Africa’s Primeval Forests

“Africa is called the Dark Continent for one reason only: the vast equatorial rain forests of its central region. This is the drainage basin of the Congo River, one-tenth of the continent is given over to it—a million and half square miles of silent, damp, dark forest, a single uniform geographical feature nearly the size of the continental United States.

This primeval forest has stood, unchanged, for more than sixty million years. Enormous trees with trunks up to forty feet in diameter rise two-hundred feet overhead, where they spread their dense leafy canopy, blotting out the sky and perpetually dripping water to the ground below.”

Congo, Michael Crichton, 1980

Great Owls and other Fowl

“Not feeling inclined for slumber, however, instead of turning in Quatermain sat at the doorway contemplating the beauty of the night while I watched the countless fireflies that seemed to dust the air with sparks of burning gold; also the great owls and other fowl that haunt the dark. These had come out in numbers from their hiding-places among the ruins and sailed to and fro like white-winged spirits, now seen and now lost in the gloom.“

Chapter XXIII, What Umslopogaas Saw, She and Allen, H. Rider Haggard

Ingoldsby Legends, “The Nurse’s Story”

Then I (Allen) took a little book out of my pocket, it was my favourite copy of the Ingoldsby Legends—and began to read.

The passage which caught my eye, if “axe” be substituted for “knife” was not inappropriate. It was from “The Nurse’s Story,” and runs,

“But, oh! what a thing ‘tis to see and to know
That the bare knife is raised in the hand of the foe,
Without hope to repel or to ward off the blow!”

This proceeding of mine astonished them a good deal who felt that they had, so to speak, missed fire. At last the soldier in the middle said,

“Are you blind, White Man?”

“No, Black Fellow,” I answered, “but I am short-sighted. Would you be so good as to stand out of my light?” a remark which puzzled them so much that all three drew back a few paces.

When I had read a little further I came to the following lines,

“‘Tis plain,
As anatomists tell us, that never again,
Shall life revisit the foully slain
When once they’ve been cut through the jugular vein.”

Chapter II The Messengers, H. Rider Haggard

Hans, a Hottentot, and his Purdey

"In appearance Hans rather resembled an antique and dilapidated baboon; his face was wrinkled like a dried nut and his quick little eyes were bloodshot. I never knew what his age was, any more than he did himself, but the years had left him tough as whipcord and absolutely untiring. Lastly he was perhaps the best hand at following a spoor that ever I knew and up to a hundred and fifty yards or so, a very deadly shot with a rifle especially when he used a little single-barreled, muzzle-loading gun of mine made by Purdey which he named Intombi or Maiden. Of that gun, however, I have written in “The Holy Flower” and elsewhere."

Chapter II, The Messengers, She and Allen, H. Rider Haggard