2 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
Behind the palm forest is a long line of blue mountain so far away that it is just 
a faint blue silhouette against the paler blue sky. The afternoon is well advanced, 
and in the eastern sky, which is a warm pinkish blue, the full moon has already 
risen and hangs there a yellow-white shield with no radiance. On the opposite 
bank of the river to the palm trees is a clump of tropical forest of the richest 
green with purple shadows, lovely and seductive in its warm tints under the 
rays of the late afternoon sun. Here are large albizzia trees . 1 Over the water¬ 
side hang thick bushes overgrown with such a drapery of convolvulus creepers 
BORASSUS PALMS ON THE SHIRE 
that the foliage of the bush is almost hidden. This green lacework is beauti¬ 
fully lit up by large mauve flowers. Above the bushes rise the heads of the 
wild date palm, and amid the fronds of this wild date here and there a cluster 
of its small orange fruit peeps out. These palms rise over masses of foliage, 
and occasionally top the higher trees, growing within their canopy in almost 
parasitic fashion. This cluster of tropical vegetation will be here and there 
scooped out into fairy bowers by the irregularities of the bank. Sometimes the 
trees will overhang the stream where the bank has been washed away. Tiny 
kingfishers of purple-blue and chestnut-orange flit through the dark network of 
gnarled trunks, and deep in this recess of shade small night-herons and bitterns 
stand bolt upright, so confident in their assumed invisibility against a back- 
1 A genus related to the acacia with the thickest foliage of pinnate leaves looking at a distance like 
green velvet. 
