[Sidenote: THE BUSY ANTS] The traveller can never proceed many miles on his journey without meeting the dark lines of driver ants. At a distance of fifty yards, all one sees is a uniform brown line, sometimes two inches wide, sometimes as many feet. Drawing nearer they are seen to be well-ordered regiments, thousands strong, with scouts, baggage bearers, captains and field-marshals. Their enemies have fled at their approach and they are masters of the field. On they will march, in faultless array, their countless thousands obediently passing at a double their immovable field-marshals, and as they proceed every living thing flees before them. Now perhaps they disappear through some subterranean passage, tunnelled out by their indomitable energy, to reappear on the surface when it suits their plan. You may scatter them if you dare, but you can daunt them never. Sweep them into heaps, kill them by the hundred, burn them by the thousand, and tens of thousands surge forward, to fill up the ranks, and remove the dead. Then the regiments will grimly move once more on their way—an incentive to higher organisms. [Illustration: WILD FOREST FRUIT.] The African forests teem with life, for the most part silent; even the great beasts glide along in perfect quietude—not till you are upon them do you realize the proximity of the elephants; then, unless the traveller be a Nimrod, his greatest concern is to avoid a possible encounter. They love most a quiet glen near the forest stream, where they will plough the earth in all directions and everywhere leave the impress of their giant limbs stretched in gymnastics all their own; here and there scattered over their playground lie scores of trees athwart each other, evidence of no woodman’s axe, but of the entwining grip of the monster’s trunk, who in his unrivalled strength delights thus to shew his power in his own domain. Everywhere, too, the great forest apples lie idle after their sport, and the natives tell how they spend hours hurling these great balls at their fellows. The rivers which everywhere feed the African forest, coupled with the tropical sun, give luxuriance to all nature. Vines are there as much as three feet in circumference, moss-grown and gnarled with age, born perhaps when the parent acorns of our oldest oaks were yet unformed. Sometimes like huge serpents they coil themselves in a tortuous grip round two or three trees, each of which may be ten times their own size. There is beauty too in these silent forests, when at intervals on the march the traveller, almost unconsciously at first, begins to inhale the fragrant odour of some delicious perfume sent forth by modest blooms that shun the gaze of man. A little searching beneath the undergrowth, or in the tree tops overhead, reveals a bloom upon which the eye gladly lingers—trails of waxen jasmine hanging from the bush in exquisite profusion. [Sidenote: BEAUTY IN DECAY]