316 THE LAND OF THE LION 
in its beautiful hidden woodlands you can always hear 
in the early morning the strange cry of the Colobus monkey 
sounding like a rapidly ground coffee mill. 
I spent many a delightful hour exploring its banks and 
watching its delicious flow, so clear of all mud and swamp 
stain. ‘The tree ferns love its cool shade. Many varieties 
unknown to me grew there. Little delicate fronded 
things like long branches of parsley. Clumps of maiden- 
hair, and others with rich hanging, curling leaves. Some 
on the bank, some from great tree stems. You may 
ride within one hundred yards of that canon’s edge on 
smoothly cropped green grass land, and but for the broad 
tree-tops, just raising themselves above the level sward 
you could have no idea that a gorge fully a hundred feet 
deep lay at your feet. 
Then as you walk for miles along its edge, you can 
study leisurely that new, strange world of the trees that 
you have so often longed to look into. 
The heavy forests of Africa are usually dark, dank, 
unhealthy. The wild pig and an occasional bushbuck 
are the only animals that haunt them. But this upper 
world of the tree-tops is full of life. There, monkeys 
swing from bough to bough with extraordinary quickness. 
Parrots screech to their fellows, and the purple pigeons 
fly to and fro. All is above and beyond you as you walk 
in semi-darkness, or rather crawl, torn, scratched at every 
step. From the canon’s crest you have a clear view of 
what you never saw before, the world where the insects, 
the birds, the monkeys find a safe and sunny home, a region 
different as fancy can paint it from the sombre tangle below. 
Besides, the little river in cutting its way so deeply has 
made a well-watered botanical garden all its own. There, 
great trees grow and sweet flowers bloom that are strangers 
to the country around. Here is the stateliest tree in 
East Africa, the juniper, whose great stem rises majestically 
