230 
ELEPHANT-HUNTING 
[CH. X 
masses of small red or large white flowers shaped some¬ 
what like columbines, or like the garden balsam ; the 
red flower bushes were under the bamboos, the white at 
a lower level. The crests and upper slopes of the 
mountains were clothed in the green uniformity of the 
bamboo forest, the trail winding dim under its dark 
archway of tall, close-growing stems. Lower down 
were junipers and yews, and then many other trees, 
with among them tree-ferns and strange dragon-trees 
with lily-like frondage. Zone succeeded zone from top 
to bottom, each marked by a different plant life. 
In this part of Africa, where flowers bloom and birds 
sing all the year round, there is no such burst of bloom 
and song as in the northern spring and early summer. 
There is nothing like the mass of blossoms which carpet 
the meadows of the high mountain valleys and far 
northern meadows, during their brief high tide of life, 
when one short joyous burst of teeming and vital beauty 
atones for the long death of the iron fall and winter. 
So it is with the bird songs. Many of them are 
beautiful, though to my ears none quite as beautiful as 
the best of our own bird songs. At any rate there is 
nothing that quite corresponds to the chorus that 
during May and June moves northward from the 
Gulf States and Southern California to Maine, Min¬ 
nesota, and Oregon, to Ontario and Saskatchewan ; 
when there comes the great vernal burst of bloom and 
song; when the may-flower, bloodroot, wake-robin, 
anemone, adder’s-tongue, liverwort, shadblow, dogwood, 
redbud, gladden the woods ; when mocking-birds and 
cardinals sing in the magnolia groves of the South, and 
hermit thrushes, winter wrens, and sweetheart sparrows 
in the spruce and hemlock forests of the North ; when 
bobolinks in the East and meadow-larks East and West 
