From chapter 16, “The darkest, stillest part of the night”

“With an acrobat’s agility, he gained momentum in two swift, swinging arcs downward from the top of an emergent silver oak. Then he catapulted himself high into the narrow space above the river. His descent brought him perfectly within the reach of an umbrella tree’s branches on the opposite shore. Grasping the huge splayed fronds of the nearest branch, he came to a landing on the ground as smoothly as if the tree had been a net. “Oh! Excuse me, friend,” he said on his way down. “I hope I didn’t wake up the babies.” A colony of Veiellot’s weaver birds chattered disapprovingly as the branch sprang back up. Without a moment’s pause, Bentari sprinted north, but only as far as the nearest dangling liana that offered access to his preferred pathway high above in the canopy."

The “Tree” plays a critical role in Bentari.



The next few entries pay our highest respect to a very personal tree-friend of ours.




Image: Musanga cecropioides — African corkwood tree or umbrella tree. In the tropical rainforest of the Mayombe region, in the Congo Basin.[1] By FabMoustic

[1] See: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mayombe-parasolier.JPG Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,