WHAT THE COUNTRY LOOKS LIKE 
29 
(baggy over the hips but tight-fitting round the calves) and pointed Persian 
shoes of crimson leather. His long, black beard has been rolled up after the 
fashion of the Sikhs, so that it makes a tidy fringe round the jaws from ear to 
ear; and the black moustache is fiercely curled. 
We walk away home over a smooth road that is vinous-red, as all the earth 
is hereabout. First there is an avenue of sombre cypresses mixed with 
shimmering eucalyptus ; then the road will be bordered by bananas or by the 
gardens of Europeans’ houses, with neat fences. In all directions other roads 
branch off, and above the greenery of Indian corn patches, of banana-groves, 
of plantations of conifers, acacias, and eucalyptus, or clumps of Misuko trees, 
can be seen the house-roofs of grey corrugated iron, or rose-pink, where that 
iron has been coloured with anti-corrosive paint. 
Bright moonlight. In a Hyphaene palm forest. Out of the shadow of the 
trees it is almost as bright as day, every detail can be seen in the dry grass— 
even the colours of some few flowers blooming in spite of the dry weather. 
The effect is that of a photograph—-a little too much devoid of half-tones, being 
sharply divided into bright lights, full of minute detail and deep grey shadows, 
like blots, in which no detail can be descried. It is clear that this forest lies far 
from the haunts of man, for all the palm stems still retain the jagged stems of 
withered fronds. This gives them an untidy and forbidding aspect; for these 
grey mid-ribs stick out at an angle of forty degrees from the main trunk. The 
faded leaf filaments have long since disappeared from the extremities of the 
dead fronds which themselves are so dry and so lightly attached to the stem 
that a few blows from a stout pole would knock them off and the palm trunk 
would be left bare and smooth. This is the condition of almost all palms near 
a native village in Africa because the natives climb them for the fruit, or more 
often for the sap which they tap at the summit and make into a fermented 
drink. Therefore whenever in tropical Africa you find palms in a forest 
retaining their old fronds from the ground upwards you may know that 
indigenous man is nowhere near. 
Each palm is surmounted by a graceful crown of fan-shaped leaves in an 
almost symmetrical oval mass, radiating from the summit as from a centre. 
The fruit which is clustered thickly on racemes is—seen by daylight—a bright 
chestnut brown and the size of a Jaffa orange. This brown husk covering an 
ivory nut is faintly sweet to the taste and is adored by elephants. It is on that 
account that I have brought you here to see with the eye of the spirit a herd 
of these survivors of past geological epochs. 
Somehow or other, it seems more fitting that we should see the wild elephant 
by moonlight at the present day. He is like a ghost revisiting the glimpses' of 
the moon—this huge grey bulk, wrinkled even in babyhood, with his monstrous 
nose, his monstrous ears and his extravagant incisor teeth. 
There! I have hypnotised you, and having suggested the idea of “elephants” 
you declare that you really begin to see huge forms assuming definite outline 
and chiaro-scuro from out of the shadows of the palms. Now you hear the 
noise they make—an occasional reverberating rattle through the proboscis as 
they examine objects on the ground half seriously, half playfully ; and the 
swishing they make as they pass through the herbage ; or the rustle of branches 
which are being plucked to be eaten. But they are chiefly bent on the ginger¬ 
bread nuts of the palms and to attain this, where they hang out of reach, they 
will pause occasionally to butt the palm trees with their flattened foreheads. 
