Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/144

 leaves, with the young shoots a dull crimson, and the soft gray-brown stem, and the luscious-looking but turpentiny-tasting fruit, a glory of gold and crimson, like an immense nectarine.

We gradually get into a more beautiful type of country, and down into a forest. The high trees are the usual high forest series with a preponderance of acacias. It is a forest of varied forms, but flowerless now in the dry season. There are quantities of ferns; hart's-tongues and the sort that grows on the oil-palms, and elks-horn growing out of its great brown shields on the trees above, and bracken, and pretty trailing lycopodium climbing over things, but mostly over the cardamoms which abound in the under-bush, and here and there great banks of the most lovely ferns I have ever seen save the tree-fern, an ambitious climber, called, I believe, by the botanists Nephrodium circutarium, and walls of that strange climbing grass, and all sorts of other lovely things by thousands in all directions.

Butterflies and dragon-flies were scarce here compared to Okijon, but of other flies there were more than plenty.

The roadway is exceedingly good; certainly in the grass country you are rather liable to what Captain Eversfield graphically describes as "stub your toe" against lava-like rock, for the grass has overgrown the road, leaving only a single-file path open. In the forest you come across isolated masses of stratified rock, sometimes eight and ten feet high, most prettily overgrown with moss and fern.

We pass through several villages which Mr. Fildes tells me are Fan villages, and are highly interesting after all one has already heard of this tribe of evil repute. Their houses are quite different to the M'pongwe ones we have left behind, and are built of sheets of bark, tied on to sticks.

Frequently in the street one sees the characteristic standing drum painted white in patterns with black or red-brown, and a piece of raw hide stretched across the top, and one or two talking-drums besides.

We cross several pretty streams in the forest carefully bridged with plank. This Woermann's road, I hear, is between six and seven miles long, and its breadth