WHAT THE COUNTRY LOOKS LIKE 
7 
with its untidy haycocks of huts, its clumps of bananas, plantations of sweet 
potatoes and tobacco, and adjoining stubble fields where gaunt isolated stalks 
of .sorghum still linger. The blue mountain wall towards which we are aiming 
rises higher into the sky, and its blue vagueness becomes resolvable into a detail 
of purple and yellow grey. But though the sun is hotter than ever as it 
approaches the zenith our continual ascent brings us to a region that enjoys 
more benign conditions of moisture and coolness at night time. The young 
green grass is more advanced than down below, the herbage is so thick that the 
red soil is almost hidden. The wild flowers commence to be beautiful. There 
are innumerable ground orchids in various 
shades of mauve or yellow, or with strange 
green blossoms, or flowers of richest orange. 
A beautiful white clematis grows from an 
upright stalk, and here and there are 
bushes of a kind of mallow, which bears 
large azalea - like clusters of the most 
perfect blush pink. Higher up still there 
are more and more flowers in many shades 
of blue and mauve and yellow. There is 
a small kind of sunflower that is a deep 
maroon crimson, and another coreopsis 
more like the cultivated sunflower with 
flaming yellow petals. In moist places— 
and the path is now constantly crossing 
small brooks — grows the dissotis, with 
large flowers of deep red-mauve. The 
path curves and twists and runs up above 
heights and then down into deep ravines, 
and still the flowers grow thicker and 
thicker and more lovely, till in the ecstasy 
of a colour dream, all remembrance of the 
sun’s heat, of your great fatigue and your 
sweat-drenched clammy garments is for¬ 
gotten. On the hill-sides there are frequent 
clumps of wild date palms, some of which 
rise to a great height with their slender 
stems often bowed or curved and seldom 
perpendicular. Then you come to your first tree-fern, or if you are a botanist 
you are delighted with a rare cycad growing majestically alone and looking 
very much as though it were an admirable piece of artificial foliage executed in 
green bronze. Still ascending, with a pause here and a rest there in the 
absolute shade of the great forest trees, tree-ferns become so abundant at 
last as to make fairy forests of themselves, excluding other arborescence. 
Then they give way again to densely-packed thick-foliaged forest trees of 
low growth through which a path winds over many a bole and through 
many a bamboo bower in deep green gloom. Through this gloom flit the 
•crimson - winged turacos, the lovely genii of the African forest — birds of 
purple-blue, bluish-green and grass-green silky plumage with a white-tipped 
crest, red parrot-like beaks, and bare red cheeks, but always, no matter what 
their species, with the broad, rounded pinion feathers of the wing the most 
perfect scarlet-crimson ever seen in nature. The loud parrot cries of these 
