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The bark of this tree yields a yellow dye; its leaf is without indentation, and of a beautiful green; it is not very high; the wood is white, and the bark is easily reduced to powder. This was the first time that I saw the baobab, that enormous tree which has been described by Adanson, and which bears his name. I measured one, and found it to be forty feet in circumference.
Great tracts of this part of the country are of calcareous tufa, with only a thin coating of soil; numbers of "baobab" and "mopane" trees abound all over this hard, smooth surface. About two miles beyond the northern bank of the pan we unyoked under a fine specimen of the baobab, here called, in the language of Bechuanas, Mowana; it consisted of six branches united into one trunk.
Low hills covered with tropical forest growth rise from the sandy shores of the Cape, and along its face are three creeks or bays, deep inlets showing through their narrow entrances smooth beaches of yellow sand, fenced inland by the forest of cotton-woods and palms, with here and there an elephantine baobab.
Instead therefore of flinging the bodies, of those upon whom capital punishment has been inflicted, to the hyenas and jackals, and leaving them to be devoured by these voracious brutes, the negroes give them a species of sepulture; and that is as described, by closing them up in vaults hewn in trunks of the baobab and in my opinion a very comfortable kind of tomb it is.
I even remembered Adanson's description of it, and his statement, that he believed there were some baobab trees five thousand years old, or coeval with the creation of the world. He had himself measured some of them seventy-five feet in girth, and had heard of others that exceeded one hundred! This I could now believe.
With a guttural exclamation of triumph he gripped her in his left arm, and, despite her struggles and her shrill cry for help, began half to drag and half to carry her towards the deep shade of the baobab grove. Instantly Aziel and Metem sprang up and rushed forward, drawing their bronze swords as they ran.
Calm and proud, although a little pallid, he stepped out on the footway, glanced at the hand-carts, and, seeing all was right, lustily took the road to the railway-station, without even once looking back towards Baobab Villa.
In these islands grows the patriarch of vegetables described by the celebrated Adanson, under the name of Baobab, the circumference of which is often found to be above one hundred feet.
In the little house of the baobab, the attic was full of these glorious trophies. All of Tarascon recognised him as their master in this respect.
Now it so chanced that I knew what kind of tree it was even to its name; my "wonder book" had not omitted to describe the vegetable curiosity. It was the great baobab.
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