230 ELEPHANT-HUNTING [ch. x 



masses of small red or large white flowers shaped some- 

 what like columbines, or like the garden balsam ; the 

 red flower bushes were under the bamboos, the white at 

 a lower level. The crests and upper slopes of the 

 mountains were clothed in the green uniformity of tlie 

 bamboo forest, the trail winding dim under its dark 

 archway of tall, close-growing stems. Lower down 

 were junipers and ye^^'s, and then many other trees, 

 M'ith among them tree-ferns and strange dragon-trees 

 with lily-like frondage. Zone succeeded zone from top 

 to bottom, each marked by a different plant- life. 



In this part of Africa, where flowers bloom and birds 

 sing all the year round, there is no such burst of bloom 

 and song as in the northern spring and early summer. 

 There is nothing like the mass of blossoms which carpet 

 the meadows of the high mountain valleys and far 

 northern meadows, during their brief high tide of life, 

 when one short joyous burst of teeming and vital beauty 

 atones for the long death of the iron fall and winter. 

 So it is with the bird songs. iNIany of them are 

 beautiful, though to my ears none quite as beautiful as 

 the best of our own bird songs. At any rate there is 

 nothing that quite corresponds to the chorus that 

 during ^Lay and June moves northward from the 

 Gulf States and Southern California to Maine, Min- 

 nesota, and Oregon, to Ontario and Saskatchewan ; 

 when tliere comes the m-eat v^ernal burst of bloom and 

 song ; when the may-flower, bloodroot, wake-robin, 

 anemone, adder 's-tongue, liverwort, shadblow, dogwood, 

 red bud, gladden the woods ; when mocking-birds and 

 cardinals sing in the magnolia groves of the South, and 

 hermit thrushes, winter wrens, and sweetheart sparrows 

 in the spruce and hemlock forests of the North ; when 

 bobolinks in the East and meadow-larks East and West 



