AFRICAN WILD LIFE

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 69, 18 September 1936, Page 11

AFRICAN WILD LIFE

SEEN FROM A CAR STRANGE CONTRASTS MR. JUSTICE OSTLER'S TR'.P There, is no one more keenly interested in Africa than his Honour Mr. justice Ostler, who has a farm at Abe'rcorh, on the way to Lake Tanganyika. He has made three trips there, the latest only thirteen months ago. Last night he gave the Wadestown and Highland Park Men's Society a most illuminating talk on the incongruities of the advance of civilisation into what were only a short time ago the wilds of the Dark Continent, and his mixture of humour and fact was irresistibly-entertaining. Mr. J. T. McDonald presided,-and the orchestra of the society enlivened a pleasant evening at intervals. . '■' in 1923 the -roads in Central Africa petered out,- he said, without getting far. but.today .Africa had been so opened, up that one could take a car from Cape Town to Cairo with very little morev trouble .than one would from invejcargill to North Cape. He had met .a party of Dutchmen who had motored through France and Spain and down" through the Sahara,' and whose only complaint.was that petrol'in that desert was 50s a gallon. He had paid no more than 2s lOd averaged throughout a trip from Cape Town to the Great Lake's in a car with a covered back rather like a butcher's van. He had incidentally caused not a little surprise to the Chief Justice in Cape Town by calling on him in this vehicle, plentiful though its prototypes were further north. fc

GOLD BETTER THAN FARMING. ; Most of the large rivers were beau* tifully bridged, thanks to the work of the Alfred Beit trustees. Beit, like his partner, Cecil Rhodes, had the idea of using, his money for the benefit of others. , l ■ ■ His own farm, purchased for 2s 6d an acre, had returned very little. Farming in Rhodesia did.not seem to give good returns,: with the exception of tobacco farming, < most of the money being made from mining., Very lowgrade reefs, as low as 3 pennyweights per ton, paid now that the price ot. gbld was so high, In Kenya he had come across the estate of an Englishman who had invested £300,000 there, but the only thing that appeared to pay him was a tea estate of 1200 acres, which returned great profits. The land in the Kenya highlands was of superb quality, continuous crops of maize being taken for 20 years off the same ground without deterioration, and returning 15 to 18 sacks of maize, per acre according to the rainfall. Off the plateau the land was not so good. Lying partly in the Belgian Congo and partly in British territory was a deposit of copper considered to be sufficient to last the world for 50 years. He predicted the springing up of a large community there. "If anyone is young and ambitious, and wishes to see at first hand an instance of the benefit of unearned increment—which has gone for ever in New Zealand—he should go there," he said. Johannesburg was prosperous owing to its big production of gold.

ELEPHANT AND LORKY. Thrilling.accounts of the vast herds of game seen in the reserves were given. In British East Africa the Government had to keep elephants down, and killed oft some 1500 annually .in; ..the endeavour to do so. "Wa'tch. toi elephants here", was- a strange sign to see on the' road, at one place, but a very advisable sign, for herds of hundreds of elephants crossed that forty-mile stretch of road daily to water. He and Mrs. Ostler were picnicking in shade near this road when they noticed a herd of 600 elephants also resting within a few chains, but fortunately they.took no notice. , On one occasion on this road a native was driving a lorry when the engine gave out. He was tinkering about i with it when a herd crossed the| road not far away. An old bull came over to see what the strange thing in the road was. the boy got into the cab. The elephant touched the hot radiator with his trunk, and got burnt. That angered him, and he smashed the radiator.with a forefoot, getting badly scalded by the hot water in the process, j Then he put his head > down and began I to'push the lorry.. The boy thought the j cab was not the safest place, and slipped out underneath the lorry. He soon found his legs sticking out in the | vicinity of the bull's head, and crawled rapidly underneath again; Seeing him there, the animal kept up his propul- 1 sion at such a pace that the boy wa#j crawling along fast. This went on for] 200 ft before the elephant tired and left.

LIONS AND SNAKES. An acquaintance of his near Abercdrri had a lion jump on the radiator of his car. It was at night, and the car was a small one of 10 h.p. A fullgrown lion weighed scwt, and this was a black-mahed male. The driver "stepped" on it, and the lion fell off in some forty yards. It had'bent the run-ning-board, but as his friend was slowing up to ease the scraping on the wheel, the boy called out that the lion was coming after them, and again he stepped oh it until far away. Another friend of his, driving along the road ten minutes before the speaker, suddenly saw something like the water supply main of a- small town right across the road, which was fifteen feet wide. Neither head nor tail was showing, he was;going too fast to stop, so accelerated and ran over the python, the car leaping well up- into the air. Going back, he was: shown the marks where the big snake had crawled over the road,,andvsome irregular marks where it:had thrashed about after being hit, but they found no signs of it, so it.must'have been more or less imhurt; ■ ..•...'.■•■■ .-..•■•:'."

• Stuck in. the mud in a game reserve near. Tanganyika, he and a couple of boys were working away to get the car out when, looking up, he counted 2000 head of game ringing the car within 200. yards in. every direction except down wind. Mr. Ostler spoke of the Ngord Ngofb crater, twelve miles across, .where,there was a kind of natural clover that attracted as many as 200,000 head of game of all sorts at times. He counted; from the edge of the crater Ave lions lying unconcernedly close to a vast herd of zebra; neither lotseemed to notice the presence of the other.

Lantern slides, each with its lesson of the plentiful presence of wild animals, wore shown by Mr. A. J. Bland, including a typical "rest house" from one of which the brother of Mr. Ostler's present African lessee was eaten by a lion, leaving nothing but the head. Many interesting stories of lions' toll on the natives and whites were told, some ,of. them ; . permeated With a... grim humour..