The Prospective Civilization of Africa [pp. 171-191]

THE PROSPECTIVE CIVILIZATIO -OF AFRICA.
The tract adjoining upon the British settlement of Sierra Leone
has long been known as " the white man's grave." Senegambia,
the Gaboon region, the tract upon the Lower Ogobai explored
by M. du Chaillu, the lower Zambesi region, and the whole of
Mozambique, are almost as bad. They are choked with the
rankest vegetation, and reek with fever and miasma. At a certain distance from the coast the land, however, generally rises;
and it is among the most marked characteristics of tropical
Africa that it consists mainly of elevated basins, varying from
one to four thousand feet above the sea-level, and separated one
from another by mountain ridges of considerably greater altitude. The basins of Lake Tchad, of the Upper Niger, and of
the Benuwe in the north, those of the Ogobai and the Upper
Nile upon the equator, and of the Upper Congo, the Upper Zambesi, and Lake Nyassa in the south, are all of them of this character; and the result is that they have a climate drier and lighter
than that of most equatorial or tropical regions, and less injurious to the health of Europeans. Still, even these more favored
tracts are trying to any but exceptionally strong constitutions.
Their rainfall is excessive; their rainy season prolonged and most
trying; the spongy soil sucks in and retains the wet; and the
march has to be made along paths which are running brooks,
and across plains little better than quagmires. Violent storms
are frequent. The wind rises suddenly with tremendous force,
accompanied by a heavy downpour, or by hail-stones "as big as
pigeon's eggs;" the lightning blazes incessantly; the thunderclaps are deafening; the traveller is wetted through and through
in a few minutes, and must ordinarily march on in his saturated
clothes until the sun comes out and dries them. Under these
circumstances fever, dysentery, asthma, rheumatism, even consumption, are apt to appear; and an expedition sometimes loses
in a few days half its number.
The combination of heat with damp produces a most rapid
growth of a rank and coarse vegetation. Hence arise fresh embarassments. The African interior has no roads; and communication is by means of narrow paths cut through the jungle or
the tall cane-like grass. In the wet season these frequently
become blocked by the quick growth of the scrub on either side.
Sometimes the path disappears altogether. More often it is
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