A RIDE THROUGH RHINO COUNTRY 317 



before you, as you painfully force your way amid the 

 dark places of the great woods, but whose feathery boughs 

 you never saw before, so densely packed and laced to- 

 gether are those forest tops. Here all open to the day- 

 light, you can study the gnarled twistings of those splendid 

 limbs, and they remind you of one of the trees Rousseau 

 has so wonderfully painted, against a background of 

 crimson sunsetting, a tree to dream of and but rarely 

 seen. Here the wide-spreading chestnut finds all the 

 space it needs for its great bouquet-like crown of rich 

 lilac blossom, and groups of them take up the whole canon 

 from side to side. The precipitous sides of this canon 

 have saved them from the yearly devastating grass fire, 

 and they sink their roots safely in the cool well watered 

 soil. On the plain above grow juniper and olive trees 

 in scattered thousands, but all are ragged and scorched. 

 The junipers for half their stunted growth are notched 

 and unsightly. The olive trees bloom only at the crowns; 

 when they live at all they live a life of protest; the hardy 

 thorn tree alone shows scarcely any sign of these fierce 

 recurrent purgatorial scorchings. 



In the canon fire never comes. Its rocky borders give 

 the flames nothing to feed on, and thus it is that within 

 it you find a secluded little woodland, naturally matured. 



Darkness and dampness make the African forests 

 unpleasant and uninteresting even when they are pene- 

 trable, while here are a hundred little green open glades 

 where for part of the day the sun shines down. Silver 

 gray moss hangs in long waving veils from upper branches. 

 Rich orange-coloured mistletoe plants itself wherever it 

 can see the sun. Long, delicate tree-ferns find rootage 

 in the trees leaning close to the water, and between feathery 

 juniper tops bunches of chestnut flowers twenty feet across 

 make, with their gray moss wreathing, a colour scheme 

 scarcely to be matched, and never to be forgotten. 



