Page:The empire and the century.djvu/856

 colours at the strayed sunbeam, and the tireless music of the insect life peals like an organ night and day.

An open glade, warm with the diffused light that trickles through the overhanging lacework of the trees. A small fire is crackling against the trunk of a mighty podocarpus, and the thin column of smoke creeps upward and hangs like a summer cloud in the stagnant air. In the middle of the glade a framework of sticks supports long strips of drying meat, and the unctuous odour of roasting elephant flesh tickles the nostrils of a group of vultures which are fidgeting and craning their snakelike necks on the lightning-bleached top of a towering juniper. To and fro, here and there, flit little gnome-like figures, stunted, gnarled, hairy of limb, veritable retrospects into the vague world of childhood's dreams, the homeless, ever-wandering, all-knowing children of the Dawn of Man.

I see a long, slimy pool of putrefying reeds, where foul fish foregather and great pythons writhe and gorge themselves on hideous toads and slither, long, gleaming bands of gold, through labyrinths of fœtid green and purple spume, where fireflies dance, great butterflies flash, dragon-flies glint, and the suck-suck of swamp, the roar of huge-bellied frogs, the cicada's scream, merge in a sad minor key, where, in the ceaseless struggle between fruition and decay, death wins.

Then follow babbling shallows, clusters of busy villages, mile upon mile of banana-groves, of fields green with maize, millet, beans, and peas, groups of laughing women balancing pitchers on their heads, lowing herds of cattle, a huge rock-torn gorge, black with forest, and the Nile, fast growing, has swept out into its long, tortuous, course which meanders through the vast alluvium of the Rutchuru plains.

The Kirunga volcanoes are dim forms looming purple in the south; herds of cobus and topi are scattered about the plains, and at night the 'boom' of the hunting lion makes the wretched native cower in his stockade of thorns.