A MOTOR RIDE THROUGH THE JUNGLE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 23, 28 January 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

A MOTOR RIDE THROUGH THE JUNGLE.

A. great road for motor cars is to be driven through a jungle bigger than Yorkshire, where the traveller will be able to see the wild world as it is. It will be one of the wonders of the British Empire.

We can study at close quarters in our iioos nearly every type of living creature; and at the same narrow range life from the outlands can study us. But within the Empire, in the reservations of Australia and New Zealand, on the grand bison lands of Canada, and, most magnificently of all, in South Africa, we are given a vision of the grandest scenes of wild life in the world.

Special lauds have been set apart for these free animals where they may follow their lawful occasions as Nature intended, and there we go to viiit them, taking our lives in our hands, it may be, here and there; and there multitudes of them behold suddenly, for the first time, the creatine with whom their ancestors have for ages battled for the mastery of the world, puny Man, whose brain has made him as a god among beasts and furnished with mechanical equipment beyond animal understanding.

The greatest opportunity in history for the better acquaintance of the fierce masters of the wild with human beings is now afforded by the opening up of * world's wonderland, the huge game reserves in the Eastern Transvaal, dedicated to the memory of President Kruger ind called by his name. It is almost * province in itself, untamed and unspoiled, the free home of beasts, birds, Reptiles. Men are to go there in guarded tors, to drive through as they will, to •tay at hotels and rest-houses, to play golf among the lions, racquets among Jhs rhinos, hockey among the hippos. JHuit will they think of it all? The Kroger Park is 2000 square miles ngger than Wales; its area is 9300 miles. In a direct line between P»toria and Delagoa Bay, it embraces phe famous Limpopo River, whose very brings teeming herds of hippofctamito mind; it has waterways •oisy with crocodiles; its sands are alive (fcith lizards; it has tree-clad plains, teeda, jungle, swamp, and rocky ways that Lave been from time immemorial Jh# home of lions, leopards, hyenas, jackals, antelopes, giraffes, rhinoceri, snakes, ostriches, and all manner of (birds.

Now, at the time of writing, the first of a great road through this natural paradise is being made, so that civilisation may come face to face with Unfettered Nature, may drive with an armed official in each car, perhaps to look a lion in the face, to see towering giraffes careering about, to hear the hideous laugh of the hyena as he cracks an ox's thigh-bone cast out by the butcher of a jungle village. What will the animals think of it? In Uganda, from time to time, a lion epnngs up on to a station platform snd carries off a native; a leopard makes a murderous raid on native huts; but more peaceful animals, like the birds on our own railways, and like those in the wake of fishing vessels, gather to garner the waste thrown from the trains. We may be sure that no one in Kruger Park will ever become so intimately acquainted with the rhinoceros as to be

nnnnimitiiiiiiniiuaMianmniiiumiimiiiuiiiiiiitujiniuiuiiiiiiiuuiniuiiiiiiiniiSiiiuiiiaiiiiui'inu able to feed it, and that the girafl'e will never surrender his power to slay a man with a single swing of his head or break him in two with a kick. The lions, seeing us on the move in their domain, must surely think, in a lion-like way, "This is indeed a tempting of Providence." And the crocodile, which can drag down a hippopotamus to death, cannot but regard human visitors to the ford by which he lurks as so much luxury awaiting his appetite and the appointed hour.

"We know what the presence of man means to untamed creatures brought hi from freedom. The new lion claws his bars aDd seeks to devour the hand that feeds him; the big herb-eater charges the timbers and railings that enclose him, and not always without success. The spitting snake covers with venom the glass that divides us from him; the lish dashes madly against the trans-

parent barriers; the pythoa whose den is invaded throws his crushing coils round his keeper, and well for the man it is if the grip does not instantly tighten and break his every bone. The heavily-armoured spiral staircases in the houses of the rhinos and hippos at the Zoo show the line of retreat up which the keepers must run when the lords of the dens reveal that it is their whim to gore or grind a niau to death; and we may infer from that what our tourists may expect if they go out to pet creatures whose spirits are uncowed, whose fierceness is uncurbed, whose freedom of movement has never been disputed. Let us imagine ourselves going through this huge African domain. A lion is in the path. We are not allowed any sort of gun; only the Government guards

may be thus armed. The hoot of a motor Lorn, a sharp clang of a bicycle bell, may serve to frighten off the king of the wilds; but other great beasts whoop, and leathery hides may take it into their heads to eharge. Like the Vikings of old, some rhinos and hippos must have a fight at times in keep themselves in training, and a rhino will charge u tree or even a thornv bush

again and again in desperate fury, until lie is turn or battered into placidity.

And what will happen, one wonders, when the inhabitants of the wild see their reflections in the shining surface of the rushing car? We know what happened to one of the larger apes which saw his own image in a mirror thrown into his cage. Looking behind the mirror,

and failing by any means to establish contact with the elusive image, the great ape finally, in a rage, dashed the mirror on the floor and smashed it. Still hammering the pieces with the frame, he caught sight of himself in a fragment of the glass, and resumed the attack until, finally baliled, he beat the remainder of the mirror to small pieces and ground the frame to splinters with his teeth, so that scarcely a vestige of his reflection was left.

So if a lion or a leopard should see himself mirrored in a passing car, or in the window of one of the hotels, we shall know what to expect. There will be many surprises, many deceptions, for the animals. An eclipse of the sun sends them to bed or calls the night wanderers from their hiding. When the

hotels light up their windows and illumine the jungle at night, what will these great beasts do? Will they think it day, and liie them Lack to dens and reeds and elephant grass?

Much may ho learned from this advance of civilisation into the wilds; it is one of the most interesting experiments ever tried, and, if wc must not hope to sec the liou lying down with the lamb, there may in time come a better understanding between man and the kindlier beasts. Living unmolested in their natural surroundings, these may lose their fear of man, »bij, at any rate, will learn many things about wild life which are as yet unknown and which no study of captive life can possibly teach him.

KING , BILLY IS DEAD.

LONELY AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL

King Billy of Canberra has gone, and old Australia feels lonely witheut him. Xew Australia is too new to know what a magnificent figure King Billy was.

King Billy was a picturesque old man whom any settler who did not know any better might easily have ordered off Vr grounds. He was not very clean, ai»d he wore an indescribable collection of old clothes; nothing in the way of clothes appealed to Billy until they were ready to be thrown away. There was always a dog at the heels of this ragged old figure, and thus he wandered in and out of Canberra, looking and watching,

h:s dim, faithful old heart reaching out to a past that was hidden from the young folk hurrying by.

It is always lonely to be last of your clan. King Billy was the last of the aboriginal tribe who had once hunted over tho Cotter and the Molonglo. He had stood by. first in bitter resentment, tflen in humility, fear, and respect as the white man advanced and planted his civilisation on the ashes of the old.

Billy the native, with his dog at his heels, saw the first telegraph wires laid. He may for a time have shared the idea of many of tho natives that the telegraph was tho white man's boundary fence, and scanned it as a piece of foolishness; he had sometimes seen tho lads climb up and cut tho wire of that absurd lcn.e. Biiiv stood bv and marvelled. He saw acre after acre taken in irom the wild, swept clean of its rugged life; he saw it all grow into a capital.

He was there when the new Parliament House was built; and when it was opened by the Duke of York King Billy was on the edge of the crowd, uncon-.-idered, forgotten. There was no place for him in the great procession, but his eyes looked out 011 a ceremony which was the last of the many a we-inspiring sights planned by the -white men who had borrowed his hunting-grounds to live in. King Billy felt very small and insignificant and very lonely, for he knew that the old order was yielding place to new, and for the lust of his race, there was soon going to be no home anywhere. The capital of a continent had swallowed up his home. He knew that the white man's prince was a great Big Chief, but he would not have been human if he had not remembered other chiefs and other days and the hunting-grounds of old.

Billy has gone; he passed away at ninety, an old man alone, with not one member of his tribe and no member of his race left to follow him to his grave.