And one of your first discoveries is
that the books of the travelers are mostly wrong. What to them was
perhaps a paradise of plant or animal life is to you, moving with your
vast impedimenta, a veritable purgatory. You soon come to agree with
Scripture that all men are liars, and from this rule you do not even
except the missionaries who write with their heads in the clouds; nor do
you except the writers of intelligence books compiled in Whitehall from
the hunting tales of the travelers or the fairy-tales of the
missionaries, and marked "very secret." But these secrets are like most
secrets of the African continent, very disconcerting to the simple,
trustful soul.
[Sidenote: The silence of the forest is broken by the tramp of armed
men.]
[Sidenote: Horses virtually unknown.]
These campaigning experiences were unique. Probably never before in the
history of the world had such things been seen: the stillness, the
brooding silence of the vast primeval forest where no, or few, white men
have ever been before, and the only path is the track of the elephant;
the silence of the forest, stretching for hundreds of miles in all
directions, broken by the tramp of tens of thousands of armed men,
followed by the guns and heavy transport of a modern army, with its
hundreds of motor-lorries, its miles of wagons, its vast concourse of
black porters; while overhead the aeroplane, or, as the natives call it,
the "bird," more dreaded and more feared than even the crocodile in the
river, passes on swiftly with its bombs for the foe retreating ahead.
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