Page:Maury's New Elements of Geography, 1907.djvu/127

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1. Leaving Asia, let us visit Africa, the home of the Negro race. Most of the natives belong to this race and are savages. Many of them used to be constantly fighting and making slaves of one another. European nations are stopping this.



Africa is second only to Asia in size. It lies chiefly in the Torrid zone, and is the hottest of all the continents.

The coastline is not much indented, and consequently there are very few good harbors. In this respect Africa is like South America.

2. Surface.—Most of Africa is a plateau, or elevated plain. It is surrounded by a narrow belt of low land along the coast. The principal mountains are the Atlas mountains on the north, and a high range on the east near the equator. Large portions of the continent are deserts.

3. Rivers and Lakes.—The chief rivers are the Nile, the Niger (ni'-jer), the Kongo, and the Zambezi (zam-bay'-ze). The Nile is one of the longest rivers in the world.

Africa contains some of the largest lakes in the world. The most important are Victoria and Tanganyika (tan-gan-yee'-ka).

4. Vegetation.—Many curious trees are natives of Africa. The date-palm is as valuable to the African as the banana is to the South American Indian. Its fruit is his daily food. The cocoa-palm produces the well-known cocoa-nut. The palm-oil tree yields a yellow oil, which is sent by steamer loads to England. It is obtained by boiling the fruit, and is used for making soap. The coffee-tree grows wild.

Africa has a remarkable shade tree that grows nowhere else. It is called the ba'-o-bab. It is not very high, but it shoots out branches which hang down to the ground, and make for the weary traveler a green shelter like a giant umbrella.

Cotton and indigo, sugar-cane, wheat, and millet (a kind of grain) are largely cultivated.

5. Animals.—Africa is remarkable for its strange and fierce animals. Among the most curious are the gorilla and chimpanzee, huge monkeys which are very like men; the giraffe, hippopotamus, rhinoceros (ri-nos'-e-ros), and zebra.



The giraffe (ji-raf&apos;) is the tallest of all living creatures. The hippopotamus, or river horse, lives partly in the water, and partly on land. On the river banks crocodiles are to be seen basking in the sun. The white ant builds houses from fifteen to thirty feet high. Whole villages of them are sometimes seen. When deserted, the ant houses are sometimes used by the natives as ovens.

Among the useful animals are the elephant, the ostrich, and the camel. Elephants' tusks and ostrich feathers are two of the chief exports of Africa.

Ostriches are now raised on farms. Formerly, the only way of getting their feathers was by hunting and killing the wild birds. They are very shy, and will run as fast as the fleetest horse. But the natives, by covering themselves with ostrich skins, manage to get near enough to shoot them.

Immense numbers of wild animals roam over the grassy plains. The natives dig great holes, and cover them over with sticks and leaves. They then drive the