Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

386 THINKING BLACK
like a stinging whip-lash to the conscience came the
thought that we might have saved her had we been only
in the country in time.
The pathless forest breaks occasionally, and for a
stretch of three hours or so you see it thinning out ; not
now the dense dark thing of the morning, but dotted
over with large acacias, mimosas, and Euphorbias. A
curious example of the grotesque in vegetation, these
candelabra top each sugar-loaf ant-hill with the humor-
ous hint that after sundown they will be lit up as forest
lamps. The stiflf spokes have the insidious suggestion
that they were artificially hammered out of bronze, and,
child of the desert as this tree is, surely the Taber-
nacle "pattern" (Ex. xxv. 9) lampstand was moulded
therefrom ? What suggests this most forcibly is the odd
Borassus palm here and there towering in the background
of these same Euphorbias. Here at least we know
where we are. Did not this very ventricose palm pose
as the mason's model for the swollen column of the
ancient temples of Egypt ? And is not Egypt the door
of Africa? The Hall of Columns, for instance, of Seti i.,
what is it but only so many Borassus palms petrified in
a row? The same thing this as the Greeks modelling
their porticoes and peristyles from the date palm. If,
however, these candelabras hint at the bizarre in Nature,
farther on we encounter the tragic. Monster cobra-like
Lianas hold giant trees of great girth in their death-
grip, the victims in every case nearly strangled, and
holding out pale, pathetic arms, preaching to us as we