The Pools of Silence

twenty miles east of Yandjali and into the h

hey had delayed here and there to shoot, and the extra porters, wh

ds moved like clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have been English but for the tropic haze and heat and the great n'sambya trees with

plant which requires a glass-house atmosphere and a soil especially rich. The great rubber forest of M'Bonga, thousands of square miles in extent, is really composed of two forests joined by an isthmus of woods. Dimly, it is shaped like an hou

elgian fort M'Bassa. They were making for this place now, which

the Belgians, as a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo Zaps terrorized the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been brought under t

are not found; only in the most desolate places do they grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the rubbe

ous face, but the rubber vine, like a dark gree

have to break up into small parties and these again subdivide, leaving a single individual here and there where the vines are thickest. He, entirely alone, at the mercy of the evil spirits that are i

s of the shower-bath roarings you can hear the ululations of these folk through the drip

or's task, and it is not a task that ever can

ere to the woods near Yandjali what the mu

ers losing themselves and calling one to the other, and the head of the expedition halting till the stragglers were collected; at times the ground they trod on was like grease from the cast-

he beard-moss hung yards long, and of a spectral gray; the very weeds trodden underfoot

ill, down, down, and then you knew you were at the bottom of a sub-arboreal valley by the deeper stagnation of the ai

this place; he was following the vague indications of a roa

est indication of a track where other men have been before

ay, in those vast depths where the rubber coll

where the trees fell away till no trees were left, and the blue sky of heaven lay above th