Through Ruanda to Lake Kiwu 69 
left of the little wood. They fell the best trees, hew down the 
bamboo-cane, and burn away the undergrowth; consequently, the 
few trees which are left standing perish also. They then till the 
land and sow it with peas, and proceed to impoverish Ruanda by 
treating further tracts of forest in the same fashion. If the 
people settled on this land thus made arable and fit for tillage, 
there would be some sense in it; but simply to burn a bit of forest 
away to plant a few peas, and then destroy it further, bit by bit, 
causes everyone regret, even though they be not experts on 
afforestation or sylviculture, more especially in a country so lack¬ 
ing in trees as Ruanda.’ 
“ I cannot vouch for the existence of these ‘ patriarchs,' but 
as to the devastation of the forest, the missionary, Roehl, has 
certainly not misrepresented matters. 
The forest received us into its arms, the mountain forest of 
Rugege, as beautiful as any in Usambara, or on the Uganda 
Railway, or on the Mau plateau; glorious in its splendour and 
its exuberance, yet almost oppressive in consequence of its pro¬ 
fusion of vegetation entirely new to us, which we at first nearly 
despaired of mastering. 
“As we knew we could not be far away from the upper source 
of the Rukarara, we decided to camp in its vicinity. We soon 
found it, a clear stream flowing through marsh and woody dingle, 
perhaps only some two or three metres broad and thirty centi¬ 
metres deep. On the further side we saw a hill covered with a 
sort of steppe grass, fairly level at its base. At first we thought 
of camping there, but as we had a vivid remembrance of the cold 
on the previous night, and we feared the strong radiation in the 
open space, we clambered up the hill and pitched our camp on 
the edge of the forest under the protection of the trees. There 
we rested—some forty metres above the cradle of the sacred Nile 
and some two thousand metres above the level of the sea—and 
gazed out into the brilliant moonlight towards the mountain 
forest, in which the tops of the trees showed up clear and 
distinct in the silvery light. Then we looked down at the delicate 
shrub lacery that embroiders the course of the Rukarara and up 
