BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
CHAPTER I. 
WHAT THE COUNTRY LOOKS LIKE 
B EFORE I begin to discourse on the dull facts of history and geography 
let me try to give my reader some idea of what the country looks like by 
describing certain set scenes and panoramas. Perhaps from these he may 
■derive a clearer impression of the general appearance and the many diverse 
aspects of British Central Africa. 
A steadily flowing river. In the middle of the stream an islet of very green 
grass, so lush and so thick that there are no bright lights or sharp shadows— 
simply a great splodge of rich green in the middle of the shining water which 
reflects principally the whitish-blue of the sky ; though this general tint becomes 
opaline and lovely as mother-of-pearl, owing to the swirling of the current and 
the red-gold colour of the concealed sand-banks which in shallow places 
permeates the reflections. Near to the right side of the grass islet separated 
only by a narrow mauve-tinted band of water is a sand-bank that has been 
uncovered, and on this stands a flock of perhaps three dozen small white egrets 
closely packed, momentarily immoveable, and all stiffly regardant of the 
approaching steamer, each bird with a general similarity of outline almost 
Egyptian in its monotonous repetition. 
The steamer approaches a little nearer, and the birds rise from the sand-bank 
with a loose flapping flight and strew themselves over the landscape like a 
shower of large white petals. On the left bank of the river looking down 
stream is a grove of borassus palms rising above the waterside fringe of white 
flowered reeds and apple-green mopheads of papyrus. The trunks of the 
taller palms are smooth and whitish, but those of younger growth nearer to the 
ground are still girt about by a fierce spiky hedge of dead black-stemmed 
fronds. The crowns of the palm trees are symmetrical and fan-shaped in 
general outline, while each individual frond has in its inner side a horse-shoe 
curve. The colour of the fronds is a deep bluish-green singularly effective 
in contrast with the grey-white column they surmount. The fruit of the palms, 
when they can be descried, are like huge yellow-green apples thickly clustered 
on pendent racemes protruding from the centre round which the fronds radiate. 
