THE MAU FOREST 
191 
acres to extensive glades, but everywhere walled-in solid 
—no interval of scattered trees fringed them. The 
game never entered these opens till after dark, and 
quitted them before a sign of dawn had appeared. The 
alternative was to try by full moonlight, and as that 
period was due within a few days, we utilised the 
interval by a journey towards the Sotik country. 
This is a region of wondrous virgin wood; but 
impressions of these Central-African forests can hardly 
be conveyed in words, though Stanley and other vivid 
writers have described them. It is the sense that one 
feels rather than actually sees, since all beyond the 
narrowest limit is shut out from view by tier upon tier 
of overarching foliage, pendent, prehensile, parasitic, and 
upright. Hard by rise the bolls of colossal cedars, 1 half 
hidden amid enveloping evergreens and lianas ; yet their 
summits, 200 ft. above, are away in another world—a 
world of sunshine and blue sky beyond our view. Below, 
all one sees in a half-light is a few yards of the bases, 
soon to lose themselves, like pillars of the Mezquita, in 
the vaulted roof overhead. 
Hour after hour one rides through these forest-aisles 
overarched with leafage, dark and eerie as some cathe¬ 
dral crypt, while the rarefied air chills to the marrow, 
and the altitude, moreover (8,000 ft.), renders breathing 
oppressive to man and beast alike. In gloomy recesses, 
shut out for ever from the sun, grow ferns much as one 
sees at home—bracken and blechnum, polypody, parsley- 
fern and others; besides brambles, ramps, primroses, 
thistles and stinging-nettles. 
There are moister dells where cedars and forest-trees 
give place to dense growth of bamboos of such giant 
dimensions that even their summits pass beyond our view, 
towering up probably eighty feet or more. The grey 
tree-moss, “ old-man s beard,” hangs in pendent festoons, 
while an incessant siss-siss-siss of infinite insects and the 
1 Though they are called cedars, and their wood is reddish and of 
the same sweet resinous smell as cedar, yet I believe these big trees 
really belong to the Juniper family. 
