24. A JOURNEY UP THE RIVER CONGO. 
sometimes seven different terms to express different kinds 
of forest. Beyond the actual inclosures of the factories 
here, there 1s a splendour of vegetable growth that defies 
an adequate rendering either with the brush or the pen. 
The hot sun and the oozy mud call into existence a plant 
life which must parallel in rank luxuriance and monstrous 
crowth the forests of the coal measures, and reproduce for 
our eyes in these degenerate days somewhat of the majesty 
of the vegetable kingdom in bygone epochs. 
In the marshy spots, down near the river shore, are 
masses of that splendid orchid, Lissochilus giganteus, a 
terrestrial species that shoots up often to the height of six 
feet from the ground, bearing such a head of red-mauyve, 
golden-centred blossoms as scarcely any flower in the 
world can equal for beauty and delicacy of form. These 
orchids, with their light-green, spear-like leaves, and their 
tall swaying flower-stalks, grow in groups of forty and 
fifty together, often reflected in the shallow pools of 
stagnant water round their bases, and filling up the fore- 
eround of the high purple-green forest with a blaze of 
tender peach-like colour, upon which, I should have 
thought,.no European could gaze unmoved. Yet the 
~ Portuguese merchants who lived among this loveliness 
scarcely regarded it, and laughed at the eagerness with 
which I gathered and painted this “ capim”—this mere 
erass or reed, as they call it. 
Clumps of a dwarf palm, Phenia spinosa, which bears 
a just-eatable starveling date, hedge in these beautiful 
orchids from the wash of the river, and seem a sort of 
water-mark that the tides rarely pass: but the water often 
leaks through the mud and vegetable barrier, and forms 
inside the ring of dwarf palms many little quiet lagoons, 
not necessarily unhealthy, for the water is changed and 
stirred by each recurring tide; and in these lagoons 
bordered by orchids and tall bushes, with large spatulate 
leaves, and white shining bracts about their flower-stalks,* 
by pandanus, by waving oil-palms, and by mangrove trees 
* Mussenda. 
