Grass 
shrubs and trees. But on the dry levels it prevents 
any ordinary tree from growing. One sees small 
shrubs, ten years old or more, which have patiently 
developed in every year a set of branches and stems 
which have been annually burnt away again. 
Some trees are, however, able to withstand the fires. 
The curious tree Euphorbias are almost fire-proof, and 
there are a very few others with a thick gummy bark 
that are not destroyed. Such trees endeavour to form 
a forest, and might perhaps in time form a nucleus of 
vegetation sappy and fresh enough to resist the fires? 
After such a fire the ground is black with cinders, 
and every breeze fills one’s eyes, ears, and nostrils with 
half-burnt dust. Yet it is extremely beautiful, for after 
a shower of rain brilliant little flowers are springing 
up everywhere, and later on small green leaves begin 
to appear from the blackened ground. 
But such fires are not confined to the table-lands of 
Uganda. The tall elephant grass in the Semliki valley 
is good pasture when young, for the cattle grow fat and 
well-nourished upon it, but it rapidly springs up to a 
rank growth of 7 feet or more in height and is regularly 
burnt by the natives. When fully mature it is so 
strong and dense that the cattle cannot get through it 
at all, but the waste of valuable feeding stuff by the 
fires is of course very great. All over South Africa the 
natives as well as the Boers, who are not much beyond 
the natives in their methods of agriculture, regularly 
burn the long dried grass towards the end of the dry 
season. In Natal this custom has, I think, been for- 
bidden, but it is still far too prevalent. 
The waste of good vegetable work involved by such 
proceedings is most reprehensible. Not only are 
many young plants burnt up altogether, but the surface 
layers of leaf-mould, dead leaves, twigs, and many 
268 
