WALKING THROUGH THE FOREST 155 



with our insignificant tents, the trees of the forest 

 are ; as a rule, their height is greater in proportion 

 to their girth than is the case with an ash or an elm. 

 The forest is seldom level ; it is always gently rising 

 or falling, as much one way as another, and it was 

 not until we found one day that the streams were 

 no longer flowing to our right into the Semliki that 

 we realized that we had crossed the watershed into 

 the basin of the Congo. 



Wandering on, day after day, through the forest, 

 one began to wonder, ' Shall we come out of it all 

 some day, as one does from a tunnel ?' and our 

 coming out of it was almost as sudden as that. 

 Without any warning, except that for a mile or so 

 the trees had become perhaps a little smaller, the 

 forest ended abruptly, and we found ourselves on 

 the edge of an open hilly grass country that stretched 

 as far as we could see to east and north. 



A few miles beyond the forest is the Belgian post 

 of Irumu, on the Ituri River, a swift-flowing cocoa- 

 coloured stream as big as the Semliki. If one of 

 its hundreds of tributaries was as big as this, we 

 could but wonder what the Congo must be before 

 it reached the sea. Irumu is a place of some im- 

 portance by being on the main route from Uganda 

 to the Congo ; large quantities of supplies brought 

 up by the Uganda Railway enter the Congo Free 

 State from that side, notably machinery and mining 

 apparatus for the gold-mines at Kilo, which lies 

 three or four days' journey to the north. We tried 



