CHAPTER IE 
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY 
on the line of 
between the 
I N looking through the pictures I have tried to paint in the preceding 
chapter to illustrate the scenery of British Central Africa, it will be noticed 
that I have made no mention of any desert, of any open sandy tract or 
stony region devoid of vegetation. The fact is that so far as my own researches 
and those of other explorers go, British Central Africa, east of the Kafue river, 
holds no desert, no stretch of country that is not more or less covered with 
abundant vegetation. Here 
and there 
water parting 
river systems there may be a 
little harsh scenery where the 
trees are poor and scrubby and 
the plants grow in scattered 
tufts. But, take it as a whole, 
the eastern half of British 
Central Africa is very well 
clothed with vegetation, es¬ 
pecially in the Nyasa province. 
There is nowhere any large 
continuous area of thick tropi¬ 
cal forest such as one sees 
in Western Africa, but in 
favoured districts where the 
soil is permeated with many 
springs there may be an 
occasional patch of woodland 
quite West African in char¬ 
acter, and not only containing 
oil palms, of the genus Elce'is 
(which are usually thought to 
be peculiarly characteristic of 
West Africa), but also not 
a few birds and mammals 
hitherto considered to be con¬ 
fined in their range to the 
West African region. From 
this and other facts, I am 
sometimes led to believe that forest on mount cholo, British central africa 
