FEBRUARY 8.

  Country more and more distinctly glacial. See hundreds or thousands of hartbeests and other antelopes, some within stone’s throw of the track. Large number of wild ostriches. Grassy plains. No trees or shrubs for miles and miles. Great hills and mountains in the distance. Lovely country. Glacial drift common. Arrived Nairobi at 11:15 a.m. Went to Norfolk Hotel.

  FEBRUARY 9.

  At Hotel. Fine scenery. Heavy rain. Great need of increased hotel accommodations. In rare weather conditions Kaillimanjara visible one hundred and fifty miles distant from here. Rained for three days on most of way from Mombasa. Rainy season usually begins in March in this part of British East Africa.

  FEBRUARY 10.

  Left Nairobi for Port Florence at noon. Rainy until after dark. Never saw rain so early in the season in the last fourteen years, though only about a month earlier than usual. Railroad runs through beautiful mountain scenery, patches of forest with open grassy prairies, filled-up lake basins. Views of large main valley, very broad, fine in its main lines. Tawny in color from dry grass. Juniper common. Used for lumber, but splits too freely for some purposes, and as usual all the older trees are eaten with dry rot in the center. This is true of all the many species of juniper. Grand views of the great valley. Was kindly given a blanket and pillow by Mr. Rees, the night being very cold, although almost directly on the equator. The elevation at the highest point the railroad passed over during the night was about 8,000 feet above sea level.

  FEBRUARY 11.

  Arrived at Port Florence about 7:00 a.m. Went aboard the good little steamer Clement Hill and started for Antebbe at 10:00 a.m. Wonderful picturesque scenery. Low, green, half-forested hills with mountains in the distance. Not very high. Some perhaps about 6,000 feet above the sea. The Victoria Nyanza one of the largest in the world. Second in size only to Lake Superior. Hippopotamus common around the muddy and reedy shores. The lake is comparatively shallow, only about 240 feet at the deepest part. Anchored at dark.

  FEBRUARY 12.

  Started at daybreak. Arrived at Antebbe about 11:00 a.m. at head of a beautiful bay. Measured one tree about six feet in diameter a little way back from the shore. Many are three or four feet, with fine, wide-spreading head. One tree, of moderate size, had noble digitate leaves, fourteen or more, eighteen inches wide. Petioles two feet long. Mr. Rees took me to the Uganda Protectorate.

  Spathodia nilotica, has very large flowers.

  Canarium schweinfurthii, very large tree.

  Thevetia nerriforia, red.

  Bauhinia triandra, double leaf.

  Randia dummetorium.

  Solianum macaranthum.

  Maesopsis berchemoides.

  Pipledenia africana.

  Monodora myristica.

  Mr. Rees took me to the Botanical Gardens. Saw the Manager, who kindly ordered his head gardener to show me over the garden and give me specimens of all I wished. A bright, scholarly fellow, Singalese, from Ceylon. There is a species of mourning dove hereabouts which says “Too hot for anything.” A lovely creeper going up straight on smooth-barked tree in regular zigzags.

  FEBRUARY 13.

  Started for Kompali at daylight. Arrived about 9:00 a.m. Ride in jinrikisha from port to village, a distance of about seven miles, through beautiful landscape. Extensive and thrifty banana orchards. The fruit red instead of yellow. Interesting swamps full of the famous papyrus growing here naturally. Charming red, blue and white water lilies in the harbor in glorious abundance. Arrived at Kompali in an hour and a half. Returned in one hour. My jinrikisha was hauled and pushed by three lusty Negroes, two pushing and the other in the shafts. Chanted all the way while trotting, the leader rapidly improvising a line, and the chorus sounded like “Harry Trunk! Harry Trunk!” The leader would say: “The white man is going to see our pretty town.” “Harry Trunk. Harry Trunk.” “He sees the black man’s fine banana field.” “Harry Trunk. Harry Trunk.” “He is looking at the birds in the trees.” “Harry Trunk. Harry Trunk.” “The white man’s far from his cold, cold home.” “Harry Trunk. Harry Trunk.” Etc.

  FEBRUARY 14.

  Started for Jinja at 5:00 a.m. Arrived at 11:30 a.m. From the village I went to see the Ripon Falls at the outlet of the great lake, the main head fountain of the Nile, the distance from the port being only a little over a mile. The fall is only about fifteen or twenty feet over a bar of resisting rock. The fall is divided into three parts and makes a magnificent show of foam. Large numbers of alligators were sunning themselves on the farther bank at the head of the falls, while fishes in large numbers are constantly springing in wide curves in their attempts to ascend the cascade to enter the lake. The broad stream setting out in rapids on its 3,330 mile course is very impressive.

  “In 1852 Sir Roderick Murchison advanced the hypothesis that Africa south of the Sahara Desert was a continent of great antiquity, and simplicity, which had maintained the form of a great basin ever since the age of the new red sandstone. He based his theory on the work of Bain, the pioneer of South African geology, summarized in a paper entitled ‘On the Antiquity of the Physical Geography of Inner Africa’ by R. Murchison, in which he claims that the country is of interest because it was geologically unique in the long conservation of ancient terrestrial conditions.”

  The famous Ngrurunga (water holes) from J. W. Gregory’s book entitled The Great Rift Valley.

  FEBRUARY 15.

  Start for Port Florence at 4:00 a.m. Arrived at 5:00 p.m.

  FEBRUARY 16.

  Got aboard the train on the return journey to Mombasa at 7:30 a.m. From the Port a long level valley six to eight miles wide looks like a filled-in part of the Port Florence arm of the lake, extending twenty or thirty miles to the southward, bounded on the west by a range of bold bluffs, separated by wide cirques here and there; and on the east by smooth terraces, extending lakeward parallel to the bluffs. Native villages and fields along the valley. Water lilies at Port Florence, and papyrus. Kigelia trees in fruit here and magnificent figs. One near Port Florence, green with dark green foliage, had fruit a half inch in diameter. The trunk about eight feet in diameter, with a dense dome-shaped broad head something like the great banyan of India. Wild mountains after leaving the lake plains, through which the railroad has been built at great cost. Twenty or thirty steel trestles over gorgeous and fluting ravines in close succession. Some of the passengers saw a lion by the roadside.

  FEBRUARY 17.

  Very cold night. Slept cold, with heavy underclothing, coat and vest, overcoat, and a thick blanket. Elevation of the region about 6,000 to 8,000 feet above the sea. Colder than the Tuolumne Meadows in the spring, though 3,000 feet higher than here. Passed through dense forests about noon, but the greater part of the way is through grassy hills with only detached patches of brush and trees. Extensive wheat fields here and there. Yesterday afternoon and this forenoon near Nivahsa Station and Lake. This remarkable lake is surrounded by a picturesque mountain and hills. Water said to be fresh, though without any visible outlet. Between Nivasha and Nairoba saw Mt. Kilimanjara and Kenia, and many antelopes and zebra, all within short distances of the railroad, and remarkably tame. The latter most at ease as the train rolled past. This afternoon soon after leaving Nairoba saw hundreds or thousands of antelopes, two droves of zebras, and a few ostriches. Some of the antelopes were lying down within a stone’s throw of the track, a few of which lay still. Others rose and gazed at the train, and a few ran off to a distance of a quarter of a mile or so. These fine beasts were on a beautiful treeless shrubless plain or prairie. After coming to a plain dotted with small trees and bushes none of the animals were seen. Some parts of the prairie were roughened with moraine boulders, and some places weathered from the bedrock, which occurs here and there in large patches without any kind of soil, something like glacier pavements, with potholes here and there, weathered out by the rain and wind. Some beds of quartz pebbles with large boulders here and there. The stream channels very shallow. All signs point to glaciation no great geological time ago. Most of the animals seen today were on the Athi plain, and have learned that the nearer the railroad the safer they are from the attack of either men or lions. A strip along the track a mile in width had been reserved as a game refuge, which the animals have been quick to discover and flock into it, from all the adjacent region. Saw Kilimanjara again this afternoon. Only its broad base was visible. The head and main body cloud mantled. Saw also many baobabs two hundred and fifty miles or more from Mombasa. One stood near the Makinda Station within six feet or so from the railroad track.

  PART FIVE:

  The Planet Steward

  God’s First Temples: How Shall We Preserve Our Forests?

  RECORD-UNION:

  The forests of coniferous trees growing on our mountain ranges are by far the most destructible of the natural resources of California. Our gold, and silver, and cinnabar are stored in the rocks, locked up in the safest of all banks, so that notwithstanding the world has been making a run upon them for the last twenty-five years, they still pay out steadily and will probably continue to do so centuries hence, like rivers pouring from perennial mountain fountains. The riches of our magnificent soil beds are also comparatively safe, because even the most barbarous methods of wildcat farming cannot effect complete destruction, and however great the impoverishment produced, full restoration of fertility is always possible to the enlightened farmer. But our forest belts are being burned and cut down and wasted like a field of unprotected grain, and once destroyed can never be wholly restored, even by centuries of persistent and painstaking cultivation.

  The practical importance of the preservation of our forests is augmented by their relations to climate, soil, and streams. Strip off the woods with their underbrush from the mountain flanks, and the whole state, the lowlands as well as the highlands, would gradually change into a desert. During rainfalls, and when the winter snow was melting, every stream would become a destructive torrent, overflowing its banks, stripping off and carrying away the fertile soils, filling up the lower river channels, and overspreading the lowland fields with detritus to a vastly more destructive degree than all the washings from hydraulic mines concerning which we now hear so much. Dripping forests give rise to moist sheets and currents of air, and the sod of grasses and underbrush thus fostered, together with the roots of trees themselves, absorb and hold back rains and melting snow, yet allowing them to ooze and percolate and flow gently in useful fertilizing streams. Indeed every pine needle and rootlet, as well as fallen trunks and large clasping roots, may be regarded as dams, hoarding the bounty of storm clouds and dispensing it as blessings all through the summer, instead of allowing it to gather and rush headlong in short-lived, devastating floods. Streams taking their rise in deep woods flow unfailingly as those derived from the eternal ice and snow of the Alps. So constant, indeed, and apparent is the relationship between forests and never-failing springs, that effect is frequently mistaken for cause, it being often asserted that line forests will grow only along stream-sides where their roots are well watered, when in fact the forests themselves produce many of the streams flowing through them.

  The main forest belt of the Sierra is restricted to the western flank, and extends unbrokenly from one end of the range to the other at an elevation of from three to eight thousand feet above sea level. The great master-existence of these noble woods is Sequoia gigantea, or big tree. Only two species of sequoia are known to exist in the world. Both belong to California, one being found only in the Sierra, the other (Sequoia sempervirens) in the Coast Ranges, although no less than five distinct fossil species have been discovered in the tertiary and cretaceous rocks of Greenland. I would like to call attention to this noble tree, with special reference to its preservation. The species extends from the well known Calaveras groves on the north, to the head of Deer Creek on the south, near the big bend of the Kern River, a distance of about two hundred miles, at an elevation above sea level of from about five to eight thousand feet. From the Calaveras to the south fork of King’s River, it occurs only in small isolated groves, and so sparsely and irregularly distributed that two gaps occur nearly forty miles in width, the one between the Calaveras and Tuolumne groves, the other between those of the Fresno and King’s rivers. From King’s River the belt extends across the broad, rugged basins of the Kaweah and Tule rivers to its southern boundary on Deer Creek, interrupted only by deep, rocky canyons, the width of this portion of the belt being from three to ten miles.

  In the northern groves few young trees or saplings are found ready to take the places of the failing old ones, and because these ancient, childless sequoias are the only ones known to botanists, the species has been generally regarded as doomed to speedy extinction, as being nothing more than an expiring remnant of an ancient flora, and that therefore there is no use trying to save it or to prolong its few dying days. This, however, is in the main a mistaken notion, for the Sierra as it now exists never had an ancient flora. All the species now growing on the range have been planted since the close of the glacial period, and the Big Tree has never formed a greater part of these postglacial forests than it does today, however widely it may have been distributed throughout preglacial forests.

  In tracing the belt southward, all the phenomena bearing upon its history goes to show that the dominion of Sequoia gigantea, as king of California trees, is not yet passing away. No tree in the woods seems more firmly established, or more safely settled in accordance with climate and soil. They fill the woods and form the principal tree, growing heartily on solid ledges, along water courses, in the deep, moist soil of meadows, and upon avalanche and glacial debris, with a multitude of thrifty seedlings and saplings crowding around the aged, ready to take their places and rule the woods.

  Nevertheless, Nature in her grandly deliberate way keeps up a rotation of forest crops. Species develop and die like individuals, animal as well as plant. Man himself will as surely become extinct as sequoia or mastodon, and be at length known only as a fossil. Changes of this kind are, however, exceedingly slow in their movements, and, as far as the lives of individuals are concerned, such changes have no appreciable effect. Sequoia seems scarcely further past prime as a species than its companion firs (Picea amabilis and P. grandis), and judging from its present condition and its ancient history, as far as I have been able to decipher it, our sequoia will live and flourish gloriously until A.D. 15,000 at least—probably for longer—that is, if it be allowed to remain in the hands of nature.

  But waste and pure destruction are already taking place at a terrible rate, and unless protective measures be speedily invented and enforced, in a few years this noblest tree-species in the world will present only a few hacked and scarred remnants. The great enemies of forests are fire and the ax. The destructive effects of these, as compared with those caused by the operations of nature, are instantaneous. Floods undermine and kill many a tree, storm winds bend and break, landslips and avalanches overwhelm whole groves, lightning shatters and burns, but the combined effects of all these amount only to a wholesome beauty-producing culture. Last summer I found some five sawmills located in or near the lower edge of the sequoia belt, all of which saw more or less of the big tree into lumber. One of these (Hyde’s), situated on the north fork of the Kaweah, cut no less than two million feet of sequoia lumber last season. Most of the Fresno big trees are doomed to feed the mills recently erected near them, and a company has been formed by Chas. Converse to cut the noble forest on the south fork of King’s River. In these milling operations, waste far exceeds use. After the choice young manageable trees have been felled, the woods are cleared of limbs and refuse by burning, and in these clearing fires, made with reference to further operations, all the young seedlings and saplings are destroyed, together with many valuable fallen trees and old trees, too large to be cut, thus effectually cutting off all hopes of a renewal of the forest.

  These ravages, however, of mill-fires and mill-axes are small as compared with those of the “sheep men’s” fires. Incredible numbers of sheep are driven to the mountain pastures every summer, and in order to make easy paths and to improve the pastures, running fires are set everywhere to burn off the old logs and underbrush. These fires are far more universal and destructive than would be guessed. They sweep through nearly the entire forest belt of the range from one extremity to the other, and in the dry weather, before the coming on of winter storms, are very destructive to all kinds of young trees, and especially to sequoia, whose loose, fibrous bark catches and burns at once. Excepting the Calaveras, I, last summer, examined every sequoia grove in the range, together with the main belt extending across the basins of Kaweah and Tule, and found everywhere the most deplorable waste from this cause. Indians burn off underbrush to facilitate deer hunting. Campers of all kinds often permit fires to run, so also do mill-men, but the fires of sheep men probably form more than 90 percent of all destructive fires that sweep the woods.

  Fire, then, is the arch destroyer of our forests, and sequoia forests suffer most of all. The young trees are most easily fire killed; the old are most easily burned, and the prostrate trunks, which never rot and would remain valuable until our tenth centennial, are reduced to ashes.

  In European countries, especially in France, Germany, Italy, and Austria, the economies of forestry have been carefully studied under the auspices of government, with the most beneficial results. Whether our loose-jointed government is really able or willing to do anything in the matter remains to be seen. If our lawmakers were to discover and enforce any method tending to lessen even in a small degree the destruction going on, they would thus cover a multitude of legislative sins in the eyes of every tree lover. I am satisfied, however, that the question can be intelligently discussed only after a careful survey of our forests has been made, together with studies of the forces now acting upon them.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18