To the Mountains of the Moon

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 6o CHAPTER IV. Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. ?browning. From the warm, bright, unhealthy flats at the north end of Lake Nyassa, there appear in the north-west a series of broken ridges covered with thin forest, and rising into the general mass of the northern ranges to a height of...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 6o CHAPTER IV. Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. ?browning. From the warm, bright, unhealthy flats at the north end of Lake Nyassa, there appear in the north-west a series of broken ridges covered with thin forest, and rising into the general mass of the northern ranges to a height of between four and five thousand feet. It is over these ridges that one of the great octopus-like arms which civilization is throwing out stretches into the interior beyond. The arm consists of the inevitable African twin series of forts and mission stations, which here stretch along the course of the new trans-continental telegraph wire, the double-jointed cast iron poles of which form excellent rubbing posts for the great beasts of the forest. They come, in fact, specially to scratch themselves against them, and it may be supposed that these beasts, at any rate, will say God bless Mr. Rhodes and the telegraph company, whatever other rewards may be earned at the hands of fate by that remarkable scheme. The posts, or those which can stand the repeated assaults of one sort and another which are continually being made against them, run through the districts where the so-called Stevenson road was said to go, and which is generally represented like a long flash of lightning stretching from Nyassa to Tanganyika, on the existing maps. As a matter of fact To face page 60. ] From a Sketch by the Author, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOK, LBHOX AND T1LDKN FOUNDATIONS this road was never in existence, at all events beyond forty miles north of Karonga, and it has now been superseded altogether by the track which has been cut, partly by the officers of the British Central African Protectorate and partly by those of Northern Rhodesia. This track is not exactly a r...