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Updated: July 23, 2025
Among organic creations, this tree is undoubtedly, together with the Adansonia or baobab of Senegal, one of the oldest inhabitants of our globe. The baobabs are of still greater dimensions than the dragon-tree of Orotava. There are some which near the root measure 34 feet in diameter, though their total height is only from 50 to 60 feet.
The slave chained with her limps, and the blood flows from her shoulder, torn by lashes from the whip. In the evening camped under an enormous baobab with white flowers and a light green foliage. During the night roars of lions and leopards. Shots fired by one of the natives at a panther. What has become of Hercules? April 29th and 30th. First colds of what they call the African winter.
They were standing now on three sides of a square. The fourth side was the trunk of the baobab. Between them and the trunk, the streaming tendrils swayed and swung, bats flitted and something still invisible sat still and chuckled. "One pace forward march!" They could see now. The fakir sat and stared at them and grinned. Brown raised the lamp and let its rays fall on him.
Its leaves are used for leaven, its bark furnishes indistructible cordage; and the bees form their hives in the cavities of its trunk. The negroes, too, often shelter themselves from storms in its time-worn caverns. The baobab is indisputably the monarch of African trees, p. 41. Travels in the interior of Africa, to the sources of the Senegal and Gambia, by G. Mollien. Lond. 1820, 4to.
That enemy was not new to us; we had already had an encounter with it; we had met it among the branches of the dragon-tree, and we were now to meet it again beside the trunk of the baobab. It was thirst. Yes, we already experienced its painful sensation. Every moment it was gaining ground upon us, and its pangs becoming keener and harder to endure.
"Close by this hut grew a large baobab tree. A glance at the mealie grounds showed me that the old head man had not exaggerated the mischief done by the elephants to his crops, which were now getting ripe. Nearly half of the entire patch was destroyed. The great brutes had eaten all they could, and the rest they had trampled down.
"For my part, I pitched my camp below the kraal; and then, having procured a beam of wood from the head man rather a rotten one, by the way I set it across two boughs that ran out laterally from the baobab tree, at a height of about twenty-five feet from the ground, in such fashion that I and another man could sit upon it with our legs hanging down, and rest our backs against the bole of the tree.
The ladies and most of the gentlemen were greatly interested in the plants and flowers, and the whole forenoon was agreeably passed in viewing them. Uncle Moses insisted that the baobab and the Indian banyan were literally the "biggest things" there; for the trunk of the former was ten feet in diameter, while the latter covered half a square mile of ground.
Then came an ear-splitting crack of thunder and up the river they saw a magnificent baobab tree, which had reared its stately head over a hundred feet high from the ground, come crashing down, split in twain as by a Titan's ax. The blackened stump was left standing, and soon this burst into flames, to blaze away until another downpour of rain put out the conflagration.
The rest of the garden consisted of bare, sun-baked tracts of clay, intersected by gravel walks. I felt certain that amongst these seedlings there must have been a two-inch high specimen of the Baobab "l'arbre geant," the pride of Tartarin's heart, the tree which, as he explained, might under favourable conditions grow 200 feet high.
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