Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/90

76 had had a surfeit, perhaps he was banting in his African fashion. Whatever were the reasons, there was the fact.
 * I was informed [says Schweinfurth] in several quarters, that people from the neighbouring districts had come to him when they found themselves growing too fat, and had declared that they did not consider their lives safe on account of the man-eaters by whom they were surrounded. But this sentiment of the chieftain did not appear to exercise much influence on the majority of his subjects, as we only too soon became aware as we advanced farther to the south.

Which mention of fat again reminds us that farther on in his book Dr. Schweinfurth, gravely discussing the question whether a white man — strong in that charmed life which most African tribes suppose him to possess — could pass alone safely to the West Coast — decides it in the affirmative, "if the traveller were not too fat;" for fatness, whether in black or white, makes all cannibal tribes lick their lips and rub their abdomens, like that well-known New-Caledonian chief who being asked if he had seen a corpulent Australian colonist, named Boyd, who had been wrecked on his coast said nothing but "Massa Boyd, him berry fat man," significantly patting at the same time that cavity of his person into which the unhappy colonist had descended.

The visit of the corpulent and bellicose Wando gave Schweinfurth an opportunity of protesting against the want of hospitality with which he had been received. His dogs he declared had been better treated by the Nubians than he himself by Wando, though Wando called himself a king. When Wando remonstrated, Schweinfurth to give him a lesson dashed his fist against a camp-table till all the plates and cups rattled, and at the same moment the traveller's servants took the unhappy Wando to task, and threatened him with speedy and certain vengeance if he suffered a Frank to come to the least harm. They charged him not to forget that it was a Frank he was dealing with, "who could make the earth yawn and give out flames that would consume his land." No wonder that after this warning the Niam Niam king hastened home and sent the traveller some unsavoury fleshpots containing a ragout made out of the "entrails of an elephant two hundred years old." The relations between Wando and the Nubian were still too critical to admit of any longer stay in his territory than was absolutely necessary; the fire so lately quenched might break out at any moment and was merely smouldering; they hastened on therefore, thereby, as it proved, avoiding a collision, bent on proceeding still farther south into Monbuttoo land, where the Nubian had a firm friend and ally in the king of the country.

It was in the Niam Niam country that Schweinfurth at first suspected, and then became gradually sure, that he had passed the watershed of the Nile Basin, and had entered into a region in which the rivers ran south to the Atlantic. All the way from the Gazelle the country had presented a monotony of geological conformation, in which the surface of the soil was composed of a red ochreous earth, rich in bog or swamp iron ore, which had been moulded into valleys and hills by the action of the streams which traversed it east and west, at last to unite in the Nile. But here in the heart of the Niam Niam country he passed a rough and rugged upland forest region, on one side of which the waters ran north towards the Nile Basin, while on the other they ran south, and away from it. At the same time the flora and fauna of the new region underwent a change. The chimpanzee, unknown in the Nile Basin, roamed in the woods, which opened out into large galleries of Pandanus and other trees, equally wanting on the other side of the watershed. It was on March 1, 1870, so far as we can gather, that at an elevation marked by his trusty aneroid as three thousand feet, Schweinfurth on the banks of a stream called the Lindukoo crossed, the first of Europeans coming from the north, the watershed of the Nile. The word "galleries," advisedly used by Schweinfurth after the term applied to these openings in the woods by the Italian Piaggia, who first of all set foot on Niam Niam soil, is singularly appropriate to these primeval forests. There on slopes of earth saturated with water like an overfull sponge, a wealth of vegetation springs up, which, on either side of old furrows formed by the watercourses, rises in tall trees more than one hundred feet high. Their gigantic trunks are covered with brilliant creepers, which form the walls of these galleries which run along and across the terraces of the hills at different levels, as though cut by the hand of a landscape-gardener. The reader must imagine for himself how a botanist like our traveller revelled in such a scene, and how day after day he discovered fresh plants, or found others hitherto supposed to be confined to 