, for the trees about bear many a mark which could only have been done to try their edge. In every camp we have seen deep incisions in a tree several inches deep, and perhaps 500 yards from the camp a series of diamond cuttings in a root of a tree across the track, which, when seen, informed us that we were approaching a village of the Wambutti pigmies.
Two Egyptians, a corporal and a Cairo boy of fifteen, both light complexioned, were captured near Fort Bodo during my absence, and no one discovered what became of them. It is supposed they were made prisoners, like young Nassamonians of old. I have often wondered what was done to them, and what the feelings of both were—they were devout Mussulmans—after they were taken to the Wambutti’s camp. I fancy they must have been something similar to those of Robert Baker, a sailor, in 1562—
“If cannibals they be
In kind, we do not know,
But if they be, then welcome we,
To pot straightway we goe.
They naked goe likewise,
For shame, we cannot so;
We cannot live after their guise,
Thus naked for to go.
By roots and leaves they live,
As beasts do in the wood:
Among these heathen who can thrive,
On this so wilde a food?”
One of the poisons employed by the tribes of the forest to smear their weapons, in order to make them more deadly, is a dark substance of the colour and consistency of pitch. It is supposed—if native women may be trusted—to be made out of a species of arum, a very common plant, with large leaves, found in any quantity between Fort Bodo and Indesura. Its smell, when fresh, reminds one of the old blister plaster. That it is deadly there can be no doubt. They kill the elephants and other big game with it, as certainly as these animals could be slain with bone-crushing rifles. That they do kill elephants is proved by the vast stores of ivory collected by Ugarrowwa, Kilonga-Longa, and Tippu-Tib, and each adult warrior has a waist-belt, or a shoulder-belt, to suspend his dagger and skinning-knife, and every mother who carries her child and every wife who carries a basket has need of broad forehead-straps, made out of buffalo hide, to bear her load on her back.
1888.
Dec.
Forest.
The poison is not permitted to be manufactured in a village. It seems to be a necessity, to prevent fatal accidents, that the poison should be prepared in the bush. It is then laid on the iron arrows thickly, and into the splints of the hard wooden arrows.
Another poison is of a pale gluey colour. At Avisibba we discovered several baskets of dried red ants among the rafters, and I conjectured, from their resemblance in colour to the deadly poison which the Avisibbas used, that it must have been made by crushing them into a fine powder, and mixing it with palm oil. If one of these insects can raise a blister on the skin of the size of a groat, what may not the powder of mummied insects of the same species effect? If this pale poison be of this material, one must confess that, in the forest, they possess endless supplies of other insects still worse, such as the long black ants which infest the trumpet tree, a bite from one of which can only be compared to cautery from a red hot iron. But whatever it be, we have great faith in a strong hypodermic injection of carbonate of ammonium, and it may be that stronger doses of morphia than any that I ventured upon might succeed in conquering the fatal tetanic spasms which followed every puncture and preceded death.
When one of these poisons is fresh its consequences are rapid. There is excessive faintness, palpitation of the heart, nausea, pallor, and beads of perspiration break out over the body, and death ensues. One man died within one minute from a mere pin-hole, which pierced the right arm and right breast. A headman died within an hour and a quarter after being shot. A woman died during the time that she was carried a distance of one hundred paces; another woman died within twenty minutes; one man died within three hours; two others died after one hundred hours had elapsed. These various periods indicate that some poisons were fresh and others had become dry. Most of these wounds were sucked and washed and syringed, but evidently some of the poison was left, and caused death.
To render the poison ineffective, a strong emetic should be given, sucking and syringing should be resorted to, and a heavy solution of carbonate of ammonium should be injected into the wound, assuming that the native antidote was unknown.
As there is no grass throughout the forest region, the natives would be put to hard shifts to cover their houses were it not for the invaluable phrynia leaves, which grow everywhere, but most abundantly in the primeval woods. These leaves are from a foot to twenty inches in diameter, are attached to slender straight stalks from three to seven feet high. Both stalks and leaves are useful in the construction of native huts and camps. The fruit is like red cherries, but the rinds are not eaten, though the kernels are often eaten to “deceive the stomach.”
The wild fruits of the forest are various, and having been sustained through so many days of awful famine, it would be well to describe such as we found useful. We owe most to a fine stately tree with small leaves, which grows in large numbers along the south banks of the Ituri between East Long. 28° and 29°. Its fruit lies in pods about ten inches long, and which contain four heart-shaped beans called “makwemé,” an inch and a quarter long by an inch broad and half an inch thick. It has a tough dove-coloured skin which when cut shows a reddish inner skin. When this latter is scraped away the bean may be bruised, mashed, or boiled whole. It is better bruised, because, as the bean is rather leathery, it has a better chance of being cooked to be digestible. The pigmies taught us the art, and it may be well conceived that they have had often need of it to support life during their forest wanderings.
In the neighbourhood of these wood-bean trees grew a bastard bread-fruit called fenessi by the Zanzibaris, the fruit of which is as large as a water-melon. When ripe we found it delightful and wholesome.
On a higher level, as we followed the Ituri up from 1° 6′ to Lat. 1° 47′, we found the spondia or hog-plums, a yellow, fragrant fruit with a large stone. An india-rubber vine produced a pear-shaped fruit which, though of delicious odour, was the cause of much nausea; a fruit also of the size of a crab-apple, with an insipid sweetness about it, assisted to maintain life. Then there were some nuts like horse-chestnuts which we found the pigmies partial to, but we cannot speak very highly of them. Besides the cherry-like berries of the phrynia, the kernels of which were industriously sought after, were the rich red fruit of the amoma, within whose husks is found an acid sweet pulp, and the grains of paradise which were first introduced to England in the year 1815. The berries of the calamus, or rattan, were also eaten, but they were difficult to get. Figs also were tried, but they were not very tempting, though anything to disguise hunger and to “deceive the stomach” found favour. Even the cola nuts were eaten, but more for the sake of expectoration than for the sake of pandering to the digestive organs.
Among other articles to which we were reduced were white ants, slugs—not the tiger-slug—snails, crabs, tortoises, roast field-rats, and the siluroids of the streams.
The domestic animals of the natives were principally confined to a fine breed of goats, dogs—of the usual pariah order, but vari-coloured. We saw only one domestic cat, and that was a brindled animal, and very tame, but kept in a cage.
It struck me as curious that while nearly all the Madis were attacked with guinea worms, which rendered them utterly unfit for work, not one Zanzibari suffered from them. The Madis’ medicine for these was simply oil or fat rubbed over the inflammation, which served to cause the worm to withdraw from the leg. At one time, however, we had fifteen cases of mumps among the Zanzibaris, but they used no medicine except rubbing the swollen face with flour and water. Numbers of Manyuema, natives, and Madis, unvaccinated and uninoculated, fell victims to variola; but only four Zanzibaris were attacked with the disease, only one of which was fatal, and two of them were not so much indisposed as to plead being relieved from duties.
Respecting the productions of the forest I have written at such length in “The Congo and the Founding of its Free State” that it is unnecessary to add any more here. I will only say that when the Congo Railway has been constructed, the products of the great forest will not be the least valuable of the exports of the Congo Independent State. The natives, beginning at Yambuya, will easily be induced to collect the rubber, and when one sensible European has succeeded in teaching them what the countless vines, creepers, and tendrils of their forest can produce, it will not be long before other competitors will invade the silent river, and invoke the aid of other tribes to follow the example of the Baburu.
