THE BAOBAB TREE 103 



(lir/itata), may justly be called the elephant of the vegetable 

 world. Near the village Grumer, in Fassokl, Eussegger saw a 

 baobab thirty feet in diameter and ninety-five in circumference ; 

 the horizontally outstretched branches were so large that the 

 negroes could comfortably sleep upon them. The Venetian 

 traveller Cadamosto (1454) found, near the mouths of the 

 Senegal, baobabs measuring more than a hundred feet in cir- 

 cumference. As these vegetable giants are generally hollow, 

 like our ancient willows, they are frequently made use of as 

 dwellings or stables ; and Dr. Livingstone mentions one in 

 which twenty or thirty men could lie down and sleep, as in a 

 hut. In the village of Grand Gralarques, in Senegambia, the 

 negroes have decorated the entrance into the cavity of a 

 monstrous baobab with rude sculptures cut into the living 

 wood, and make use of the interior as a kind of assembly room, 

 where they meet to deliberate on the interests of their small 

 community, " reminding one," says Humboldt, " of the cele- 

 brated plantain in Lycia, in whose hollow trunk the Roman 

 consul, Lucinius Mutianus, once dined with a party of twenty- 

 one." As the baobab begins to decay in the part where the 

 trunk divides into the larger branches, and the process of de- 

 struction thence continues downwards, the hollow space fills, 

 during the rainy season, with water, which keeps a long time, 

 from its being protected against the rays of the sun. The 

 baobab thus forms a vegetable cisteim, whose water the neigh- 

 bouring villagers sell to travellers. In Kordofan the Arabs 

 climb upon the tree, fill the water in leathern backets, and let 

 it down from above ; but the people in Congo more ingeniously 

 bore a hole in the trunk, which they stop, after having tapped as 

 much as they require. * 



The height of the baobab does not correspond to its amazing 

 bulk, as it seldom exceeds sixty feet. As it is of very rapid 

 growth, it acquires a diameter of three or four feet and its full 

 altitude in about thirty years, and then continues to grow in 

 circumference. The larger beam-like branches, almost as thick 

 at their extremity as at their origin, are abruptly rounded, and 

 then send forth smaller branches, with large, light green, palmated 

 leaves. The bark is smooth and greyish. The oval fruits, 



* D'Escayrac, " Le Desert et le Soudan." 

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