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This coloured earth identifies a silk-cotton tree as being the residence of a Sasabonsum, as its colour is held to arise from the blood it whips off him as he goes down to his under-world home after a night's carnage. All silk-cotton trees are suspected because they are held to be the roosts for Duppies.
A tree distinguished by a girdle of palm-leaves may not be cut down or injured in any way; and even silk-cotton trees which are not supposed to be animated by Huntin may not be felled unless the woodman first offers a sacrifice of fowls and palm-oil to purge himself of the proposed sacrilege. To omit the sacrifice is an offence which may be punished with death.
Among the trees of the brushes I may mention the Anacardium, or cashew nut, with large red acrid fruit, Mimusops kaukii, often attaining a great size, and a species of Bombax, or silk-cotton tree, from the trunk of one of which the canoe we saw upon the beach was being constructed.
In the neighbourhood of these grow bamboo, the thickest of which was about two and a half inches in diameter; the "myombo," a very shapely tree, with a clean trunk like an ash, the "imbite," with large, fleshy leaves like the "mtamba," sycamore, plum-tree, the "ugaza," ortamarisk, and the "mgungu," a tree containing several wide branches with small leaves clustered together in a clump, and the silk-cotton tree.
That night, as we sat under a large silk-cotton tree silently eating supper off plates of palm leaves, the old chief suddenly threw down his meat, and, with a startled expression, said, "I hear spirits!"
"Oh," cried Corny, as soon as she saw me. "We have something to talk to you about! Let's go and sit down. I wish there was some kind of an umbrella or straw hat that people could wear under their chins to keep the glare of these white roads out of their eyes. Let's go up into the silk-cotton tree." I proposed that I should go to my room and clean up a little first, but Corny couldn't wait.
The sun had slanted slow; ceibas and silk-cotton woods threw a shade dark almost as twilight; but the air was full of breathless heat, and Kettle's white drill clothes hung upon him clammy and damp. Behind him, in the stern of the canoe, Brass Pan scratched himself plaintively. Dark fell and the dug-out was made fast to a mangrove root.
Chipperton put the whole thing down as the result of his lecture to Rectus up in the silk-cotton tree. For several days after our hot chase after Priscilla, we saw nothing of this ex-emissary. Indeed, we began to be afraid that something had happened to her. She was such a regular attendant at the hotel-door-market, that people were talking about missing her black face and her chattering tongue.
It was pretty late in the afternoon when we reached home, and I made up my mind that the next time I went so far to fish, in a semi-tropical country, I'd go with a party who wore suits that would do for riding. Rectus and Corny and Mrs. Chipperton were up in the silk-cotton tree when I got home, and I went there and sat down. Mrs. Chipperton lent me her fan.
Then we wandered out to see the site of his intended mansion, with the rich wooded hills of the Latagual to the north, and all around the unbroken forest, where, he told us, the howling monkeys shouted defiance morning and evening at him who did 'Invade their ancient solitary reign. An enormous silk-cotton near by was felled, in spite of the Negroes' fears.