Phil Robinson

“ The ground itself was bare of vegetation, except where, here and there, monster fungi clustered, like a condemned invoice of umbrellas and parasols, round some fallen giant of the forest, or where, in a screen of blossom, wonderful air-plants filled up great spaces from tree-trunk to tree-trunk.
At intervals we crossed rivulets of crystal water, icy cold, finding their way as best they might from hollow to hollow over the centuries’ layers of fallen leaves, and along their courses grew in rich profusion masses of a broad-leafed sedge, that afforded the panther safe covert and easy couch ”

“ Every man of my force was in his place.
Then who was the man that had run away, when all the party started up from their sleep? A ghost? I looked round into the deepening gloom. All my men were standing together, looking rather frightened. Around us stretched the eternal forest. A ghost! And then on a sudden the thought flashed across me — I had seen the Soko.
I had seen the Soko! and seeing it had mistaken it for a human being! And while I was still loading my cartridge-belt, Shumari, my gun-boy, had crept up to my side, with my express in one hand and heavy elephant rifle in the other ”

“ In an instant I was round the brake, and there lay Shumari, apparently unhurt, and the Soko — dying!
“Untie his hands,” I said. This was done, and the wounded thing made an effort to stagger to its feet.
A dozen arms thrust it to the ground again. “ Let him rise,” I said; “help him to rise;” and Mabruki helped the Soko on to its feet.
Powers above! If this were an ape, what else were half my expedition? The wounded wood-thing passed its right arm round Mabruki’s neck, and taking one of his hands, pressed it to its own heart. ”

“ Shumari, a hunter born and bred, was full of Soko lore; the skin, he said, was covered, except on the throat, hands, and feet, with a short, harsh hair of a dark color, and tipped in the older individuals with gray; these also had long growths of hair on the head, their cheeks and lips. It had no tail.
“Standing up,” said he, “it is as tall as I am [he was only five feet one inch] , and its eyes are together in the front of its face, so that it looks at you straight. It eats sitting up, and when tired leans its back against a tree, putting its hands behind its head. ”

“ The ass, however, was by no means soothed by the meteor-like disappearance of the beasts of prey, and the gruesome dronings that, in spite of hard whacks, it indulged in for many minutes, betrayed the depth of its emotions and the cavernous nature of its interior organization. The ass, like the savage, has no perception of the picturesque. ”

“ That they could ever have got out of the awful trap, with its millions of strong spines barbed like fish-hooks and as strong as steel, is probably impossible; but the magnificent promptitude of the suicide, its picturesque completeness, was undeniable. ”

“ It had stood upright amongst the upright men, and turning to run had stooped, but only so much as a man might do when running with all his speed. In the gait there was a one-sided swing, just as some great man-ape — gorilla or chimpanzee — might have when, as travellers tell us, they help themselves along on the knuckles of the long fore-arm, the body swaying down to the side on which the hand touches the ground at each stride. ”

“ I determined that I would not; so, before leaving Zanzibar, served out to every man twenty yards of net. These, in the daytime, were worn round the head as turbans, and at night spread upon sticks, and furnished each man a protection against these Macbeths of the sedge and brake. The men thoroughly understood their value, and before turning in for the night, always carefully examined their nets for stray holes, which they caught together with fibres. But somehow I could not go to sleep for a long while; the pain in my arm where the Soko seized me was very great at times ”

“ When a Soko catches a man it holds him, and makes faces at him, and jabbers; sometimes it lets him go without doing him any harm, but generally it bites off all his fingers one by one, spitting them out as it bites them off, and his nose and ears and toes as well, and ends up by strangling him with its fingers or beating him to death with a branch. ”

“ The response came on the instant, and in a few minutes there was a cordon round the brake at one hundred yards radius, each man about twenty yards or so from the next. But all was silent as the grave. As jet nothing had got through our line, I felt sure; and if therefore Shumari had indeed seen the Soko, the Soke was still within the circle of our guns. A few tufts of young rattan grew between the line and the brake in the centre of. which were our goods, and unless it was up above us, hidden in the impervious canopy overhead, where was the Soko? ”

“ One of my men, sent up the tree to cut us off some of these natural ropes, reported that all round the tree, that is, between its trunk and the cane-hedge, there was a clear space, so that though, looking at it from the outside, it seemed as if the canes grew right up to the tree trunk, looking at it from above, there was seen to be really an open pathway, so to speak, surrounding the tree, broad enough for three men to walk abreast. ”

“ I had often heard of similar cases of vegetable aversions, where, from some secret cause of plant prejudice, two shrubs, though growing together, exercise this mutual repulsion, and never actually combine in growth. ”

“ The method of march was in line, each man about a hundred yards from the next, and every second man on an ass, the riders carrying the usual ivory horns, without which no travellers in the Uregga forests ever move from home, and the notes of which, exactly like the cry of the American wood-marmot, keep the party in line. By this means we covered a mile, and being unencumbered, marched fast, scouring the wood before us at the rate of four miles an hour for three hours. ”

“ My museum, however, wanted yet another skin — the Polar bear! I cannot say the prospect pleased me. I would much rather have sent my compliments to the Polar bear and asked it to come comfortably into some warm climate to be shot; but regretting was useless, so I gave ’the order of the clay — the North Pole.
In London, however, I heard of Stanley’s successful search for Livingstone, and then it was that the sense of my utter nothingness came over me. All Africa was unshot! It is true I had once gone from Bombay to Zanzibar, Dr. ”

“ Shumari had lagged behind, as usual, and on his coming up I reproved him for being the last.
“I am not the last,” he said; “Zaidi, the Wangwana, is not here yet. I saw him climbing up for a liane” (the men got their ropes from these useful plants) “just as I was coming away, and I called out to him that you would be angry.”
“Peace!” said Baraka, the man next to me; “is not that Zaidi the Wangwana there, riding on the ass? It was not he. It was that good-for-nothing Tarya. He is always the last to stand up and the first to sit down.”
“No doubt, then,” said Shumari, “it was Tarya ”

“ They have no spears or knives, and they do not use anything that men use, except that they walk with sticks, knocking down fruit with them, and that they drink water out of their hands. Their front teeth are very sharp, and at each side is one longer and sharper than the rest. ”