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She broke cover well on Grosvenor's side of the baobab; and, like the lion, came to an abrupt halt as soon as she saw Grosvenor, straight toward whom she was charging. In an instant the white man's rifle leapt to his shoulder, and the next instant he fired.
Therefore it was, that the figure cut upon the bark of the baobab surprised us for this was a sign that human beings had been there before us though it may have been ever so long before. We approached the trunk then to examine it more closely. As we came near, we observed that the lines were very deep as if they had been cut into the wood but beyond this there was nothing remarkable.
Emerging from the entangled thorn jungle, the extensive settlements of Kiwyeh came into view; and to the east of the chief's village we found a camping place under the shade of a group of colossal baobab. We had barely encamped when we heard the booming, bellowing war horns sounding everywhere, and we espied messengers darting swiftly in every direction giving the alarm of war.
To the right of the huts as you look up the kloof, and commanding the mealie lands, stands the baobab tree that I have mentioned. Into that baobab tree I made up my mind to go. Then if the elephants appeared I should get a shot at them. I announced my intentions to the head man of the kraal, who was delighted.
The pipe is the gourd of a baobab, which here sometimes grows a foot and a half long; it is cleared, filled with water and provided with a wooden tube fixed in the upper part away from the mouth, and supporting a small "chillam" or bowl of badly baked clay.
Looking to his left, he saw a hut hardly larger than a dog kennel but ingeniously thatched with bamboo leaves. Then his glance was caught and held by a curious contrivance of interwoven thorn branches and creepers, fitted into a high narrow opening in the trunk of the baobab. "What's that? hollow tree?" he asked. "Yes," answered Blake, without turning. "Sixteen-foot room inside.
In that book I remembered having read of course in the same chapter that treated of the baobab how a curious practice existed among some tribes of negroes, of hollowing out the great trunks of these trees into vaults or chambers, and there depositing their dead.
He, in fact, measured a Baobab thirty-six years after Adanson, and found its diameter increased by only eight lines. The growth is not therefore uniformly progressive, and must become slower at a certain period of the age of this tree, in a proportion which it is hardly possible to determine.
Brown looked about him and, save where the lantern cast a fitful light on the fakir and the sentry and the native servant, and threw into faint relief the shadowy, snake-like tendrils of the baobab, his eyes failed to pierce the gloom. The sunset was a memory. In that heavy, death-darkness silence it seemed almost as though there had never been a sun. "'A blot of blood, he says.
Try to conceive my own emotion, which I was bound to feel on that day of days when I crossed through this marvellous garden, and that was capped when I was ushered into the hero's sanctum. His study, one of the lions I should say, lions' dens of the town, was at the end of the garden, its glass door opening right on to the baobab.
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