Explore "The World of the Great Forest" by Paul B. Du Chaillu on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Evil days were now coming for the njokoos. During all the years they had been in the forest they had escaped many dangers, but henceforth they were to encounter great peril and disaster. In their wanderings they came at last to a part of the immense forest where there were villages inhabited by wild, fierce human beings.
These human beings were very cunning. They spent a great part of their lives sleeping in the forest, hunting njokoos for the sake of their ivory tusks, which they could barter; besides, they liked njokoo meat very much. They had all kinds of contrivances to trap njokoos. They dug many pits for them to fall into and made many _hanous_, or huge beams armed with big iron spikes, suspended among the trees, with lianas as ropes attached to them and coming to the ground, so that when the njokoos touched these, the heavy hanous, with their iron spikes, fell upon their backs.