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Descending the Congo valley, last week, on their way back to the Atlantic, King Albert & Queen Elizabeth came, after passing the Mountains of the Moon, to the border of what is perhaps the Congo's greatest wonder: the "Pigmy Forest," also called the "Stanley Forest" and the "Great Forest of the Congo." Strong, hearty, cheerful, white men have not seldom emerged from a journey through the Pigmy Forest with hair turned white and mind temporarily unhinged by its stark terror. Darkness. The Great Forest is always dark. So prodigious is the foliage that even at high noon deep twilight reigns. Jungle. The mass of tangled, choking creepers must be chopped through at every step, and actually closes behind the explorer within 48 hours, so that if he would retrace his steps he must again chop. Ooze. Since no drying sunshine ever penetrates, the Pigmy Forest is bottomed by a slimy ooze. Lions, tigers and all cleanly cats eschew the foul place, but snakes, lizards and—in the oozy lakes-crocodiles are noxiously at home. Branded upon memory may remain a fight between two mammoth crocodiles, each some 20 feet long—savage devils, mercilessly tearing, raking, lunging, thrashing the ooze with loud slaps of mighty tails. The eyes seem to glare with sheer hate, remorseless, soulless, infernal. The defeated crocodile, mangled and dead, is not eaten until it has partially decayed and thus become more succulent to the victor. Pigmies. Suspicious of the white man, Congo Pigmies often set thin, poisoned stakes point upward in his path. He, knowing or fearing that they are always watching, perhaps with poisoned arrows drawn, may without difficulty become crazed with fear. The few whites who claim familiarity with Congo Pigmies have reported that these four-foot folk not only claim to be descended from monkeys, but state that they know they are, because the Congo Monkeys still occasionally live with them. . . . Their Belgian Majesties of course avoided the terrors and obscenities of the Pigmy Forest, last week, merely sailing past its extremity in a prim Congo steamer. Near Stanleyville the "Seven Cataracts of the Congo" or "Stanley Falls" halted the royal steamer, and King & Queen were obliged to motor around the Cataracts. Before proceeding downstream to the Atlantic (1,500 miles) King Albert received the homage of several onetime cannibal tribes, two being notorious backsliders. A sprinkling of Pigmies had been drummed up and Their Majesties inspected with interest the cleanest, tamest, least savage. On their way home to Belgium, King Albert and Queen Elizabeth will pass a bleak spot in the English channel where, in September 1917, a German submarine torpedoed the Belgian steamer Elizabethville in the safe of which was locked the entire diamond output of the Congo for 1917, valued at $10,000,000. The Government of His Belgian Majesty has just employed an Italian deep sea diving firm which proposes to raise the safe by means of a potent submarine magnet.
* Such as the Palace of Justice, in Brussels, boasted to be the largest secular edifice in Europe.