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National Geographic : 1909 Mar
Contents
AMID THE SNOW PEAKS OF THE EQUATOR race. There is a small area of swamp, but this terrace is chiefly remarkable for the wonderful luxuriance of the heath trees, which here attain their greatest growth. STRANGE LOOKING HEATH-TREES A heath-tree is a thing entirely unlike any of the trees of England; the reader must imagine a stem of the common "ling" magnified to a height of 60 or 70 or even 80 feet, but bearing leaves and flowers hardly larger than those of the "ling" as it grows in England. Huge cushions of many-colored mosses, often a foot or more deep, encircle the trunks and larger branches, while the finer twigs are festooned with long beards of gray lichen, which give to the trees an unspeakably dreary and funereal aspect. This first terrace was perhaps the most difficult and tiring part of the whole as cent, for not only did the heath-trees grow very close together, but the ground beneath them was strewn with the dead and decaying trunks of fallen trees, some of them hard as bog oak, and others ready to crumble at a touch, but all of them covered with a dense carpet of thick moss, which necessitated a careful probing before any step forward could be taken. The way in which our por ters, encumbered as they were with awk ward loads, hopped nimbly from one trunk to another made one feel thor oughly ashamed. As we ascended the steep slope the heath-trees became rather less dense, and in the intervals between them appeared a few helichrysums, tall senecios with clusters of yellow flowers, and a beauti ful little blue violet (Viola abyssinica) very similar to the English dog-violet. At the top of this slope, about 11,8oo feet, the climber enters upon a new world, or, to speak more truly, it is a tract that seems to be a relic of a long past age. One would not be in the least sur prised to see pterodactyls flying scream ing overhead (they must have been noisy creatures, I think) or iguanodons floun dering through the morasses and brows- ing on the tree-tops. But there are no living creatures to be seen or heard; it is a place of awful silence and solitude. It is an almost level meadow or "swampy garden," as Sir H. H. Johnston called it, a mile or more long and several hundred yards wide. GIANT LOBELIAS AND GROUNDSELS Out of the moss, which everywhere forms a dense and soaking carpet, grow thick clumps of helichrysum with white and pink flowers, and standing up like attenuated tombstones are the tall spikes of giant lobelias (Lobelia deckenii). Groundsels (Senecio adnivalis) grow here into trees 20 feet high, Saint Johns wort (Hypericum) is a tree even higher, and brambles (Rubus doggetti) bear flowers two inches across and fruit as big as walnuts. Through the middle of the meadow the Mubuku meanders over a gravelly bed, as perfect a trout stream in appearance as one could wish to see. On either side are steep rocks and slopes covered with heath-trees looming like ghosts upward into the everlasting fog. At its upper end the meadow is bounded by an almost pre cipitous wall, over which the Mubuku stream falls in a splendid cascade. Our next camp was pitched under the shelter of another overhanging cliff, and surrounded by huge blocks that had fallen therefrom. Our porters found refuge in all sorts of queer holes and crannies among the rocks. There was not space enough to pitch a tent, and we were a miserable little party as we sat huddled round a fire of sodden heath logs, which produced only an acrid and blinding smoke. The cliff overhead is the haunt by day of large fruit-eating bats (Roussettus lanosus), which measure about two feet across the wings. At sunset they come flapping out, and for a second or two afford a chance of a difficult shot before they disappear through the heath-trees towards the valley below. To judge from the number of their tracks, which we found about the camp and far up the mountain sides almost to the snow level, 261
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