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Updated: May 26, 2025
Between two of the larger buildings was wedged a room dedicated to the worship of Bacchus, to-day like a narrow river-gorge at flood time jammed with tree-trunks some of them, let us say, water-logged and all grinding together with an intolerable noise like a battle. If you happened to be passing the windows, certain more or less intelligible sounds might separate themselves from the bedlam.
But here were hundreds of masts, standing as thick as tree-trunks in a fir-wood, and they were not bare poles, but lofty and slender, and crossed by innumerable yards, and covered with ropes in orderly profusion, which showed in the sunshine as cobwebs shine out in a field in summer.
Tribesmen knew their deaths in mid-leap, and as they fell, their brothers surged over them in a roaring, irresistible wave. In the forefront of the rush, hair flying and arms swinging free, flashing past the tree-trunks, and leaping the obstructing logs, came Thom. Fairfax sighted on her and almost pulled trigger ere he knew her. "The woman! Don't shoot!" he cried. "See! She is unarmed!"
But, after persevering for more than three hours, it became evident that the little spot was so completely overgrown with tangled, impenetrable jungle that but one course was open to us, that of clearing the ground by cutting down and destroying the network of creepers that choked up the spaces between the tree-trunks.
What we see most of here is the light bush; dense thickets of shrubs, and smaller trees, resembling our remembrance of the denes and copses of England, or Epping and the New Forest. To us new-chums it seems absurd to call this bush "light," but we can see that it is so by comparison with the primeval forest, where the tree-trunks run from ten to forty feet in girth.
The shadows of the tree-trunks lie black and defined across the road branches, twigs, every thing then comes a sweep of steely cloud, and they disappear, swallowed up in one uniform gray: a colorless moment or two passes, and the sun pushes out again; and they start forth distinct and defined, each little shoot and great limb, into new life on the bright ground.
Out of the blanket which hid the field appeared the great welts of chalk of the main line trenches, then the lesser connecting ones; the woods became black patches and the remaining tree-trunks gaunt, still and dismal sentinels of the gray ruins of the villages, until finally all the conformations of the scarred and tortured slope were distinct in the first fresh light of a brilliant summer's day.
They were none too early, for, just behind them, where a moment since the canoe had been hanging, they heard a splash. For the rest of the night they kept watch over themselves lest they slept. Till the dawn broke, whenever they turned their eyes toward the bank, they could discern the grey streak of the timber-wolf, dodging in and out between the tree-trunks, keeping pace with them.
It was close by the part of the forest through which Morgan and I had made our way cautiously and silently when we were going to kill the rattlesnake; and as we reached the edge, and passed in amongst the densely growing trees, all was silent, dark, and mysterious-looking; but there was nothing to be seen but tree-trunks, and we crept up to where the great black stood bending down and listening.
When alarmed, he hides in the foliage, and once swallowed up in the green depths which are his home and his protection, neither eye nor ear can find any trace of him. But our ideas change when we enter his village home, with its dancing-grounds with the big drums, the sacred stone tables, idols and carved tree-trunks, all in a frame of violently coloured bushes red, purple, brown and orange.
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