Page:Livingstone in Africa.djvu/48

They wear enormous heads upon their shoulders
They build their pigmy booths in dim recesses
Of some impenetrable forest world!
Two travellers⁴ lately came upon their traces.

Here are no mouldering monuments of glory,
Confused dim ruin of long centuries;
As though ashamed of human purposes,
Suffering slow conversion to the ways
Of soft-outlined harmonious natural things,
Flower and herb, and weatherhued worn stone.
Yet here Napoleons and Tamerlanes
Have temper'd to a life-devouring sword
The drossy coarseness of humanity:
Only their mighty Mother in more scorn
Spurns in an hour the poor fantastic toil!
A millstone, lost in verdure or black ooze;
Cairns upon hillsides; fragments of rude jars;
Obsidian implements with fossil bones,
Buried in bowels of unquarried rock;
These are the memories Earth retains of man.
And yet the dead are in the forest mould,