Henry Drummond

“ Day after day you may wander through these forests with nothing except the climate to remind you where you are. The beasts, to be sure, are different, but unless you watch for them you will seldom see any; the birds are different, but you rarely hear them; and as for the rocks, they are our own familiar gneisses and granites, with honest basalt-dykes boring through them, and leopard-skin lichens staining their weathered sides. Thousands and thousands of miles, then, of vast thin forest, shadeless, trackless, voiceless—forest in mountain and forest in plain—this is East Central Africa. ”

“ But the effect in nature is just the opposite. The black and white somehow take away the sense of a solid body altogether; the two colors seem to blend into the most inconspicuous gray, and at close quarters the effect is as of bars of light seen through the branches of shrubs. I have found myself in the forest gazing at what I supposed to be a solitary zebra, its presence betrayed by some motion due to my approach, and suddenly realized that I was surrounded by an entire herd which were all invisible until they moved. ”

“ When we watch the farmer at work, and think how he has to plough, harrow, manure, and humor the soil before even one good crop can be coaxed out of it, we are apt to wonder how nature manages to secure her crops and yet dispense with all these accessories. The world is one vast garden, bringing forth crops of the most luxuriant and varied kind century after century, and millennium after millennium. ”

“ One is struck at first at a certain clean look about the great forests of the interior, a novel and unaccountable cleanness, as if the forest-bed was carefully swept and dusted daily by unseen elves. And so, indeed, it is. Scavengers of a hundred kinds remove decaying animal matter—from the carcase of a fallen elephant to the broken wing of a gnat—eating it, or carrying it out of sight, and burying it on the deodorizing earth. ”

“ The Germans, the Belgians, the English, and the Portuguese, are crying out at present for territory in Central Africa. Meantime humanity is crying out for some one to administer the country; for some one to claim it, not by delimiting a frontier-line upon a map with colored crayons, but by seeing justice done upon the spot; for some one with a strong arm and a pitiful heart to break the Arab yoke and keep these unprotected children free. ”

“ Sometimes somebody does come in the shape of another ant—the real ant this time, not the defenceless Neuropteron, but some valiant and belted knight from the warlike Formicidæ. Singly, or in troops, this rapacious little insect, fearless in its chitinous coat of mail, charges down the tree-trunk, its antennæ waving defiance to the enemy, and its cruel mandibles thirsting for termite blood. The worker white ant is a poor defenceless creature, and blind and unarmed, would fall an immediate prey to these well-drilled banditti, who forage about in every tropical forest in unnumbered legion. ”

“ Africa rises from its three environing oceans in three great tiers, and the general physical geography of these has been already sketched—first, a coast-line, low and deadly; farther in, a plateau the height of the Scottish Grampians; farther in still, a higher plateau, covering the country for thousands of miles with mountain and valley. Now fill in this sketch, and you have Africa before you. Cover the coast belt with rank yellow grass, dot here and there a palm; scatter through it a few demoralized villages; and stock it with the leopard, the hyena, the crocodile, and the hippopotamus. ”

“ One stick, pointed, makes him a spear; two sticks rubbed together make him a fire; fifty sticks tied together make him a house. The bark he peels from them makes his clothes; the fruits which hang on them form his food. It is perfectly astonishing when one thinks of it what nature can do for the animal-man, to see with what small capital after all a human being can get through the world. I once saw an African buried. According to the custom of his tribe, his entire earthly possessions—and he was an average commoner—were buried with him. ”

“ With a few sweeps of its scythe-like jaws it clears the ground, and while the attacking party is carrying off its dead, the builders, unconscious of the fray, quietly continue their work. To every hundred workers in a white ant colony, which numbers many thousands of individuals, there are perhaps two of these fighting men. The division of labor here is very wonderful, and the fact that besides these two specialized forms there are in every nest two other kinds of the same insect, the kings and queens, shows the remarkable height to which civilization in these communities has attained. ”

“ Alfred Russel Wallace respecting the equatorial belt in general—a judgment which has at once sobered all modern descriptions of tropical lands, and made imaginative people more content to stay at home—applies almost to this whole area. 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 paroquets, the monkey swinging from his trapeze in the shaded bowers—these are unknown to Africa. Once a week you will see a palm ”

“ Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its morals, this cesspool of wickedness is a fit capital for the Dark Continent. But Zanzibar is Zanzibar simply because it is the only apology for a town on the whole coast. An immense outfit is required to penetrate this shopless and foodless land, and here only can the traveller make up his caravan. The ivory and slave trades have made caravaning a profession, and everything the explorer wants is to be had in these bazaars, from a tin of sardines to a repeating rifle. ”

“ Occasionally one sees a whole trunk or branch, and sometimes almost an entire tree, so swathed in red mud that the bark is almost completely concealed, the tree looking as if it had been taken out bodily and dipped in some crystallizing solution. It is not only one tree here and there that exhibits the work of the white ant, but in many places the whole forest is so colored with dull red tunnels and patches as to give a distinct tone to the landscape—an effect which, at a little distance, reminds one of the abend-roth in a pine forest among the Alps. ”

“ When you catch him, his limbs are twisted about at every angle, as if the whole were made of one long stalk of the most delicate grass, hinged in a dozen places, and then gently crushed up into a dishevelled heap. Having once assumed a position, by a wonderful instinct he never moves or varies one of his many angles by half a degree. The way this insect keeps up the delusion is indeed almost as wonderful as the mimicry itself ”

“ It is a wonderful thing to start from the civilization of Europe, pass up these mighty rivers, and work your way into that unknown land—work your way alone, and on foot, mile after mile, month after month, among strange birds and beasts and plants and insects, meeting tribes which have no name, speaking tongues which no man can interpret, till you have reached its secret heart, and stood where white man has never trod before. ”

“ Man turns up the crust with the plough, throwing up the exhausted earth, down the refreshed soil, with infinite toil and patience. And nature does it by natural ploughmen who, with equal industry, are busy all over the world reversing the earth's crust, turning it over and over from year to year, only much more slowly and much more thoroughly, spadeful by spadeful, foot by foot, and even grain by grain. ”

“ It is a wonderful thing to look at this weird world of human beings—half animal half children, wholly savage and wholly heathen; and to turn and come back again to civilization before the impressions have had time to fade, and while the myriad problems of so strange a spectacle are still seething in the mind. It is an education to see this sight—an education in the meaning and history of man. To have been here is to have lived before Menes. It is to have watched the dawn of evolution. ”

“ Flowers there are, small and great, in endless variety; but there is no display of flowers, no gorgeous show of blossom in the mass, as when the blazing gorse and heather bloom at home. The dazzling glare of the sun in the torrid zone has perhaps something to do with this want of color-effect in tropical nature; for there is always about ten minutes just after sunset, when the whole tone of the landscape changes like magic, and a singular beauty steals over the scene. ”

“ The native tracks which I have just described are the same in character all over Africa. They are veritable footpaths, never over a foot in breadth, beaten as hard as adamant, and rutted beneath the level of the forest bed by centuries of native traffic. As a rule these footpaths are marvellously direct. Like the roads of the old Romans, they run straight on through everything, ridge and mountain and valley, never shying at obstacles, nor anywhere turning aside to breathe. ”

“ Some have the impression that everything is done in bullock-wagons—an idea borrowed from the Cape, but hopelessly inapplicable to Central Africa, where a wheel at present would be as great a novelty as a polar bear. Others at the opposite extreme suppose that the explorer works along solely by compass, making a bee-line for his destination, and steering his caravan through the trackless wilderness like a ship at sea. ”

“ They plant the seeds of their favorite vegetables and fruits—the Arab always carries seeds with him—as if they meant to stay for ever. Meantime they buy ivory, tusk after tusk, until great piles of it are buried beneath their huts and all their barter-goods are gone. Then one day, suddenly, the inevitable quarrel is picked. And then follows a wholesale massacre. Enough only are spared from the slaughter to carry the ivory to the coast; the grass-huts of the villages are set on fire; the Arabs strike camp; and the slave-march, worse than death, begins. ”

“ To watch uninterruptedly the same few yards of universe unfold its complex history; to behold the hourly resurrection of new living things, and miss no change or circumstance, even of its minuter parts; to look at all, especially the things you have seen before, a hundred times, to do all with patience and reverence—this is the only way to study nature.
Towards the afternoon the men began to drop in with their boxes of insects, each man having to collect a certain number every camp-day. ”

“ Into the grave, after the body, was lowered the dead man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a mud bowl, and last his bow and arrows—the bow string cut through the middle, a touching symbol that its work was done. This was all. Four items, as an auctioneer would say, were the whole belongings for half a century of this human being. No man knows what a man is till he has seen what a man can be without, and be withal a man. That is to say, no man knows how great man is till he has seen how small he has been once. ”

“ The real dangers to a traveller are of a simpler kind. Central Africa is the finest hunting country in the world. Here are the elephant, the buffalo, the lion, the leopard, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the hyæna, the eland, the zebra, and endless species of small deer and antelope. Then the whole country is covered with traps to catch these animals—deep pits with a jagged stake rising up in the middle, the whole roofed over with turf and grass, so exactly like the forest bed that only the trained eye can detect their presence. ”

“ The next to follow him found not a solitary human being—nothing but burned homes and bleaching skeletons. It was but yesterday—the close of 1887—that the Arabs at the north end of Lake Nyassa, after destroying fourteen villages with many of their inhabitants, pursued the population of one village into a patch of tall dry grass, set it on fire, surrounded it, and slew with the bullet and the spear those who crawled out from the more merciful flames. The Wa-Nkonde tribe, to which these people belonged, were, until this event, one of the most prosperous tribes in East Central Africa. ”

“ He does not need to work; with so bountiful a nature round him it would be gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as it is called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and as little blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise. The fact is, Africa is a nation of the unemployed.
This completeness, however, will be a sad drawback to development. Already it is found difficult to create new wants; and when labor is required, and you have already paid your man a yard of calico and a string of beads, you have nothing in your possession to bribe him to another hand's turn. ”

“ Three distinct Africas are known to the modern world—North Africa, where men go for health; South Africa, where they go for money; and Central Africa, where they go for adventure. The first, the old Africa of Augustine and Carthage, every one knows from history; the geography of the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, has been taught us by two Universal Educators—War and the Stock-Exchange; but our knowledge of the third, the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley, is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look upon our maps which tells how long this mysterious land has kept its secret. ”

“ It seems the awful destiny of this homeless people to spend their lives in breaking up the homes of others. Wherever they go in Africa the followers of Islam are the destroyers of peace, the breakers up of the patriarchal life, the dissolvers of the family tie. Already they hold the whole Continent under one reign of terror. They have effected this in virtue of one thing—they possess firearms; and they do it for one object—ivory and slaves, for these two are one. ”

“ And yet the white ant can never procure any food until it comes above ground. Nor will it meet the case for the insect to come to the surface under the shadow of night. Night in the tropics, so far as animal life is concerned, is as the day. It is the great feeding time, the great fighting time, the carnival of the carnivores, and of all beasts, birds, and insects of prey from the least to the greatest. It is clear then that darkness is no protection to the white ant; and yet without coming out of the ground it cannot live. ”