MYSTERY OF BIG HOLE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19454, 13 November 1925, Page 8

MYSTERY OF BIG HOLE

PIT IN DARKEST AFRICA. ‘ LEGENDS AMONG NATIVES. STRANGE UNKNOWN MONSTER. Whore the road ends in North Rhodesia, and unknown mid-Africa begins, a great hole a hundred feet wide pits the desert. The Mashona and Matab6le shun it. To the native it is the Forbidden Pit in whoso depths some strange unknown monster lives. In the native mind it has produced such a horror that a few years ago some of the Ila people tied themselves together and flung themselves into its depths as a sacrifice. A visit has lately been made to the pit by a friend of Mr. Worthington, was was the Native Commissioner there. He found the strange pit, though it was hard to get a native guide to take him there, and peered into the depths in which water from some underground river has risen now to within 40ft of the top. He saw no strange beasts, but the native assertion that they are still concealed in tho forests and swamps of that wild country cannot be shaken. Lewanki, the late chief of the Barotsc, a very intelligent man, more than once told Mr. Worthington that near marshes about tho Forbidden Pit ho had seen an animal like a monstrous hippopotamus, but many times larger, which swirled aw*ay as he looked, but left behind it tho traces of its crawling limbs like ruts of waggon wheels. Tho Age of Reptiles. The story conjures up visions of some great reptile like tho plesiosaurus, which wallowed in the swamps of Africa millions of years before the most ancient man walked there. Fifty miles from tho Forbidden Pit the skull of Africa’s earliest known man was found, a contemporary of the cave men of Europe. Could ho ever have seen this monster or its ancestors?

It seems impossible, says a London paper, that any such prehistoric monster could have survived tho frightful upheaval which cut off tho. age of reptiles on the earth from which followed it and brought in tho reign of the mammals. It seems incredible that in any portion of the ‘world, how ever secluded and shut off from the rest, any such creatures could have lived through tho gap of millions of years. Yet the stories of the survival of unknown extinct monsters cannot be disregarded. An expedition was sent to South America to find in Patagonia tho extinct giant sloth. It was never found, but its living traces . wore. If it is extinct it has only just become so. In the forests of Borneo tho native hunters say that there flies a monstrous b*at as largo as a dragon. Where Time Might Stand Still. If no such extinct reptile can haunt the country of the Forbidden Pit, is there any other extinct animal which might be found there? The earth changes in a hundred years aro enormous, and. suffice by themselves to extinguish races of animals, birds, beasts, and, more slowly, reptiles. Tn Africa there arc *a number of animals which, according 1o tho geological time-piece, have only lately become extinct, and there seems no reason why in some protected spot where food is plentiful and enemies few some of these ancient animals should not have survived to show tho world, like the okapi, that they are not yet prehistoric.