ACROSS THE MAU ESCARPMENT 59 
held back by barriers so tough that steady cutting and 
chopping with axe and sharp panga can alone enable you 
to make any headway, but you are attacked and wounded. 
Woody trailers, thick as your arm, or frail, delicate, twin- 
ing things, slender as a blade of grass, spread forth strong, 
clinging hands and fingers to hold you back. ‘Twigs that 
instinctively in other lands you would easily brush aside, 
here may not be so dealt with. They may be fine as wire, 
they are surely as strong. And all are armed, armed 
with thorns, some of them so stout and sharp that they will 
rip a mule’s tough hide. Or thorns so sharp and barbed 
that they cut and tear the toughest hunting coat. All 
nature here seems to cry out against your intrusion. ‘“‘Why 
are you raiding where you have no right to come?” she 
seems to say. “I want no stranger here.” 
Nor can it be said that to her own dark children the 
woodlands are kindly. The hardy native hunter pays the 
same penalty as does the well-clothed European. And 
none suffers so much as the N’dorobo wild man, who is 
born and lives and dies among these woods. Very large 
numbers of these folk, you will notice, have lost an eye. 
Or their well-shaped legs show deep scars where ulcers, 
that months couldn’t have completely cured, bit into the 
bone. You see these horrid scars, and in your mind’s eye, 
conjure up some deadly encounter between ill-armed 
savage and terrible beast. You ask the cause. The 
answer is prosaic enough. Nine times out of ten it is: 
ehe thorn.’ * 
The forest ends as abruptly as it began. Suddenly you 
emerge from the dark tangle into sunlight, and joyfully see 
before you wide rolling pasture lands of freshest green. 
It is May, and you might fancy yourself in the Berkshires, 
were the soil not so rich, and the grass and trees so high. 
* Thorn wounds are always painful, sometimes dangerous. Never fail to treat them antiseptically 
atonce. They are almost as poisonous as tooth or claw wounds. 
