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: 

 "The 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 

 at once. They are almost as poisonous as tooth or claw wounds. 



