LOST "UP NORTH”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 June 1941, Page 7

LOST "UP NORTH”

DISCOVERY OF A WATERFALL. South African soldiers in East Africa went for a walk in a forest adjoining their camp and lost their way. They were gone 12 hours, sleeping the night out, when a search party found them. They told a fantastic story. In a ravine five miles from a camp where thousands of South African troops were living on a water ration of half a gallon a day, they had discovered, they said, a waterfall of crystal clear water. They were placed under arrest for being absent without leave, and told to refind the water. After two days’ searching they found it. The bacteriological expert pronounced the water pure and drinkable. The engineer said it would yield 31.000 gallons per hour. And the roaming soldiery were punished by being made to assist their unit in chopping a road through the trees to the waterpoint. The officer who recounts the incident said he visited the waterfall and marvelled at nature in the raw. He saw huge, tall, straight trees, and how mighty were the fallen. The monkey ropes surpassed anything he had ever seen in jungle films. "We saw,’ he writes, "plenty of huge baboons who paid no heed to humans and their motor cars, but just went on looking for their favourite food —scorpions. I have watched the baboons, through glasses, turn over boulders, and, quick as lightning, grab a scorpion —sometimes twice the size of a matchbox—nip off its sting with their thumb and devour it alive.’