The following account, which St. Barbe shared many times, is taken from two of his books, My Life, My Trees, (1970) and I Planted Trees (1944). It relates one of his first adventures in Africa, which took place perhaps as early as 1920.

In another telling in print, in Dance of the Trees, (1956) he explained, "The compass was accurate, but virtually useless as I had no idea of the extent of the forest and there were no maps of the area. We had followed old elephant trails that meandered and it would have been impossible to plot our exact position with or without maps."

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Lost in the Bamboo

"Safari." Say it over again to yourself. "Safari." It sounds full of romance... Safari simply means 'journey'...

One safari took me to the vast bamboo forests which surround the Aberdare Range … Between 7,500 and 10,000 feet up the bamboo seems to go on and on and on forever. It does not grow in clumps but is continuous, all the same distance apart like a well-seeded field of grass—giant grass fifty or sixty feet high. This Kenya bamboo is indeed a kind of grass for it is called Arundinaria alpina, the grass of the mountains. Each stem is called a culm and has joints or nodes, and each culm is comprised of nodes and internodes. Growth is very rapid and the shoot reaches its full height in about three months, growing about eight inches a day.

My job on this safari was to fell sample plots of bamboo, weigh the culms and discover how many tons of bamboo were produced per acre a year. We thought we would use bamboo for papermaking to save more valuable timber. Besides, our tests showed us that this Kenya bamboo produced a first-class paper that would not only do for wrapping tea and coffee, but for books and writing paper. There were no roads in the bamboo forest so I took thirty-six carriers who fastened their loads with a mukwa, a broad rawhide thong which was tied round a load at each end, leaving a loop long enough to reach the top of the forehead of the carrier. The loads rode in the middle of the back and left the arms free to open a passage through the bamboo culms. It was slow going and sometimes one had to squeeze oneself between two culms sideways. It was easy to lose oneself and I did! None of my carriers had been here before and they had complete confidence in me. If they had suspected that I had lost my way they might have grounded their loads and left me to my fate, or more likely they would have sat down in despair to await their fate in this bamboo prison from which there seemed little hope of escape. It is difficult for the spoilt children of western civilization to imagine the predicament of a man lost in a vast bamboo forest with not a solid tree for him to climb to regain his bearings. If only he could shin up a culm and look out on some known feature in the landscape or spot a distant mountain peak, he might regain his lost sense of direction. But if he starts to climb, he will reach less than halfway before the giant stalk begins to waver and bend under his weight and he slips down or is thrown to earth.

The damp floor of the bamboo forest is no place to sleep, and with little hope of making camp he trudges on till even the dim light fades and soon night closes down on him like a black curtain of despair. It is bad enough to be lost in daylight, but it is much worse when night comes and the unsteady flare of the oil lamp distorts the giant bamboos into grim and fantastic shapes which seem to spring up out of the dark and trap the traveler in a living cage, imprisoning him on all sides. There is always the risk that his trail may have been followed by some hungry leopard, or that his scent may disturb an elephant in his mountain home. He is truly in a most difficult predicament.

I was that man who had lost all sense of direction but dared not admit it to my companions. I busied myself examining the culms to see if they had a weather side, which would give me a clue to the direction of the prevailing wind. I found nothing. I lit a fire of dried culms and lay on the damp floor of leaves and sheaths and listened to the silence broken only by the swish of the leaves and creaking sounds, which sounded like shrieks from a person being tortured. These gruesome sounds came from interlocked bamboos as they moved in the wind. (My Life, My Trees, pp. 44-46.)

We were up and only too glad to be away at dawn. We were cold and wet and still lost, lost in a forest of giant bamboo ten thousand feet up somewhere on that imaginary line known as the Equator. How fantastic, how contradictory it seemed! It could not have been many degrees above freezing. I had yet to learn what a continent of contrasts was Africa.

While I was smothering the last embers of the fire, the sun rose and once again I tried to pick up my bearings. Ignoring the direction from which I thought we had come, I struck out on a new line. After about half an hour the bamboos began to decrease in size and soon there were few over thirty feet in height… The ground was rising, the bamboos were shortening and I had high hopes of soon escaping from them. For the first time for days, too, I was beginning to feel some small warmth from the sun. Quickly now the bamboos were dwindling in height to twenty feet and less and arranging themselves into clumps, leaving more open ground in between. I could now walk with ease and quickened my pace. Presently, with little warning, the bamboo forest opened out into a fairy-like glade. I shouted for joy, though my voice echoed back weirdly distorted and came unexpectedly from behind and out of the long night of dark forebodings. Here at my feet were clusters of everlasting flowers with golden centres just like those my mother used to pick at home towards the end of the summer and keep for the winter…

I walked on and the bamboos receded on either side. The ground was deep in damp moss and I was surrounded by phantom growths of giant heather with gnarled and twisted stems all draped with lichens. A morning haze hung low, but as I came on to higher ground it suddenly cleaved as if at the bidding of a magic wand and there, perhaps eighty miles away, towered the peak of Mount Kenya, Kerenyaga—Possessor of Whiteness…

I retraced my way through giant groundsel nine or ten feet high, giant lobelias that have to be seen to be believed, and once again entered the bamboo forests, which no longer troubled me. We would travel for a whole day without seeing anything but bamboos. In many regions progress was slow and I was thankful to follow elephant herds that had trampled their way through the denser places with the ease of a man walking through a cornfield.