through them, and
leopard-skin lichens staining their weathered sides. Thousands and
thousands of miles, then, of vast thin forest, shadeless, trackless,
voiceless,--forest in mountain and forest in plain,--this is East
Central Africa.

The indiscriminate praise, formerly lavished on tropical vegetation,
has received many shocks from recent travelers. In Kaffir-land, South
Africa, I have seen one or two forests fine enough to justify the
enthusiasm of arm-chair word-painters of the tropics; but so far as
the central plateau is concerned, the careful judgment of Mr. Alfred
Russell Wallace respecting the equatorial belt in general (a judgment
which has at once sobered all modern descriptions of tropical lands
and made imaginative people more content to stay at home) applies
almost to this whole area. The fairy labyrinth of ferns and palms,
the festoons of climbing plants blocking the paths and scenting the
forests with their resplendent flowers, the gorgeous clouds of
insects, the gayly plumaged birds, the paroquets, the monkey swinging
from his trapeze in the shaded bowers--these are unknown to Africa.
Once a week you will see a palm; once in three months the monkey will
cross your path; the flowers on the whole are few; the trees are poor;
and to be honest, though the endless forest-clad mountains have a
sublimity of their own, and though there are tropical bits along some
of the mountain streams of exquisite beauty, nowhere is there anything
in grace and sweetness and strength to compare with a Highland glen.
For the most part of the year these forests are jaded and
sun-stricken, carpeted with no moss or alchemylla or scented woodruff,
the bare trunks frescoed with few lichens, their motionless and
unrefreshed leaves drooping sullenly from their sapless boughs.
Flowers there are, small and great, in endless variety; but there is
no display of flowers, no gorgeous show of blossom in the mass, as
when the blazing gorse and heather bloom at home. The dazzling glare
of the sun in the torrid zone has perhaps something to do with this
want of color effect in tropical nature; for there is always about ten
minutes just after sunset when the whole tone of the landscape changes
like magic, and a singular beauty steals over the scene. This is the
sweetest moment of the African day, and night hides only too swiftly
the homelike softness and repose so strangely grateful to the
over-stimulated eye.

Hidden away in these endless f