A journey to the interior of Africa would be a rural jaunt, were it not so often endangered by the perils of war. The African may fairly be characterized as a shepherd, whose pastoral life is varied by a little agriculture, and the conflicts into which he is seduced, either by family quarrels, or the natural passions of his blood. His country, though uncivilized, is not so absolutely wild as is generally supposed. The gradual extension of Mahometanism throughout the interior is slowly but evidently modifying the Negro. An African Mussulman is still a warrior, for the dissemination of faith as well as for the gratification of avarice; yet the Prophet’s laws are so much more genial than the precepts of paganism, that, within the last half century, the humanizing influence of the Koran is acknowledged by all who are acquainted with the interior tribes.

But in all the changes that may come over the spirit of man in Africa, her magnificent external nature will for ever remain the game. A little labor teems with vast returns. The climate exacts nothing but shade from the sun and shelter from the storm. Its oppressive heat forbids a toilsome industry, and almost enforces indolence as a law. With every want supplied, without the allurements of social rivalry, without the temptations of national ambition or personal pride, what has the African to do in his forest of palm and cocoa, his grove of orange, pomegranate and fig, on his mat of comfortable repose, where the fruit stoops to his lips without a struggle for the prize, save to brood over, or gratify, the electric passions with which his soul seems charged to bursting!

It is an interesting task to travel through a continent filled with such people, whose minds are just beginning, here and there, to emerge from the vilest heathenism, and to glimmer with a faith that bears wrapped in its unfolded leaves, the seeds of a modified civilization.

As I travelled in the “dry season,” I did not encounter many of the discomforts that beset the African wayfarer in periods of rain and tempest. I was not obliged to flounder through lagoons, or swim against the current of perilous rivers. We met their traces almost every day; and, in many places, the soil was worn into parched ravines or the tracks of dried-up torrents. Whatever affliction I experienced arose from the wasting depression of heat. We did not suffer from lack of water or food, for the caravan of the ALI-MAMI commanded implicit obedience throughout our journey.

In the six hundred miles I traversed, whilst absent from the coast, my memory, after twenty-six years, leads me, from beginning to end, through an almost continuous forest-path. We struck a trail when we started, and we left it when we came home. It was rare, indeed, to encounter a cross road, except when it led to neighboring villages, water, or cultivated fields. So dense was the forest foliage, that we often walked for hours in shade without a glimpse of the sun. The emerald light that penetrated the wood, bathed every thing it touched with mellow refreshment. But we were repaid for this partial bliss by intense suffering when we came forth from the sanctuary into the bare valleys, the arid barrancas, and marshy savannas of an open region. There, the red eye of the African sun glared with merciless fervor. Every thing reflected its rays. They struck us like lances from above, from below, from the sides, from the rocks, from the fields, from the stunted herbage, from the bushes. All was glare! Our eyes seemed to simmer in their sockets. Whenever the path followed the channel of a brook, whose dried torrents left bare the scorched and broken rocks, our feet fled from the ravine as from heated iron. Frequently we entered extensive prairies, covered with blades of sword-grass, tall as our heads, whose jagged edges tore us like saws, though we protected our faces with masks of wattled willows. And yet, after all these discomforts, how often are my dreams haunted by charming pictures of natural scenery that have fastened themselves for ever in my memory!

As the traveller along the coast turns the prow of his canoe through the surf, and crosses the angry bar that guards the mouth of an African river, he suddenly finds himself moving calmly onward between sedgy shores, buried in mangroves. Presently, the scene expands in the unruffled mirror of a deep, majestic stream. Its lofty banks are covered by innumerable varieties of the tallest forest trees, from whoso summits a trailing network of vines and flowers floats down and sweeps the passing current. A stranger who beholds this scenery for the first time is struck by the immense size, the prolific abundance, and gorgeous verdure of every thing. Leaves, large enough for garments, lie piled and motionless in the lazy air: The bamboo and cane shake their slender spears and pennant leaves as the stream ripples among their roots. Beneath the massive trunks of forest trees, the country opens; and, in vistas through the wood, the traveller sees innumerable fields lying fallow in grass, or waving with harvests of rice and cassava, broken by golden clusters of Indian corn. Anon, groups of oranges, lemons, coffee-trees, plantains and bananas, are crossed by the tall stems of cocoas, and arched by the broad and drooping coronals of royal palm. Beyond this, capping the summit of a hill, may be seen the conical huts of natives, bordered by fresh pastures dotted with flocks of sheep and goats, or covered by numbers of the sleekest cattle. As you leave the coast, and shoot round the river-curves of this fragrant wilderness teeming with flowers, vocal with birds, and gay with their radiant plumage, you plunge into the interior, where the rising country slowly expands into hills and mountains.

The forest is varied. Sometimes it is a matted pile of tree vine, and bramble, obscuring every thing, and impervious save with knife and hatchet. At others, it is a Gothic temple. The sward spreads openly for miles on every side, while, from its even surface, the trunks of straight and massive trees rise to a prodigious height, clear from every obstruction, till their gigantic limbs, like the capitals of columns, mingle their foliage in a roof of perpetual verdure.

At length the hills are reached, and the lowland heat is tempered by mountain freshness. The scene that may be beheld from almost any elevation, is always beautiful, and sometimes grand. Forest, of course, prevails; yet, with a glass, and often by the unaided eye, gentle hills, swelling from the wooded landscape, may be seen covered with native huts, whose neighborhood is checkered with patches of sward and cultivation, and inclosed by massive belts of primeval wildness. Such is commonly the westward view; but north and east, as far as vision extends, noble outlines of hill and mountain may be traced against the sky, lapping each other with their mighty folds, until they fade away in the azure horizon.

When a view like this is beheld at morning, in the neighborhood of rivers, a dense mist will be observed lying beneath the spectator in a solid stratum, refracting the light now breaking from the east. Here and there, in this lake of vapor, the tops of hills peer up like green islands in a golden sea. But, ere you have time to let fancy run riot, the “cloud compelling” orb lifts its disc over the mountains, and the fogs of the valley, like ghosts at cock-crow, flit from the dells they have haunted since nightfall. Presently, the sun is out in his terrible splendor. Africa unveils to her master, and the blue sky and green forest blaze and quiver with his beams.