260 



THE LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA. 



studded with square villages, and with the stately but 

 grotesque calabash. This giant is to the vegetable what 

 the elephant is to the animal world : — the Persians call 

 it the " practice-work of nature" — its disproportionate 

 conical bole rests upon huge legs exposed to view by 

 the washing away of the soil, and displays excrescences 

 which in pious India would merit a coat of vermilion. 

 From the neck extend gigantic gnarled arms, each one 

 a tree, whose thinnest twig is thick as a man's finger, 

 and their weight causes them to droop earthwards, giving 

 to the outline the shape of a huge dome. In many parts 

 the unloveliness of its general appearance is varied by 

 the wrinkles and puckerings which, forming by granula- 

 tion upon the oblongs where the bark has been removed 

 for fibre, give the base the appearance of being cham- 

 fered and fluted ; and often a small family of trunks, 

 four or five in number, springs from the same 

 root. At that season all were leafless ; at other times 

 they are densely foliaged, and contrasting with their 

 large timber and with their coarse fleshy leaf, they are 

 adorned with the delicatest flowers of a pure virgin- 

 white, which, opening at early dawn, fade and fall before 

 eventide. The babe-tree issues from the ground about 

 one foot in diameter : in Ugogo, however, all those ob- 

 served were of middle age. The } 7 oung are probably 

 grubbed up to prevent their encumbering the ground, 

 and when decayed enough to be easily felled, they are 

 converted into firewood. By the side of these dry and 

 leafless masses of dull dead hue, here and there a mimosa 

 or a thorn was beginning to bear the buds of promise 

 green as emeralds. The sun burned like the breath of 

 a bonfire, a painful glare — the reflection of the terrible 

 crystal above, — arose from the hot earth ; warm Siroccos 

 raised clouds of dust, and in front the horizon was so 



