Morning journal and courier., 1888-09-07
THE DARK C0NTTrEaT.

lightning and was killed with it's prey its
 mouth.
 THE DARK CONTIrERT.
 DimcnItfes Attendant on Travel i'm
 Africa-A Land Entirely Traveraed
 on she Trail.
 From the Pal Mall Budget.l
 Probably no country in the world, civilized
 or uncivilzed, is better supplied with paths
 than this unmapped continent. Every yil-
 every tribe with the next tribe, every state
 with it's neighbor, and therefore with all the
 rest. The explorers business is simply to
 select from this network of tracks, keep. 8
 general direction and hold on his way. Let
 him begin at Zanzibar, plant his foot on 8
 native footpath and set his face toward Tan
 ganyika. In eight months he will be there.
 He has simply to perseYere. Nor is there
 any art in finding out these successive villa
 ges with their intereommunioating links.
 He must find them out. A whole army of
 guides, servants, carriers, soldiers and camp
 followers accompany him in his march, and
 this nondescript regiment must be fed. In-
 dian corn, cassava, mawere, beans and ba-
 nanas-these do not grow wild even in Afri-
 ca. Every meal has to be bought and paid for in cloth and beads. The native tracks
 which have just described are the same in character all over Africa. They are verita~ ble footpaths, never over foot in breadth, beaten as hard as adamant and rutted be- heath the level of the forest bed by oentu-
 ries of native traffic. As 8 rule the foot
 paths are marvelously direct.
 The life of the native African, says MT.
 Drummond, is not all idyl. It is darkened yxrvbo Tn any other people. Its revolting witohcraft and it's endless quarrels and frequent tribal wars-these minor evils are lost in the shad- ow of great and national wrong. Among 1 these simple and unprotected tribes Arabs uninvited strangers of another race and nR- l ture-pour in from the north and east, with ! the deliberate purpose of making this para | disc hell. It seems the awful destiny of I this homeless people to spend their lives in breaking up the homes of others. Already l they hold the whole continent under one reign of terror. They have effected this in virtue of one thing-they possess firearms, and they do it for one object, ivory and slaves, for these two are one. The slaves gre | needed to buy ivory with, then more slaves | have to be stolen to carry it. So living man l himself has become the commercial currency 1 of Africa. He is locomotive, he is easily ac | quired, he is immediately negotiable.
 1 The last act in the drama-the slave marct -is the aspect of slavery which in the pas has chiefly aroused the passions and the sym l pathy of the outside world, but the greater evil is the demoralization and the disintsgra 1 ton of communities by which it is necessari I ly preceded. It is essential to the traffic that l the region drained by the slayer should be kept in perpetual political ferment; that in ! order to prevent combination chief should 1 be pitted against chief, and that the moment | any tribe threatened to assume dominating strength it should either be broken up by the I instigation of rebellion among it's dependen- I cies or made tool of at their expense. do not presume to bring forward for nal proposal, but two things occur to me as feasible and I shall simply name them. The first, for England or Germany, or France or some one with power and sarnestness, to take & firm and uncompromising stand at Zanzibar. Zanzibar, as the Arab capital, is one of the keys of the situation, and any lesson taught here would be learned present. l ly by the whole Mahommedan following fn the country.
 The other key to the situation is the vast and splendid waterway in the heart of Afri- ea-the upper Shire, Lake Nyasss, Lake Tan ganyika and the great lakes generally. As 8 base for military or patrol operations nothing better could be desired than these great in l land seas. A small steamer upon each of them-or to begin with upon Nyassa and Tanganyika-with an associated depot or two of armed men on the higher and healthier plateaux which surround them would keep the whole country quiet. Only trif1ing force of well drilled men would be needed for this purpose. They might be whites or blacks and whites; they might be Sinks or Pathaus from India.
 The barriers in the way of government action are only two and neither is insur- mountable. The one is Portugal, which owns the approaches to the country; the other is Germany, which has inland inter- ! ests of her own. Whether England could proceed in the face of these two powers would simply depend on how it was done. As a mere political move such an occupa- tion of the interior might at once excite alarm and jealousy. But wearing the as- pect of & serious mission for the good of Africa, instigated not by the foreign office, ! but by the people of England, it is impos- ! sible to believe that the step could either \ be misunderstood or opposed. It is time \ the nations looked upon Africa as some | thing more than a chessboard.
 | One portion of Professor Drummond's | book reads lide fairy tale. It is the | wonderful romance of the white ant which ! doef for Africa what Darwin a few years ago told us the worm does for us. It is 8 ! small insect with a bloated, yellowish- white body and somewhat large thorax, oblong shaped and colored disagreeable oily ! brown. The termite lives almost exclusively upon wood, and the moment tree is cut ol I ! insect is upon it's track. One may never sec ! the insect possibly in the flesh, for it livet ! underground, but it's ravages confront one al
 every turn.
 ! The white ant is blind; it has many enc I mics and can never procure food until il
 comes above ground. How does it solve the dificultya It takes the ground out along 1 with it. He has seen white ants working or the top of high tree, and yet and yet they
 were underground. They took up some o1 the ground with them to the tree top; jus
 as the Esquimaux heap up snow, building into the low tunnel huts in which they live so the white ants collect earth, only in thi Lease not from the surface, but from som, depth underneath the ground, and plaster i ! into Junneled ways. Occasionally these rul
 along the ground, but more often mount ir
 endless ramifcation to the tops of trees, me andering along every branch and twig, ant l here and there debouching into large covered
 chambers which occupy half the girth of tn | trunk Millions of treee in some district
 are thus fantastically plastered over witt
 ! tubes galleries and chambers of earth, an(
 many pounds weight of subsoil must b
 brought up for the mining of even singl tree.
 Peering over the growing wall, one seo
 discovers one, two or more termites of
 somewhat larger build, considerably longe ) l and with a vGry different arrangement of tn parts of the head, and especially of the man dibles. These important looking individu
 als saunter about the rampant in the mos leisurely way, but yet with certain air c ] business, as if perhaps the one was the maj $ | ter of works and the other the architect 3 They are posted there as sentries, and ther 2 they stand or promenade about, Ct the mout :. of every tunnel, like Sister Ann, to see B anybody is coming. Sometimes somebod B | does come in the shape of another ant-th f real ant this time, not the defenceless Net Q ropteron, but some valiant and belted knigt - from the warlike Formicide. Singly or 3 troops this rapacious little insect, fearless s it's chitonous coat of mail, charges down th j. tree trunk, it's antennm waving defiance t 0 the enemy and it's cruel mandibles thirstin - for termite blood.
 @ The worker white ant is a poor defensele 1. creature, and blind and unarmed, would fs e an immediate prey to these well drilled ha