Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/29

 terminates abruptly a few inches above the ground in a level surface compared by Welwitsch to a "round table," but fissured and crevassed in all directions. From its outer rim branch off two thick leaves nearly 8 feet long, which resemble two great leather discs, and which are in fact the very first leaves, which have survived since the plant began to sprout, and which have grown with the growth of the tree itself. The edges of these strange leaves are frayed into numerous snake-like thongs, which have all the appearance of so many tentacles of a polype.

In the northern districts of Angola the flora differs in no respects from that of the Lower Congo. Here the characteristic plents of the landscape are everywhere the arborescent euphorbias, the eriodendrons, the bombax, and wide-spread baobab. In some of the valleys well sheltered from the sea breezes and abundantly watered, tropical vegetation displays all its variety of great forest trees, parasitic and climbing plants.

But the exposed plateaux, where the rainwater flows off rapidly and where the surface is covered only with a thin layer of vegetable soil, are overgrown for vast spaces with tall steppe grasses, giving refuge to numerous herds of large game. But these boundless savannahs are exposed to periodical gueimadas, or conflagrations, which sweep away all living creatures down to the very insects.

In the direction from north to south the vegetation grows scantier with the continuously decreasing rainfall. At a short distance south of Cape Padrão the primeval forest descends to the water's edge, whereas it gradually recedes in the interior to the south of the Cabeça de Cobra settlement. Still farther south forests are nowhere seen in the neighbourhood of the coast, and beyond Mossamedes the last lingering isolated clumps disappear altogether, although behind the outer terraces the vast wildernesses of the Sertão are still diversified with fine forest growths. In the same direction