Page:The empire and the century.djvu/858

 And above loom forty miles of forest-stained slopes—the vast buttresses, torn by ten thousand ravines, which hold up the great waste of shimmering snow and blue serac, above which leap, 20,000 feet on nigh, the gleaming tips of the Mountains of the Moon.

Then the muddy tide, swollen with the wastage of Ruwenzori's snows, crawls into the wide-flung swamps of the Albert Lake.

It is a weird, uncanny world of its own, with its endless bands of yellow weed, its pearl-tinted waters, its islands of papyrus, whereon the poor hunted Wanyabinga hide their primitive huts, fleeing from the myrmidons of the Brussels rubber mart. Flocks of pelicans splash and gabble in the silent pools. Far and wide rings the plomp-plomp of rising fish. Elephants stand sphinx-like, belly-deep in weed, hippos galumph and bellow in their play. White clouds of ibis drift across the weed. Geese scream to the whistle of the flighting teal. Silently poling their way down the lanes of water are the scarce-moving forms of natives in canoes. And interwoven with it all, mystifying and enchanting, are the long woofs of mist and the kaleidoscopic dance of noon's mirage.

Here again are white strips of sand, green bands of bananas, yellow clumps of huts, and above, the towering purple hills, gorges inky black or all aglow with flowers, groups of chattering apes, a leopard snarling on a rock, the plaintive-screaming fish-eagle, frail canoes dancing on billowy seas, precipices plunging into limpid bays, fierce Balegga with their faces hidden in long, greasy plaits of hair, basking crocodiles and wallowing hippos. The ninety miles of the Albert Lake are left behind, and the Albert Nile and Victoria Nile, twin children of the Kivu Hills, have merged and slid into the broad stream which for a moment lingers under Wadelai.

A tiny lake, scarce five miles wide, smothered with weed, two insignificant hills, over one of which the Union Jack flutters on a crooked pole, some gravitation-defying huts, a sad-eyed Englishman, such is Wadelai,