220 A JOURNEY UP THE RIVER CONGO. 
continue till about the 20th of May, thus leaving four 
months of dry season. There is also here no interval in 
January, no “little dries,’ as they are called. Higher up 
the river still, approaching the equator, the natives tell 
me it rains often in June, August, and September, so that 
this may be called a true equatorial climate, where rain is 
seldom absent, and consequently, as we find at Bolobo, 
this is the region of perpetual forest. ‘The reason this 
forest belt does not extend more fully over Africa is that, 
where there is a continuous dry season of four, five, or six 
months, there is time for the long erass to become 
thoroughly tindered by the sun, and the natives can then 
more easily set going the great bush-fires, in which they 
delight, which clear the ground for their plantations, and 
at the same time sweep the forest from the hills. In the 
equatorial regions of perpetual moisture this is impossible, 
and so the forest country there, with its somewhat peculiar 
fauna and avi-fauna, continues to represent a condition of 
things which probably existed more widely over Africa 
before. the advent of man, or, rather, before the period 
when man first began to give some effect to his growing 
dissatisfaction with the arrangements of Nature, and to 
take the law into his own hands. I am sure that the 
arboreal life of our species dates very far back in its 
development, and that, like our cousins the baboons, we 
had, whilst we were yet mere monkeys, begun to prefer 
the rocks and caverns* and the knolls of observation in 
an open country to the dense woods in which our degraded 
relations the gorillas and orangs still skulk in sullen 
shyness, As a rule man is an enemy of the forest, and 
has done much to circumscribe his future supplies of coal, 
but perhaps on the whole he is unconsciously right. The — 
open country is far healthier and brighter than the 
cloomy mysterious forest depths, and the higher forms of 
mammals—those that are strongest in intelligence and 
widest in range—seem to have been evolved from the 
breezy plateaus and rolling plains. . 
* Early paleolithic man is constantly associated with caves. 
