Yet sometimes one must become a guide-book, and
bespeak his reader's imagination.
The country, then, wherein we travelled begins at the sea. Along
the coast stretches a low rolling country of steaming tropics,
grown with cocoanuts, bananas, mangoes, and populated by a happy,
half-naked race of the Swahilis. Leaving the coast, the country
rises through hills. These hills are at first fertile and green
and wooded. Later they turn into an almost unbroken plateau of
thorn scrub, cruel, monotonous, almost impenetrable. Fix thorn
scrub in your mind, with rhino trails, and occasional openings
for game, and a few rivers flowing through palms and narrow
jungle strips; fix it in your mind until your mind is filled with
it, until you are convinced that nothing else can exist in the
world but more and more of the monotonous, terrible, dry,
onstretching desert of thorn.
Then pass through this to the top of the hills inland, and
journey over these hills to the highland plains.
Now sense and appreciate these wide seas of and the hills and
ranges of mountains rising from them, and their infinite
diversity of country-their rivers marked by ribbons of jungle,
their scattered-bush and their thick-bush areas, their grass
expanses, and their great distances extending far over
exceedingly wide horizons. Realize how many weary hours you must
travel to gain the nearest butte, what days of toil the view from
its top will disclose. Savour the fact that you can spend months
in its veriest corner without exhausting its possibilities. Then,
and not until then, raise your eyes to the low rising transverse
range that bands it to the west as the thorn desert bands it to
the east.
And on these ranges are the forests, the great bewildering
forests. In what looks like a grove lying athwart a little hill
you can lose yourself for days. Here dwell millions of savages in
an apparently untouched wilderness. Here rises a snow mountain on
the equator. Here are tangles and labyrinths, great bamboo
forests lost in folds of the mightiest hills. Here are the
elephants. Here are the swinging vines, the jungle itself.
Yet finally it breaks. We come out on the edge of things and look
down on a great gash in the earth. It is like a sunken kingdom in
itself, miles wide, with its own mountain ranges, its own rivers,
its own landscape features. Only on either side of it rise the
escarpments which are the true level of the plateau. One can
spend two months in this valley, too, and in the countries south
to which it leads. And on its farther side are the high plateau
plains again, or the forests, or the desert, or the great lakes
that lie at the source of the Nile.
So now, perhaps, we are a little prepared to go ahead.
