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Updated: May 27, 2025
On both sides a fringe of dark forest-trees flung out long branches extending half-way across the stream. The water flowed darkly underneath. Huge lilies stood out from the banks their broad, wax-like leaves trailing upon the glassy ripple. Here and there were pools fringed with drooping willows and belts of green tule.
Our forest-trees have a great sameness of character, like our people, because one and the other grow too closely. In one part of the Park we came to a small tower, for what purpose I know not, unless as an observatory; and near it was a marble statue on a high pedestal.
We left Unyambewa at 7 A.M., and reached a village in the Ibanda district, having marched seven miles over flat ground, growing fine crops in some places, with the remainder covered by the usual slender forest-trees. The road was very good and regular.
It is one of the bewildering mistakes that all persons who lose their way in the pathless woods fall into, they have no idea of distance, or the points of the compass, unless they can see the sun rise and set, which is not possible to do when surrounded by the dense growth of forest-trees; they rather measure distance by the time they have been wandering, than by any other token.
Occasionally, too, very minute land-snails would arrive alive on the island after their long sea-voyage on bits of broken forest-trees a circumstance which I would perhaps hesitate to mention in mere human society were it not that I have been credibly informed your own great naturalist, Darwin, tried the experiment himself with one of the biggest European land-molluscs, the great edible Roman snail, and found that it still lived on in vigorous style after immersion in sea-water for twenty days.
840 the wearied Spaniards endeavored to thread the mazes of this tangled thicket, where the creepers and flowering vines, that shoot up luxuriant in a hot and humid atmosphere, had twined themselves round the huge trunks of the forest-trees, and made a network that could be opened only with the axe.
The "goings on of life" hidden for ages under the rough bark of the patient forest-trees, are brought to light; the rings of lovely shadow which the creature went on making in the dark, as the oyster its opaline laminations, and its tree-pearls of beautiful knots, where a beneficent disease has broken the geometrical perfection of its structure, gloom out in their infinite variousness.
11th. We started on the journey northwards at 7 A.M., and, soon clearing the cultivated plain, bade adieu to Unyanyembe. The track passed down a broad valley with a gentle declination, which was full of tall but slender forest-trees, and was lined on either side by low hills.
So Ripple journeyed on again, till the earth below her shone with yellow harvests waving in the sun, and the air was filled with cheerful voices, as the reapers sang among the fields or in the pleasant vineyards, where purple fruit hung gleaming through the leaves; while the sky above was cloudless, and the changing forest-trees shone like a many-colored garland, over hill and plain; and here, along the ripening corn-fields, with bright wreaths of crimson leaves and golden wheat-ears in her hair and on her purple mantle, stately Autumn passed, with a happy smile on her calm face, as she went scattering generous gifts from her full arms.
Large groups of the natives, sitting on the ground, or standing leaning on their spears, gave increased effect to the picturesque scenery. Some clumps of forest-trees still occupied the centre of the course, and through these you caught glimpses of coloured jackets and jockey-caps as they flashed by.
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