Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1883 — Gongo Vegetation. [ARTICLE]

Gongo Vegetation.

The vegetation that clothes the precipitous shores on the south side of Stanley Pool, near the entrance from the Upper river, is one of the most magnificent spectacles that the Congo oilers, Rising nearly perpendicularly from the water, the serest climbs the hillsides higher than the, eye can reach, without a single break in its luxuriance. The variety of colors, too, at this season, when most of the trees are in blossom, is particularly striking. One treetop will be covered with scarlet flowers, .■scattered with a liberal hand; another has pendulous flowers of a pinky white, lianging gracefully by their long stalks amid the, somber masses of foliage; while errant creepers in exuberant growth trail their yellow blossoms over the victims they entwine. There is every note struck in the gamut of greed, and the trees that form this mass of foliage may vary in tone from blue-green to greenish yellow, and from greenish white to russet red, and they will differ equally in form and aspect. While some are compactly massed in their leafage, others grow erratically and in disordered tufts. Beautiful mimosas dominate their fellows,clothed in foliage of dark green velvet, •dracoenas raise their spiky heads here and there from out of the soft, verdant mass. The large, flat leaves of a fig alternate with the feathery palm fronds, while many stems are completely dis-

■' ' . . . • guised.by the net-woyk of graceful creepers, which mask them like a veritable cobweb. A climbing palm makes a sort of lattice-work fence, rising straight up from the water’s edge, and seems effectually to forbid trespassingin the fairy forests, while along the river’s brim lines of white lilies stand like sentinels to see the barrier is not passed.— Cor. London Telegraph. >