12th April, 1866.—­On starting we found the jungle so dense that the people thought “there was no cutting it:”  it continued upwards of three miles.  The trees are not large, but so closely planted together that a great deal of labour was required to widen and heighten the path:  where bamboos prevail they have starved out the woody trees.  The reason why the trees are not large is because all the spaces we passed over were formerly garden ground before the Makonde had been thinned by the slave-trade.  As soon as a garden is deserted, a thick crop of trees of the same sorts as those formerly cut down springs up, and here the process of woody trees starving out their fellows, and occupying the land without dense scrub below, has not had time to work itself out.  Many are mere poles, and so intertwined with climbers as to present the appearance of a ship’s ropes and cables shaken in among them, and many have woody stems as thick as an eleven-inch hawser.  One species may be likened to the scabbard of a dragoon’s sword, but along the middle of the flat side runs a ridge, from which springs up every few inches a bunch of inch-long straight sharp thorns.  It hangs straight for a couple of yards, but as if it could not give its thorns a fair chance of mischief, it suddenly bends on itself, and all its cruel points are now at right angles to what they were before.  Darwin’s observation shows a great deal of what looks like instinct in these climbers.  This species seems to be eager for mischief; its tangled limbs hang out ready to inflict injury on all passers-by.  Another climber is so tough it is not to be broken by the fingers; another appears at its root as a young tree, but it has the straggling habits of its class, as may be seen by its cords stretched some fifty or sixty feet off; it is often two inches in diameter; you cut it through at one part and find it reappear forty yards off.

[Illustration:  Tomahawk and Axe.]

Another climber is like the leaf of an aloe, but convoluted as strangely as shavings from the plane of a carpenter.  It is dark green in colour, and when its bark is taken off it is beautifully striated beneath, lighter and darker green, like the rings of growth on wood; still another is a thin string with a succession of large knobs, and another has its bark pinched up all round at intervals so as to present a great many cutting edges.  One sort need scarcely be mentioned, in which all along its length are strong bent hooks, placed in a way that will hold one if it can but grapple with him, for that is very common and not like those mentioned, which the rather seem to be stragglers from the carboniferous period of geologists, when Pachydermata wriggled unscathed among tangled masses worse than these.  We employed about ten jolly young Makonde to deal with these prehistoric plants in their own way, for they are accustomed to clearing spaces for gardens, and went at the work with a will, using tomahawks well adapted for the work.