LIFE ON THE CHOSEN SITE 99 
than amid the luxurious vegetation of the game- 
haunted forests of Equatorial Africa ! 
How the timber-workers manage to get through the 
day with the tsetse fly, and through the night with 
the mosquito, it is hard to tell. Often, too, they 
have to work for days together up to the hips in 
water. Naturally they all suffer from fever and 
rheumatism. 
The felling of the trees is very troublesome work 
because of the thickness of the trunks. Moreover, the 
giants of the forest do not grow up out of the earth 
round and smooth ; they are anchored to the ground 
by a row of strong, angular projections, which as 
they leave the stems become the main roots, and act as 
buttresses. Mother Nature, as though she had studied 
under the best architects, gives these forest giants the 
only sort of protection which could be effective against 
the force of the tornadoes. 
In many cases the hewing of the trees at ground level 
is not to be thought of. The axe can begin its work 
only at the height of a man’s head, or it may even be 
necessary to erect a scaffold on which the hewers can 
then stand. 
Several men must toil hard for days before the axe 
can finish its work, and even then the tree does not 
always fall. It is tangled into a single mass with its 
neighbours by powerful creepers, and only when these 
have been cut through does it come, with them, to the 
ground. Then begins the process of cutting up. It is 
sawn, or hewn with axes, into pieces from 12 to 15 feet 
long, until the point is reached at which the diameter 
is less than 2 feet. The rest is left, and decays, and with 
it those portions also which are too thick, that is, which 
