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National Geographic : 1892 Feb 19
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240 E . . Hove-The Heart of Africa. healthy. In another sense, too, this outer belt is both rich and unhappy. Into it come those men and things representing " civilization " from afar. To it, from the interior, gravitate those of the natives who are influenced by contact with those men and things, deprived to a great extent of the old uncivilized condition and its innocencies and partially imbued with what of civiliza tion has come to them. Mankind, too, in this outer belt is often only too rank and unhealthy in his character. It is truly " darkest Africa; " for, first, the slave trade and then the rum bottle have in many parts been the preponderating representa tives to them of outer civilization. The next layer is a step or terrace of flat sandy semi-arid country, narrow in the tropics, widening toward each extreme, until it bulges out in the north into the Sahara desert, in the south into the Kalahari, some parts always bare and sandy or covered with a sparkling saline or alkaline deposit, some parts forming broad savannas or prairies, bearing rich grasses in the rains, burnt bare in the dry season; others covered with thickets of thorns or stunted and crippled trees under the same variations of seasons. This is the land of the ostrich and the pelican, the scene of vast prairie fires or whirling dust spouts; it is the land also of the nomad man. Across the Sahara the wandering Arab leads his camels from oasis to oasis; amid the wastes of the Kalahari the homeless Bushman finds a congenial hunting terri tory; in the narrow, tropical parts such semi-nomads as the Somali, the Wamasai, and the Wagogo lead their cattle from place to place, as the grass and water serve them with the seasons. This terrace or flat sandy belt being crossed, we come to the true central region of Africa, a long irregular oval-shaped eleva tion of mountain masses, spreading out in many places as vast plateaus and forming altogether that mysterious elevated region reported from time to time by old investigators as well as com pilers of native reports as the Mountains of the Moon. In the crevices of this central mass, in rocky basins, in fathomless chasms, in vast depressions of the plateaus, lie those great natural rain water tanks known as the central African lakes. On and around it are the richest and most beautiful and healthful countries. Spreading over it and around its beautiful waters are the most intelligent and industrious of the native African tribes, their native industry and enterprise yet almost undisturbed by the
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