220 
EAST AFRICA AND ITS BIG GAME. 
I was disappointed to find the orchids were not in 
bloom at this time of year, but some of the flowers were 
lovely. We saw no animals on the march, but once 
came upon some fresh elephant-tracks crossing the 
path into the impenetrable jungle, on which the pas¬ 
sage of even those leviathans had left little impression. 
The silence of the dead reigned here unbroken by the 
note of birds or the hum of insects, and even our porters 
seemed impressed with this unusual phenomenon, and 
refrained from breaking the solemnity of the awful still¬ 
ness with the usual amount of shouting and singing. 
At last the aspect of this somewhat melancholy 
though beautiful forest changed, and at a height 
of 8800 feet we encamped in an open grass glade 
about a quarter of a mile square. At this point 
the larger and more massive vegetation is replaced by 
innumerable slender trees, closely packed and about 
twenty feet in height, with stems only a few inches 
in diameter. They are clothed with light grey moss, 
hanging like icicles from their spectre branches and 
producing a strangely weird and chilly effect These 
curious trees are, I believe, a variety of gigantic heath 
with bushy tops ; they apparently have a hard struggle 
for existence and were more than half-dead, as their 
stems were so rotten that we could break them 
down like paper as we walked through them. The 
grass was also very weak and much resembled the 
herbage found on the high hills of deer-forests in 
Scotland, and was here and there patched with clusters 
of the common pink “ everlasting flowers.” 
