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Updated: May 23, 2025
I would back a true mowana against a dozen floods, provided you do not boil it in hot sea-water; but I can not believe that any of those now alive had a chance of being subjected to the experiment of even the Noachian deluge. The natives make a strong cord from the fibres contained in the pounded bark.
Any injury is felt most severely by the first class on the bark; by the second on the inside; while the inside of the exogenous may be removed, and the outside of the endogenous may be cut, without stopping the growth in the least. The mowana possesses the powers of both.
The whole of the trunk, as high as they can reach, is consequently often quite denuded of its covering, which in the case of almost any other tree would cause its death, but this has no effect on the mowana except to make it throw out a new bark, which is done in the way of granulation.
Each of the laminae can be seen to be composed of two, three, or four layers of ligneous tubes; but supposing each ring the growth of one year, and the semidiameter of a mowana of one hundred feet in circumference about seventeen feet, if the central point were in the centre of the tree, then its age would lack some centuries of being as old as the Christian era . Though it possesses amazing vitality, it is difficult to believe that this great baby-looking bulb or tree is as old as the Pyramids.
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.
The wood is so spongy and soft that an axe can be struck in so far with a good blow that there is great difficulty in pulling it out again. In the dead mowana mentioned the concentric rings were well seen. The average for a foot at three different places was eighty-one and a half of these rings.
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