CHAPTER XI 



OKAPI HUNTING WITH THE PYGMIES OF THE SEMLIKI FOREST 



•' Fronting us lay a patch of tenderest green 

 With tiny, doited huts of sober grey — 

 Most quaintly Quaker-like amid a scene 



Where all the rest wore Nature's fete array. 

 And girls with swaddled babies on their backs 

 Passed and repassed along the forest tracks." 



From " Songs out of Exile," by Cullen Gouldsbury. 



THE far-reaching extent of the Ituri forest protrudes 

 a small part of its eastern boundary over the Congo- 

 Nile watershed, into the central portion of the narrow 

 Semliki valley below. The southern boundary of this forest 

 area stands without the gates, as it were, of the Belgian post 

 of Mbeni, so we found ourselves almost immediately beneath 

 its cool shade as we left this station to resume our travels. 

 We now entered the portals of the vast forest region of 

 West Africa — a vegetable kingdom that was to hold us in 

 its embrace for over four months. A region that affects 

 profoundly all human or animal life within it ; whose sombre 

 shade breeds the dark germ of cannibalism, and unhinging 

 minds only half-human, conceives such monstrosities as the 

 Leopard sect of the Anyioto or the burial murders of the 

 Baluba ; a region, too, that distorts the stature and pales 

 the face of nature. Here the world is buried in grotesque 

 growths ; a plant world where giant and majestic trees jostle 

 one another for breathing space, where a continuous war is being 

 waged and living, dead, and dying trees litter the battlefield 

 — some standing, others fallen, but all in the deadly embrace 

 of elegant and fantastic parasites of fern and liana. 



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