United States or Grenada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
First the screw-pines come and live among them; then the wine-palm and various creepers, and then the oil-palm; and the debris of these plants being greater and making better soil than dead mangroves, they work quicker and the mangrove is doomed. Soon the salt waters are shut right out, the mangrove dies, and that bit of Africa is made.
In that little garden, not thirty feet broad, what treasures there are! A tall palm whether Palmiste or Oil-palm has its smooth trunk hung all over with orchids, tied on with wire. Close to it stands a purple Dracaena, such as are put on English dinner-tables in pots: but this one is twenty feet high; and next to it is that strange tree the Clavija, of which the Creoles are justly fond.
And when a railway was projected and begun from Port Harcourt, west of Calabar, to Udi, and there was talk of an extension to Itu, she sought to make her friends at home grasp the full significance of the development. That railway would become the highway to the interior, and Calabar would cease to be so important a port. Great stretches of rich oil-palm country would be opened up and exploited.
It arbitrarily determines the question of the Tanganyika, separating it from the Nile-system upon the insufficient strength of a gorilla, and of an oil-palm which is specifically different from that of the Western Coast; and 3. It wilfully misrepresents Dr. Livingstone in the matter of the so-called Victoria Nyanza. My first objection has been amply discussed.
Casembe sent me about a hundredweight of the small fish Nsipo, which seems to be the whitebait of our country; it is a little bitter when cooked alone, but with ground-nuts is a tolerable relish: we can buy flour with these at Chikumbi's. The oil-palm grows wild in Pemba. A chief named Moené Ungu, who admires the Arabs, sent his children to Zanzibar to be instructed to read and write.
The nymphaea, lotus or water-lily, forms rafts of verdure; and the stream-banks bear the calabash, the palmyra, the oil-palm, and the papyrus. Until late years it was supposed that the water-lily, sacred to Isis, had been introduced into Egypt from India, where it is also a venerated vegetable, and that it had died out with the form of Fetishism which fostered it.
While travelling on the water each day brought forth similar scenes on our right rose the mountains of Urundi, now and then disclosing the ravines through which the several rivers and streams issued into the great lake; at their base were the alluvial plains, where flourished the oil-palm and grateful plantain, while scores of villages were grouped under their shade.
She entered on a period of toil and tribulation which proved to be one of the most trying and exacting in her life. The house itself was a simple matter. Large posts were inserted in the ground, and split bamboos were placed between; cross pieces were tied on with strips of the oil-palm tree, and then clay was prepared and pounded in.
Nothing in the vegetable world can be more beautiful than a full-grown specimen of the oil-palm, with its cluster of ripe fruit, their bright-yellow colour contrasting finely with the deep-green of its long curling fronds, that seem intended, as it were, to protect the rich bunches from the too powerful rays of a tropic sun.
It was no other than the oil-palm, called by the natives of Western Africa the "Mava," and by botanists "Elais Guiniensis," which, when translated into plain English, means the "oil-palm of Guinea." It is a palm that somewhat resembles the beautiful cocoa, and by botanists is placed in the same family.
Word Of The Day