Travels in West Africa (Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons)
by
Mary H. Kingsley.

To my brother, C. G. Kingsley this book is dedicated.

CONTENTS

PREFACE.
PREFACE TO THE ABRIDGED EDITION OF TRAVELS IN WEST
AFRICA.
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER I.    LIVERPOOL TO
SIERRA LEONE AND THE GOLD COAST.
CHAPTER II.    FERNANDO
PO AND THE BUBIS.
CHAPTER III.  VOYAGE DOWN COAST.
CHAPTER
IV.    THE OGOWÉ.
CHAPTER V.    THE
RAPIDS OF THE OGOWÉ.
CHAPTER VI.    LEMBARENE.
CHAPTER
VII.  ON THE WAY FROM KANGWE TO LAKE NCOVI.
CHAPTER VIII. 
FROM NCOVI TO ESOON.
CHAPTER IX.    FROM ESOON TO AGONJO.
CHAPTER
X.    BUSH TRADE AND FAN CUSTOMS.
CHAPTER XI. 
  DOWN THE REMBWÉ.
CHAPTER XII.  FETISH.
CHAPTER
XIII.  FETISH – (Continued).
CHAPTER XIV.  FETISH
– (Continued).
CHAPTER XV.    FETISH – (Continued).
CHAPTER
XVI.  FETISH – (Concluded).
CHAPTER XVII.  ASCENT
OF THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE GREAT PEAK OF
CAMEROONS – (Continued).
CHAPTER XIX.  THE GREAT PEAK
OF CAMEROONS – (Continued).
CHAPTER XX.    THE
GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS – (Concluded).
CHAPTER XXI. 
TRADE AND LABOUR IN WEST AFRICA.
CHAPTER XXII.  DISEASE IN
WEST AFRICA.
APPENDIX.      THE INVENTION OF THE
CLOTH LOOM.

PREFACE

TO THE READER. – What this book wants is not a simple Preface but
an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that.  Recognising
this fully, and feeling quite incompetent to write such a masterpiece,
I have asked several literary friends to write one for me, but they
have kindly but firmly declined, stating that it is impossible satisfactorily
to apologise for my liberties with Lindley Murray and the Queen’s
English.  I am therefore left to make a feeble apology for this
book myself, and all I can personally say is that it would have been
much worse than it is had it not been for Dr. Henry Guillemard, who
has not edited it, or of course the whole affair would have been better,
but who has most kindly gone through the proof sheets, lassoing prepositions
which were straying outside their sentence stockade, taking my eye off
the water cask and fixing it on the scenery where I meant it to be,
saying firmly in pencil on margins “No you don’t,”
when I was committing some more than usually heinous literary crime,
and so on.  In cases where his activities in these things may seem
to the reader to have been wanting, I beg to state that they really
were not.  It is I who have declined to ascend to a higher level
of lucidity and correctness of diction than I am fitted for.  I
cannot forbear from mentioning my gratitude to Mr. George Macmillan
for his patience and kindness with me, – a mere jungle of information
on West Africa.  Whether you my reader will share my gratitude
is, I fear, doubtful, for if it had not been for him I should never
have attempted to write a book at all, and in order to excuse his having
induced me to try I beg to state that I have written only on things
that I know from personal experience and very careful observation. 
I have never accepted an explanation of a native custom from one person
alone, nor have I set down things as being prevalent customs from having
seen a single instance.  I have endeavoured to give you an honest
account of the general state and manner of life in Lower Guinea and
some description of the various types of country there.  In reading
this section you must make allowances for my love of this sort of country,
with its great forests and rivers and its animistic-minded inhabitants,
and for my ability to be more comfortable there than in England. 
Your superior culture-instincts may militate against your enjoying West
Africa, but if you go there you will find things as I have said.

January, 1897.

PREFACE TO THE ABRIDGED EDITION OF TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA.

When on my return to England from my second sojourn in West Africa,
I discovered, to my alarm, that I was, by a freak of fate, the sea-serpent
of the season, I published, in order to escape from this reputation,
a very condensed, much abridged version of my experiences in Lower Guinea;
and I thought that I need never explain about myself or Lower Guinea
again.  This was one of my errors.  I have been explaining
ever since; and, though not reconciled to so doing, I am more or less
resigned to it, because it gives me pleasure to see that English people
can take an interest in that land they have neglected.  Nevertheless,
it was a shock to me when the publishers said more explanation was required. 
I am thankful to say the explanation they required was merely on what
plan the abridgment of my first account had been made.  I can manage
that explanation easily.  It has been done by removing from it
certain sections whole, and leaving the rest very much as it first stood. 
Of course it would have been better if I had totally reformed and rewritten
the book in pellucid English; but that is beyond me, and I feel at any
rate this book must be better than it was, for there is less of it;
and I dimly hope critics will now see that there is a saving grace in
disconnectedness, for owing to that disconnectedness whole chapters
have come out without leaving holes.

As for the part that is left in, I have already apologised for its
form, and I cannot help it, for Lower Guinea is like what I have said
it is.  No one who knows it has sent home contradictions of my
description of it, or its natives, or their manners or customs, and
they have had by now ample time and opportunity.  The only complaints
I have had regarding my account from my fellow West Coasters have been
that I might have said more.  I trust my forbearance will send
a thrill of gratitude through readers of the 736-page edition.

There is, however, one section that I reprint, regarding which I
must say a few words.  It is that on the trade and labour problem
in West Africa, particularly the opinion therein expressed regarding
the liquor traffic.  This part has brought down on me much criticism
from the Missionary Societies and their friends; and I beg gratefully
to acknowledge the honourable fairness with which the controversy has
been carried on by the great Wesleyan Methodist Mission to the Gold
Coast and the Baptist Mission to the Congo.  It has not ended in
our agreement on this point, but it has raised my esteem of Missionary
Societies considerably; and anyone interested in this matter I beg to
refer to the Baptist Magazine for October, 1897.  Therein
will be found my answer, and the comments on it by a competent missionary
authority; for the rest of this matter I beg all readers of this book
to bear in mind that I confine myself to speaking only of the bit of
Africa I know – West Africa.  During this past summer I attended
a meeting at which Sir George Taubman Goldie spoke, and was much struck
with the truth of what he said on the difference of different African
regions.  He divided Africa into three zones: firstly, that region
where white races could colonise in the true sense of the word, and
form a great native-born white population, namely, the region of the
Cape; secondly, a region where the white race could colonise, but to
a less extent – an extent analogous to that in India – namely, the highlands
of Central East Africa and parts of Northern Africa; thirdly, a region
where the white races cannot colonise in a true sense of the word, namely,
the West African region, and in those regions he pointed out one of
the main elements of prosperity and advance is the native African population. 
I am quoting his words from memory, possibly imperfectly; but there
is very little reliable printed matter to go on when dealing with Sir
George Taubman Goldie, which is regrettable because he himself is an
experienced and reliable authority.  I am however quite convinced
that these aforesaid distinct regions are regions that the practical
politician dealing with Africa must recognise, and keep constantly in
mind when attempting to solve the many difficulties that that great
continent presents, and sincerely hope every reader of this work will
remember that I am speaking of that last zone, the zone wherein white
races cannot colonise in a true sense of the word, but which is nevertheless
a vitally important region to a great manufacturing country like England,
for therein are vast undeveloped markets wherein she can sell her manufactured
goods and purchase raw material for her manufactures at a reasonable
rate.

Having a rooted, natural, feminine hatred for politics I have no
inclination to become diffuse on them, as I have on the errors of other
people’s cooking or ideas on decoration.  I know I am held
to be too partial to France in West Africa; too fond of pointing out
her brilliant achievements there, too fond of saying the native is as
happy, and possibly happier, under her rule than under ours; and also
that I am given to a great admiration for Germans; but this is just
like any common-sense Englishwoman.  Of course I am devoted to
my own John; but still Monsieur is brave, bright, and fascinating; Mein
Herr is possessed of courage and commercial ability in the highest degree,
and, besides, he takes such a lot of trouble to know the real truth
about things, and tells them to you so calmly and carefully – and our
own John – well, of course, he is everything that’s good and great,
but he makes a shocking fool of himself at times, particularly in West
Africa.

I should enjoy holding what one of my justly irritated expurgators
used to call one of my little thanksgiving services here, but I will
not; for, after all, it would be impossible for me to satisfactorily
thank those people who, since my publication of this book, have given
me help and information on the subject of West Africa.  Chief amongst
them have been Mr. A. L. Jones, Sir. R. B. N. Walker, Mr. Irvine, and
Mr. John Holt.  I have not added to this book any information I
have received since I wrote it, as it does not seem to me fair to do
so.  My only regret regarding it is that I have not dwelt sufficiently
on the charm of West Africa; it is so difficult to explain such things;
but I am sure there are amongst my readers people who know by experience
the charm some countries exercise over men – countries very different
from each other and from West Africa.  The charm of West Africa
is a painful one: it gives you pleasure when you are out there, but
when you are back here it gives you pain by calling you.  It sends
up before your eyes a vision of a wall of dancing white, rainbow-gemmed
surf playing on a shore of yellow sand before an audience of stately
coco palms; or of a great mangrove-watered bronze river; or of a vast
aisle in some forest cathedral: and you hear, nearer to you than the
voices of the people round, nearer than the roar of the city traffic,
the sound of the surf that is breaking on the shore down there, and
the sound of the wind talking on the hard palm leaves and the thump
of the natives’ tom-toms; or the cry of the parrots passing over
the mangrove swamps in the evening time; or the sweet, long, mellow
whistle of the plantain warblers calling up the dawn; and everything
that is round you grows poor and thin in the face of the vision, and
you want to go back to the Coast that is calling you, saying, as the
African says to the departing soul of his dying friend, “Come
back, come back, this is your home.”

                                     M.
H. KINGSLEY.
October, 1897.

[NOTE. – The following chapters of the first edition are not included
in this edition: – Chap. ii., The Gold Coast; Chap. iv., Lagos Bar;
Chap. v., Voyage down Coast; Chap. vi., Libreville and Glass; Chap.
viii., Talagouga; Chap. xvi., Congo Français; Chap. xvii., The
Log of the Lafayette; Chap. xviii., From Corisco to Gaboon; Chap.
xxviii., The Islands in the Bay of Amboises; Appendix ii., Disease in
West Africa; Appendix iii., Dr. A. Günther on Reptiles and Fishes;
Appendix iv., Orthoptera, Hymenoptera, and Hemiptera.]

INTRODUCTION.

Relateth the various causes which impelled the author to embark
upon the voyage.

It was in 1893 that, for the first time in my life, I found myself
in possession of five or six months which were not heavily forestalled,
and feeling like a boy with a new half-crown, I lay about in my mind,
as Mr. Bunyan would say, as to what to do with them.  “Go
and learn your tropics,” said Science.  Where on earth am
I to go? I wondered, for tropics are tropics wherever found, so I got
down an atlas and saw that either South America or West Africa must
be my destination, for the Malayan region was too far off and too expensive. 
Then I got Wallace’s Geographical Distribution and after
reading that master’s article on the Ethiopian region I hardened
my heart and closed with West Africa.  I did this the more readily
because while I knew nothing of the practical condition of it, I knew
a good deal both by tradition and report of South East America, and
remembered that Yellow Jack was endemic, and that a certain naturalist,
my superior physically and mentally, had come very near getting starved
to death in the depressing society of an expedition slowly perishing
of want and miscellaneous fevers up the Parana.

My ignorance regarding West Africa was soon removed.  And although
the vast cavity in my mind that it occupied is not even yet half filled
up, there is a great deal of very curious information in its place. 
I use the word curious advisedly, for I think many seemed to translate
my request for practical hints and advice into an advertisement that
“Rubbish may be shot here.”  This same information
is in a state of great confusion still, although I have made heroic
efforts to codify it.  I find, however, that it can almost all
be got in under the following different headings, namely and to wit:
–

The dangers of West Africa.
The disagreeables of West Africa.
The
diseases of West Africa.
The things you must take to West Africa.
The
things you find most handy in West Africa.
The worst possible things
you can do in West Africa.

I inquired of all my friends as a beginning what they knew of West
Africa.  The majority knew nothing.  A percentage said, “Oh,
you can’t possibly go there; that’s where Sierra Leone is,
the white mans grave, you know.”  If these were pressed further,
one occasionally found that they had had relations who had gone out
there after having been “sad trials,” but, on consideration
of their having left not only West Africa, but this world, were now
forgiven and forgotten.

I next turned my attention to cross-examining the doctors. 
“Deadliest spot on earth,” they said cheerfully, and showed
me maps of the geographical distribution of disease.  Now I do
not say that a country looks inviting when it is coloured in Scheele’s
green or a bilious yellow, but these colours may arise from lack of
artistic gift in the cartographer.  There is no mistaking what
he means by black, however, and black you’ll find they colour
West Africa from above Sierra Leone to below the Congo.  “I
wouldn’t go there if I were you,” said my medical friends,
“you’ll catch something; but if you must go, and you’re
as obstinate as a mule, just bring me – ” and then followed a
list of commissions from here to New York, any one of which – but I
only found that out afterwards.

All my informants referred me to the missionaries.  “There
were,” they said, in an airy way, “lots of them down there,
and had been for many years.”  So to missionary literature
I addressed myself with great ardour; alas! only to find that these
good people wrote their reports not to tell you how the country they
resided in was, but how it was getting on towards being what it ought
to be, and how necessary it was that their readers should subscribe
more freely, and not get any foolishness into their heads about obtaining
an inadequate supply of souls for their money.  I also found fearful
confirmation of my medical friends’ statements about its unhealthiness,
and various details of the distribution of cotton shirts over which
I did not linger.

From the missionaries it was, however, that I got my first idea about
the social condition of West Africa.  I gathered that there existed
there, firstly the native human beings – the raw material, as it were
– and that these were led either to good or bad respectively by the
missionary and the trader.  There were also the Government representatives,
whose chief business it was to strengthen and consolidate the missionary’s
work, a function they carried on but indifferently well.  But as
for those traders! well, I put them down under the dangers of West Africa
at once.  Subsequently I came across the good old Coast yarn of
how, when a trader from that region went thence, it goes without saying
where, the Fallen Angel without a moment’s hesitation vacated
the infernal throne (Milton) in his favour.  This, I beg to note,
is the marine form of the legend.  When it occurs terrestrially
the trader becomes a Liverpool mate.  But of course no one need
believe it either way – it is not a missionary’s story.

Naturally, while my higher intelligence was taken up with attending
to these statements, my mind got set on going, and I had to go. 
Fortunately I could number among my acquaintances one individual who
had lived on the Coast for seven years.  Not, it is true, on that
part of it which I was bound for.  Still his advice was pre-eminently
worth attention, because, in spite of his long residence in the deadliest
spot of the region, he was still in fair going order.  I told him
I intended going to West Africa, and he said, “When you have made
up your mind to go to West Africa the very best thing you can do is
to get it unmade again and go to Scotland instead; but if your intelligence
is not strong enough to do so, abstain from exposing yourself to the
direct rays of the sun, take 4 grains of quinine every day for a fortnight
before you reach the Rivers, and get some introductions to the Wesleyans;
they are the only people on the Coast who have got a hearse with feathers.”

My attention was next turned to getting ready things to take with
me.  Having opened upon myself the sluice gates of advice, I rapidly
became distracted.  My friends and their friends alike seemed to
labour under the delusion that I intended to charter a steamer and was
a person of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.  This not being
the case, the only thing to do was to gratefully listen and let things
drift.

Not only do the things you have got to take, but the things you have
got to take them in, present a fine series of problems to the young
traveller.  Crowds of witnesses testified to the forms of baggage
holders they had found invaluable, and these, it is unnecessary to say,
were all different in form and material.

With all this embarras de choix I was too distracted to buy
anything new in the way of baggage except a long waterproof sack neatly
closed at the top with a bar and handle.  Into this I put blankets,
boots, books, in fact anything that would not go into my portmanteau
or black bag.  From the first I was haunted by a conviction that
its bottom would come out, but it never did, and in spite of the fact
that it had ideas of its own about the arrangement of its contents,
it served me well throughout my voyage.

It was the beginning of August ’93 when I first left England
for “the Coast.”  Preparations of quinine with postage
partially paid arrived up to the last moment, and a friend hastily sent
two newspaper clippings, one entitled “A Week in a Palm-oil Tub,”
which was supposed to describe the sort of accommodation, companions,
and fauna likely to be met with on a steamer going to West Africa, and
on which I was to spend seven to The Graphic contributor’s
one; the other from The Daily Telegraph, reviewing a French book
of “Phrases in common use” in Dahomey.  The opening
sentence in the latter was, “Help, I am drowning.” 
Then came the inquiry, “If a man is not a thief?” and then
another cry, “The boat is upset.”  “Get up, you
lazy scamps,” is the next exclamation, followed almost immediately
by the question, “Why has not this man been buried?” 
“It is fetish that has killed him, and he must lie here exposed
with nothing on him until only the bones remain,” is the cheerful
answer.  This sounded discouraging to a person whose occupation
would necessitate going about considerably in boats, and whose fixed
desire was to study fetish.  So with a feeling of foreboding gloom
I left London for Liverpool – none the more cheerful for the matter-of-fact
manner in which the steamboat agents had informed me that they did not
issue return tickets by the West African lines of steamers.  I
will not go into the details of that voyage here, much as I am given
to discursiveness.  They are more amusing than instructive, for
on my first voyage out I did not know the Coast, and the Coast did not
know me and we mutually terrified each other.  I fully expected
to get killed by the local nobility and gentry; they thought I was connected
with the World’s Women’s Temperance Association, and collecting
shocking details for subsequent magic-lantern lectures on the liquor
traffic; so fearful misunderstandings arose, but we gradually educated
each other, and I had the best of the affair; for all I had got to teach
them was that I was only a beetle and fetish hunter, and so forth, while
they had to teach me a new world, and a very fascinating course of study
I found it.  And whatever the Coast may have to say against me
– for my continual desire for hair-pins, and other pins, my intolerable
habit of getting into water, the abominations full of ants, that I brought
into their houses, or things emitting at unexpectedly short notice vivid
and awful stenches – they cannot but say that I was a diligent pupil,
who honestly tried to learn the lessons they taught me so kindly, though
some of those lessons were hard to a person who had never previously
been even in a tame bit of tropics, and whose life for many years had
been an entirely domestic one in a University town.

One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based
on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around
me, and found them either worthless or wanting.  The greatest recantation
I had to make I made humbly before I had been three months on the Coast
in 1893.  It was of my idea of the traders.  What I had expected
to find them was a very different thing to what I did find them; and
of their kindness to me I can never sufficiently speak, for on that
voyage I was utterly out of touch with the governmental circles, and
utterly dependent on the traders, and the most useful lesson of all
the lessons I learnt on the West Coast in 1893 was that I could trust
them.  Had I not learnt this very thoroughly I could never have
gone out again and carried out the voyage I give you a sketch of in
this book.

Thanks to “the Agent,” I have visited places I could
never otherwise have seen; and to the respect and affection in which
he is held by the native, I owe it that I have done so in safety. 
When I have arrived off his factory in a steamer or canoe unexpected,
unintroduced, or turned up equally unheralded out of the bush in a dilapidated
state, he has always received me with that gracious hospitality which
must have given him, under Coast conditions, very real trouble and inconvenience
– things he could have so readily found logical excuses against entailing
upon himself for the sake of an individual whom he had never seen before
– whom he most likely would never see again – and whom it was no earthly
profit to him to see then.  He has bestowed himself – Allah only
knows where – on his small trading vessels so that I might have his
one cabin.  He has fished me out of sea and fresh water with boat-hooks;
he has continually given me good advice, which if I had only followed
would have enabled me to keep out of water and any other sort of affliction;
and although he holds the meanest opinion of my intellect for going
to such a place as West Africa for beetles, fishes and fetish, he has
given me the greatest assistance in my work.  The value of that
work I pray you withhold judgment on, until I lay it before you in some
ten volumes or so mostly in Latin.  All I know that is true regarding
West African facts, I owe to the traders; the errors are my own.

To Dr. Günther, of the British Museum, I am deeply grateful
for the kindness and interest he has always shown regarding all the
specimens of natural history that I have been able to lay before him;
the majority of which must have had very old tales to tell him. 
Yet his courtesy and attention gave me the thing a worker in any work
most wants – the sense that the work was worth doing – and sent me back
to work again with the knowledge that if these things interested a man
like him, it was a more than sufficient reason for me to go on collecting
them.  To Mr. W. H. F. Kirby I am much indebted for his working
out my small collection of certain Orders of insects; and to Mr. Thomas
S. Forshaw, for the great help he has afforded me in revising my notes.

It is impossible for me even to catalogue my debts of gratitude still
outstanding to the West Coast.  Chiefly am I indebted to Mr. C.
G. Hudson, whose kindness and influence enabled me to go up the Ogowé
and to see as much of Congo Français as I have seen, and his
efforts to take care of me were most ably seconded by Mr. Fildes. 
The French officials in “Congo Français” never hindered
me, and always treated me with the greatest kindness.  You may
say there was no reason why they should not, for there is nothing in
this fine colony of France that they need be ashamed of any one seeing;
but I find it is customary for travellers to say the French officials
throw obstacles in the way of any one visiting their possessions, so
I merely beg to state this was decidedly not my experience; although
my deplorable ignorance of French prevented me from explaining my humble
intentions to them.

The Rev. Dr. Nassau and Mr. R. E. Dennett have enabled me, by placing
at my disposal the rich funds of their knowledge of native life and
idea, to amplify any deductions from my own observation.  Mr. Dennett’s
work I have not dealt with in this work because it refers to tribes
I was not amongst on this journey, but to a tribe I made the acquaintance
with in my ’93 voyage – the Fjort.  Dr. Nassau’s observations
I have referred to.  Herr von Lucke, Vice-governor of Cameroon,
I am indebted to for not only allowing me, but for assisting me by every
means in his power, to go up Cameroons Peak, and to the Governor of
Cameroon, Herr von Puttkamer, for his constant help and kindness. 
Indeed so great has been the willingness to help me of all these gentlemen,
that it is a wonder to me, when I think of it, that their efforts did
not project me right across the continent and out at Zanzibar. 
That this brilliant affair did not come off is owing to my own lack
of enterprise; for I did not want to go across the continent, and I
do not hanker after Zanzibar, but only to go puddling about obscure
districts in West Africa after raw fetish and fresh-water fishes.

I owe my ability to have profited by the kindness of these gentlemen
on land, to a gentleman of the sea – Captain Murray.  He was captain
of the vessel I went out on in 1893, and he saw then that my mind was
full of errors that must be eradicated if I was going to deal with the
Coast successfully; and so he eradicated those errors and replaced them
with sound knowledge from his own stores collected during an acquaintance
with the West Coast of over thirty years.  The education he has
given me has been of the greatest value to me, and I sincerely hope
to make many more voyages under him, for I well know he has still much
to teach and I to learn.

Last, but not least, I must chronicle my debts to the ladies. 
First to those two courteous Portuguese ladies, Donna Anna de Sousa
Coutinho e Chichorro and her sister Donna Maria de Sousa Coutinho, who
did so much for me in Kacongo in 1893, and have remained, I am proud
to say, my firm friends ever since.  Lady MacDonald and Miss Mary
Slessor I speak of in this book, but only faintly sketch the pleasure
and help they have afforded me; nor have I fully expressed my gratitude
for the kindness of Madame Jacot of Lembarene, or Madame Forget of Talagouga. 
Then there are a whole list of nuns belonging to the Roman Catholic
Missions on the South West Coast, ever cheery and charming companions;
and Frau Plehn, whom it was a continual pleasure to see in Cameroons,
and discourse with once again on things that seemed so far off then
– art, science, and literature; and Mrs. H. Duggan, of Cameroons too,
who used, whenever I came into that port to rescue me from fearful states
of starvation for toilet necessaries, and lend a sympathetic and intelligent
ear to the “awful sufferings” I had gone through, until
Cameroons became to me a thing to look forward to.

When in the Canaries in 1892, I used to smile, I regretfully own,
at the conversation of a gentleman from the Gold Coast who was up there
recruiting after a bad fever.  His conversation consisted largely
of anecdotes of friends of his, and nine times in ten he used to say,
“He’s dead now.”  Alas! my own conversation may
be smiled at now for the same cause.  Many of my friends mentioned
even in this very recent account of the Coast “are dead now.” 
Most of those I learnt to know in 1893; chief among these is my old
friend Captain Boler, of Bonny, from whom I first learnt a certain power
of comprehending the African and his form of thought.

I have great reason to be grateful to the Africans themselves – to
cultured men and women among them like Charles Owoo, Mbo, Sanga Glass,
Jane Harrington and her sister at Gaboon, and to the bush natives; but
of my experience with them I give further details, so I need not dwell
on them here.

I apologise to the general reader for giving so much detail on matters
that really only affect myself, and I know that the indebtedness which
all African travellers have to the white residents in Africa is a matter
usually very lightly touched on.  No doubt my voyage would seem
a grander thing if I omitted mention of the help I received, but – well,
there was a German gentleman once who evolved a camel out of his inner
consciousness.  It was a wonderful thing; still, you know, it was
not a good camel, only a thing which people personally unacquainted
with camels could believe in.  Now I am ambitious to make a picture,
if I make one at all, that people who do know the original can believe
in – even if they criticise its points – and so I give you details a
more showy artist would omit.

CHAPTER I.  LIVERPOOL TO SIERRA LEONE AND THE GOLD COAST.

Setting forth how the voyager departs from England in a stout
vessel and in good company, and reaches in due course the Island of
the Grand Canary, and then the Port of Sierra Leone: to which is added
some account of this latter place and the comeliness of its women. 
Wherein also some description of Cape Coast and Accra is given, to which
are added divers observations on supplies to be obtained there.

The West Coast of Africa is like the Arctic regions in one particular,
and that is that when you have once visited it you want to go back there
again; and, now I come to think of it, there is another particular in
which it is like them, and that is that the chances you have of returning
from it at all are small, for it is a Belle Dame sans merci.

I succumbed to the charm of the Coast as soon as I left Sierra Leone
on my first voyage out, and I saw more than enough during that voyage
to make me recognise that there was any amount of work for me worth
doing down there.  So I warned the Coast I was coming back again
and the Coast did not believe me; and on my return to it a second time
displayed a genuine surprise, and formed an even higher opinion of my
folly than it had formed on our first acquaintance, which is saying
a good deal.

During this voyage in 1893, I had been to Old Calabar, and its Governor,
Sir Claude MacDonald, had heard me expatiating on the absorbing interest
of the Antarctic drift, and the importance of the collection of fresh-water
fishes and so on.  So when Lady MacDonald heroically decided to
go out to him in Calabar, they most kindly asked me if I would join
her, and make my time fit hers for starting on my second journey. 
This I most willingly did.  But I fear that very sweet and gracious
lady suffered a great deal of apprehension at the prospect of spending
a month on board ship with a person so devoted to science as to go down
the West Coast in its pursuit.  During the earlier days of our
voyage she would attract my attention to all sorts of marine objects
overboard, so as to amuse me.  I used to look at them, and think
it would be the death of me if I had to work like this, explaining meanwhile
aloud that “they were very interesting, but Haeckel had done them,
and I was out after fresh-water fishes from a river north of the Congo
this time,” fearing all the while that she felt me unenthusiastic
for not flying over into the ocean to secure the specimens.

However, my scientific qualities, whatever they may amount to, did
not blind this lady long to the fact of my being after all a very ordinary
individual, and she told me so – not in these crude words, indeed, but
nicely and kindly – whereupon, in a burst of gratitude to her for understanding
me, I appointed myself her honorary aide-de-camp on the spot, and her
sincere admirer I shall remain for ever, fully recognising that her
courage in going to the Coast was far greater than my own, for she had
more to lose had fever claimed her, and she was in those days by no
means under the spell of Africa.  But this is anticipating.

It was on the 23rd of December, 1894, that we left Liverpool in the
Batanga, commanded by my old friend Captain Murray, under whose
care I had made my first voyage.  On the 30th we sighted the Peak
of Teneriffe early in the afternoon.  It displayed itself, as usual,
as an entirely celestial phenomenon.  A great many people miss
seeing it.  Suffering under the delusion that El Pico is a terrestrial
affair, they look in vain somewhere about the level of their own eyes,
which are striving to penetrate the dense masses of mist that usually
enshroud its slopes by day, and then a friend comes along, and gaily
points out to the newcomer the glittering white triangle somewhere near
the zenith.  On some days the Peak stands out clear from ocean
to summit, looking every inch and more of its 12,080 ft.; and this is
said by the Canary fishermen to be a certain sign of rain, or fine weather,
or a gale of wind; but whenever and however it may be seen, soft and
dream-like in the sunshine, or melodramatic and bizarre in the moonlight,
it is one of the most beautiful things the eye of man may see.

Soon after sighting Teneriffe, Lançarote showed, and then
the Grand Canary.  Teneriffe is perhaps the most beautiful, but
it is hard to judge between it and Grand Canary as seen from the sea. 
The superb cone this afternoon stood out a deep purple against a serpent-green
sky, separated from the brilliant blue ocean by a girdle of pink and
gold cumulus, while Grand Canary and Lançarote looked as if they
were formed from fantastic-shaped sunset cloud-banks that by some spell
had been solidified.  The general colour of the mountains of Grand
Canary, which rise peak after peak until they culminate in the Pico
de las Nieves, some 6,000 feet high, is a yellowish red, and the air
which lies among their rocky crevices and swathes their softer sides
is a lovely lustrous blue.

Just before the sudden dark came down, and when the sun was taking
a curve out of the horizon of sea, all the clouds gathered round the
three islands, leaving the sky a pure amethyst pink, and as a good-night
to them the sun outlined them with rims of shining gold, and made the
snow-clad Peak of Teneriffe blaze with star-white light.  In a
few minutes came the dusk, and as we neared Grand Canary, out of its
cloud-bank gleamed the red flash of the lighthouse on the Isleta, and
in a few more minutes, along the sea level, sparkled the five miles
of irregularly distributed lights of Puerto de la Luz and the city of
Las Palmas.

We reached Sierra Leone at 9 A.M. on the 7th of January, and as the
place is hardly so much in touch with the general public as the Canaries
are {14} I may perhaps
venture to go more into details regarding it.  The harbour is formed
by the long low strip of land to the north called the Bullam shore,
and to the south by the peninsula terminating in Cape Sierra Leone,
a sandy promontory at the end of which is situated a lighthouse of irregular
habits.  Low hills covered with tropical forest growth rise from
the sandy shores of the Cape, and along its face are three creeks or
bays, deep inlets showing through their narrow entrances smooth beaches
of yellow sand, fenced inland by the forest of cotton-woods and palms,
with here and there an elephantine baobab.

The first of these bays is called Pirate Bay, the next English Bay,
and the third Kru Bay.  The wooded hills of the Cape rise after
passing Kru Bay, and become spurs of the mountain, 2,500 feet in height,
which is the Sierra Leone itself.  There are, however, several
mountains here besides the Sierra Leone, the most conspicuous of them
being the peak known as Sugar Loaf, and when seen from the sea they
are very lovely, for their form is noble, and a wealth of tropical vegetation
covers them, which, unbroken in its continuity, but endless in its variety,
seems to sweep over their sides down to the shore like a sea, breaking
here and there into a surf of flowers.

It is the general opinion, indeed, of those who ought to know that
Sierra Leone appears at its best when seen from the sea, particularly
when you are leaving the harbour homeward bound; and that here its charms,
artistic, moral, and residential, end.  But, from the experience
I have gained of it, I have no hesitation in saying that it is one of
the best places for getting luncheon in that I have ever happened on,
and that a more pleasant and varied way of spending an afternoon than
going about its capital, Free Town, with a certain Irish purser, who
is as well known as he is respected among the leviathan old negro ladies,
it would be hard to find.  Still it must be admitted it is
rather hot.

Free Town its capital is situated on the northern base of the mountain,
and extends along the sea-front with most business-like wharves, quays,
and warehouses.  Viewed from the harbour, “The Liverpool
of West Africa,” {15}
as it is called, looks as if it were built of gray stone, which it is
not.  When you get ashore, you will find that most of the stores
and houses – the majority of which, it may be remarked, are in a state
of acute dilapidation – are of painted wood, with corrugated iron roofs. 
Here and there, though, you will see a thatched house, its thatch covered
with creeping plants, and inhabited by colonies of creeping insects.

Some of the stores and churches are, it is true, built of stone,
but this does not look like stone at a distance, being red in colour
– unhewn blocks of the red stone of the locality.  In the crannies
of these buildings trailing plants covered with pretty mauve or yellow
flowers take root, and everywhere, along the tops of the walls, and
in the cracks of the houses, are ferns and flowering plants.  They
must get a good deal of their nourishment from the rich, thick air,
which seems composed of 85 per cent. of warm water, and the remainder
of the odours of Frangipani, orange flowers, magnolias, oleanders, and
roses, combined with others that demonstrate that the inhabitants do
not regard sanitary matters with the smallest degree of interest.

There is one central street, and the others are neatly planned out
at right angles to it.  None of them are in any way paved or metalled. 
They are covered in much prettier fashion, and in a way more suitable
for naked feet, by green Bahama grass, save and except those which are
so nearly perpendicular that they have got every bit of earth and grass
cleared off them down to the red bed-rock, by the heavy rain of the
wet season.

In every direction natives are walking at a brisk pace, their naked
feet making no sound on the springy turf of the streets, carrying on
their heads huge burdens which are usually crowned by the hat of the
bearer, a large limpet-shaped affair made of palm leaves.  While
some carry these enormous bundles, others bear logs or planks of wood,
blocks of building stone, vessels containing palm-oil, baskets of vegetables,
or tin tea-trays on which are folded shawls.  As the great majority
of the native inhabitants of Sierra Leone pay no attention whatever
to where they are going, either in this world or the next, the confusion
and noise are out of all proportion to the size of the town; and when,
as frequently happens, a section of actively perambulating burden-bearers
charge recklessly into a sedentary section, the members of which have
dismounted their loads and squatted themselves down beside them, right
in the middle of the fair way, to have a friendly yell with some acquaintances,
the row becomes terrific.

In among these crowds of country people walk stately Mohammedans,
Mandingoes, Akers, and Fulahs of the Arabised tribes of the Western
Soudan.  These are lithe, well-made men, and walk with a peculiarly
fine, elastic carriage.  Their graceful garb consists of a long
white loose-sleeved shirt, over which they wear either a long black
mohair or silk gown, or a deep bright blue affair, not altogether unlike
a University gown, only with more stuff in it and more folds. 
They are undoubtedly the gentlemen of the Sierra Leone native population,
and they are becoming an increasing faction in the town, by no means
to the pleasure of the Christians.

But to the casual visitor at Sierra Leone the Mohammedan is a mere
passing sensation.  You neither feel a burning desire to laugh
with, or at him, as in the case of the country folks, nor do you wish
to punch his head, and split his coat up his back – things you yearn
to do to that perfect flower of Sierra Leone culture, who yells your
bald name across the street at you, condescendingly informs you that
you can go and get letters that are waiting for you, while he smokes
his cigar and lolls in the shade, or in some similar way displays his
second-hand rubbishy white culture – a culture far lower and less dignified
than that of either the stately Mandingo or the bush chief.  I
do not think that the Sierra Leone dandy really means half as much insolence
as he shows; but the truth is he feels too insecure of his own real
position, in spite of all the “side” he puts on, and so
he dare not be courteous like the Mandingo or the bush Fan.

It is the costume of the people in Free Town and its harbour that
will first attract the attention of the newcomer, notwithstanding the
fact that the noise, the smell, and the heat are simultaneously making
desperate bids for that favour.  The ordinary man in the street
wears anything he may have been able to acquire, anyhow, and he does
not fasten it on securely.  I fancy it must be capillary attraction,
or some other partially-understood force, that takes part in the matter. 
It is certainly neither braces nor buttons.  There are, of course,
some articles which from their very structure are fairly secure, such
as an umbrella with the stick and ribs removed, or a shirt.  This
last-mentioned treasure, which usually becomes the property of the ordinary
man from a female relative or admirer taking in white men’s washing,
is always worn flowing free, and has such a charm in itself that the
happy possessor cares little what he continues his costume with – trousers,
loin cloth, red flannel petticoat, or rice-bag drawers, being, as he
would put it, “all same for one” to him.

The ladies are divided into three classes; the young girl you address
as “tee-tee”; the young person as “seester”;
the more mature charmer as “mammy”; but I do not advise
you to employ these terms when you are on your first visit, because
you might get misunderstood.  For, you see, by addressing a mammy
as seester, she might think either that you were unconscious of her
dignity as a married lady – a matter she would soon put you right on
– or that you were flirting, which of course was totally foreign to
your intention, and would make you uncomfortable.  My advice is
that you rigidly stick to missus or mammy.  I have seen this done
most successfully.

The ladies are almost as varied in their costume as the gentlemen,
but always neater and cleaner; and mighty picturesque they are too,
and occasionally very pretty.  A market-woman with her jolly brown
face and laughing brown eyes – eyes all the softer for a touch of antimony
– her ample form clothed in a lively print overall, made with a yoke
at the shoulders, and a full long flounce which is gathered on to the
yoke under the arms and falls fully to the feet; with her head done
up in a yellow or red handkerchief, and her snowy white teeth gleaming
through her vast smiles, is a mighty pleasant thing to see, and to talk
to.  But, Allah! the circumference of them!

The stone-built, white-washed market buildings of Free Town have
a creditably clean and tidy appearance considering the climate, and
the quantity and variety of things exposed for sale – things one wants
the pen of a Rabelais to catalogue.  Here are all manner of fruits,
some which are familiar to you in England; others that soon become so
to you in Africa.  You take them as a matter of course if you are
outward bound, but on your call homeward (if you make it) you will look
on them as a blessing and a curiosity.  For lower down, particularly
in “the Rivers,” these things are rarely to be had, and
never in such perfection as here; and to see again lettuces, yellow
oranges, and tomatoes bigger than marbles is a sensation and a joy.

One of the chief features of Free Town are the jack crows. 
Some writers say they are peculiar to Sierra Leone, others that they
are not, but both unite in calling them Picathartes gymnocephalus. 
To the white people who live in daily contact with them they are turkey
buzzards; to the natives, Yubu.  Anyhow they are evil-looking fowl,
and no ornament to the roof-ridges they choose to sit on.  The
native Christians ought to put a row of spikes along the top of their
cathedral to keep them off; the beauty of that edifice is very far from
great, and it cannot carry off the effect produced by the row of these
noisome birds as they sit along its summit, with their wings arranged
at all manner of different angles in an “all gone” way. 
One bird perhaps will have one straight out in front, and the other
casually disposed at right-angles, another both straight out in front,
and others again with both hanging hopelessly down, but none with them
neatly and tidily folded up, as decent birds’ wings should be. 
They all give the impression of having been extremely drunk the previous
evening, and of having subsequently fallen into some sticky abomination
– into blood for choice.  Being the scavengers of Free Town, however,
they are respected by the local authorities and preserved; and the natives
tell me you never see either a young or a dead one.  The latter
is a thing you would not expect, for half of them look as if they could
not live through the afternoon.  They also told me that when you
got close to them, they had a “’trong, ’trong ’niff;
’niff too much.”  I did not try, but I am quite willing
to believe this statement.

The other animals most in evidence in the streets are, first and
foremost, goats and sheep.  I have to lump them together, for it
is exceedingly difficult to tell one from the other.  All along
the Coast the empirical rule is that sheep carry their tails down, and
goats carry their tails up; fortunately you need not worry much anyway,
for they both “taste rather like the nothing that the world was
made of,” as Frau Buchholtz says, and own in addition a fibrous
texture, and a certain twang.  Small cinnamon-coloured cattle are
to be got here, but horses there are practically none.  Now and
again some one who does not see why a horse should not live here as
well as at Accra or Lagos imports one, but it always shortly dies. 
Some say it is because the natives who get their living by hammock-carrying
poison them, others say the tsetse fly finishes them off; and others,
and these I believe are right, say that entozoa are the cause. 
Small, lean, lank yellow dogs with very erect ears lead an awful existence,
afflicted by many things, but beyond all others by the goats, who, rearing
their families in the grassy streets, choose to think the dogs intend
attacking them.  Last, but not least, there is the pig – a rich
source of practice to the local lawyer.

Cape Coast Castle and then Accra were the next places of general
interest at which we stopped.  The former looks well from the roadstead,
and as if it had very recently been white-washed.  It is surrounded
by low, heavily-forested hills, which rise almost from the seashore,
and the fine mass of its old castle does not display its dilapidation
at a distance.  Moreover, the three stone forts of Victoria, William,
and Macarthy, situated on separate hills commanding the town, add to
the general appearance of permanent substantialness so different from
the usual ramshackledom of West Coast settlements.  Even when you
go ashore and have had time to recover your senses, scattered by the
surf experience, you find this substantialness a true one, not a mere
visual delusion produced by painted wood as the seeming substantialness
of Sierra Leone turns out to be when you get to close quarters with
it.  It causes one some mental effort to grasp the fact that Cape
Coast has been in European hands for centuries, but it requires a most
unmodern power of credence to realise this of any other settlement on
the whole western seaboard until you have the pleasure of seeing the
beautiful city of San Paul de Loanda, far away down south, past the
Congo.

My experience of Cape Coast on this occasion was one of the hottest,
but one of the pleasantest I have ever been through on the Gold Coast. 
The former attribute was due to the climate, the latter to my kind friends,
Mr. Batty, and Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Kemp.  I was taken round the
grand stone-built houses with their high stone-walled yards and sculpture-decorated
gateways, built by the merchants of the last century and of the century
before, and through the great rambling stone castle with its water-tanks
cut in the solid rock beneath it, and its commodious accommodation for
slaves awaiting shipment, now almost as obsolete as the guns it mounts,
but not quite so, for these cool and roomy chambers serve to house the
native constabulary and their extensive families.

This being done, I was taken up an unmitigated hill, on whose summit
stands Fort William, a pepper-pot-like structure now used as a lighthouse. 
The view from the top was exceedingly lovely and extensive.  Beneath,
and between us and the sea, lay the town in the blazing sun.  In
among its solid stone buildings patches of native mud-built huts huddled
together as though they had been shaken down out of a sack into the
town to serve as dunnage.  Then came the snow-white surf wall,
and across it the blue sea with our steamer rolling to and fro on the
long, regular swell, impatiently waiting until Sunday should be over
and she could work cargo.  Round us on all the other sides were
wooded hills and valleys, and away in the distance to the west showed
the white town and castle of Elmina and the nine-mile road thither,
skirting the surf-bound seashore, only broken on its level way by the
mouth of the Sweet River.  Over all was the brooding silence of
the noonday heat, broken only by the dulled thunder of the surf.

After seeing these things we started down stairs, and on reaching
ground descended yet lower into a sort of stone-walled dry moat, out
of which opened clean, cool, cellar-like chambers tunnelled into the
earth.  These, I was informed, had also been constructed to keep
slaves in when they were the staple export of the Gold Coast. 
They were so refreshingly cool that I lingered looking at them and their
massive doors, ere being marched up to ground level again, and down
the hill through some singularly awful stenches, mostly arising from
rubber, into the big Wesleyan church in the middle of the town. 
It is a building in the terrible Africo-Gothic style, but it compares
most favourably with the cathedral at Sierra Leone, particularly internally,
wherein, indeed, it far surpasses that structure.  And then we
returned to the Mission House and spent a very pleasant evening, save
for the knowledge (which amounted in me to remorse) that, had it not
been for my edification, not one of my friends would have spent the
day toiling about the town they know only too well.  The Wesleyan
Mission on the Gold Coast, of which Mr. Dennis Kemp was at that time
chairman, is the largest and most influential Protestant mission on
the West Coast of Africa, and it is now, I am glad to say, adding a
technical department to its scholastic and religious one.  The
Basel Mission has done a great deal of good work in giving technical
instruction to the natives, and practically started this most important
branch of their education.  There is still an almost infinite amount
of this work to be done, the African being so strangely deficient in
mechanical culture; infinitely more so, indeed, in this than in any
other particular.

After leaving Cape Coast our next port was Accra which is one of
the five West Coast towns that look well from the sea.  The others
don’t look well from anywhere.  First in order of beauty
comes San Paul de Loanda; then Cape Coast with its satellite Elmina,
then Gaboon, then Accra with its satellite Christiansborg, and lastly,
Sierra Leone.

What there is of beauty in Accra is oriental in type.  Seen
from the sea, Fort St. James on the left and Christiansborg Castle on
the right, both almost on shore level, give, with an outcrop of sandy
dwarf cliffs, a certain air of balance and strength to the town, though
but for these and the two old castles, Accra would be but a poor place
and a flimsy, for the rest of it is a mass of rubbishy mud and palm-leaf
huts, and corrugated iron dwellings for the Europeans.

Corrugated iron is my abomination.  I quite understand it has
points, and I do not attack from an æsthetic standpoint. 
It really looks well enough when it is painted white.  There is,
close to Christiansborg Castle, a patch of bungalows and offices for
officialdom and wife that from a distance in the hard bright sunshine
looks like an encampment of snow-white tents among the coco palms, and
pretty enough withal.  I am also aware that the corrugated-iron
roof is an advantage in enabling you to collect and store rain-water,
which is the safest kind of water you can get on the Coast, always supposing
you have not painted the aforesaid roof with red oxide an hour or two
before so collecting, as a friend of mine did once.  But the heat
inside those iron houses is far greater than inside mud-walled, brick,
or wooden ones, and the alternations of temperature more sudden: mornings
and evenings they are cold and clammy; draughty they are always, thereby
giving you chill which means fever, and fever in West Africa means more
than it does in most places.

Going on shore at Accra with Lady MacDonald gave me opportunities
and advantages I should not otherwise have enjoyed, such as the hospitality
of the Governor, luxurious transport from the landing place to Christiansborg
Castle, a thorough inspection of the cathedral in course of erection,
and the strange and highly interesting function of going to a tea-party
at a police station to meet a king, – a real reigning king, – who kindly
attended with his suite and displayed an intelligent interest in photographs. 
Tackie (that is His Majesty’s name) is an old, spare man, with
a subdued manner.  His sovereign rights are acknowledged by the
Government so far as to hold him more or less responsible for any iniquity
committed by his people; and as the Government do not allow him to execute
or flagellate the said people, earthly pomp is rather a hollow thing
to Tackie.

On landing I was taken in charge by an Assistant Inspector of Police,
and after a scrimmage for my chief’s baggage and my own, which
reminded me of a long ago landing on the distant island of Guernsey,
the inspector and I got into a ’rickshaw, locally called a go-cart. 
It was pulled in front by two government negroes and pushed behind by
another pair, all neatly attired in white jackets and knee breeches,
and crimson cummerbunds yards long, bound round their middles. 
Now it is an ingrained characteristic of the uneducated negro, that
he cannot keep on a neat and complete garment of any kind.  It
does not matter what that garment may be; so long as it is whole, off
it comes.  But as soon as that garment becomes a series of holes,
held together by filaments of rag, he keeps it upon him in a manner
that is marvellous, and you need have no further anxiety on its behalf. 
Therefore it was but natural that the governmental cummerbunds, being
new, should come off their wearers several times in the course of our
two mile trip, and as they wound riskily round the legs of their running
wearers, we had to make halts while one end of the cummerbund was affixed
to a tree-trunk and the other end to the man, who rapidly wound himself
up in it again with a skill that spoke of constant practice.

The road to Christiansborg from Accra, which runs parallel to the
sea and is broad and well-kept, is in places pleasantly shaded with
pepper trees, eucalyptus, and palms.  The first part of it, which
forms the main street of Accra, is remarkable.  The untidy, poverty-stricken
native houses or huts are no credit to their owners, and a constant
source of anxiety to a conscientious sanitary inspector.  Almost
every one of them is a shop, but this does not give rise to the animated
commercial life one might imagine, owing, I presume, to the fact that
every native inhabitant of Accra who has any money to get rid of is
able recklessly to spend it in his own emporium.  For these shops
are of the store nature, each after his kind, and seem homogeneously
stocked with tin pans, loud-patterned basins, iron pots, a few rolls
of cloth and bottles of American rum.  After passing these there
are the Haussa lines, a few European houses, and the cathedral; and
when nearly into Christiansborg, a cemetery on either side of the road. 
That to the right is the old cemetery, now closed, and when I was there,
in a disgracefully neglected state: a mere jungle of grass infested
with snakes.  Opposite to it is the cemetery now in use, and I
remember well my first visit to it under the guidance of a gloomy Government
official, who said he always walked there every afternoon, “so
as to get used to the place before staying permanently in it,”
– a rank waste of time and energy, by the way, as subsequent events
proved, for he is now safe off the Gold Coast for good and all.

He took me across the well-kept grass to two newly dug graves, each
covered with wooden hoods in a most business-like way.  Evidently
those hoods were regular parts of the cemetery’s outfit. 
He said nothing, but waved his hand with a “take-your-choice,-they-are-both-quite-ready”
style.  “Why?” I queried laconically.  “Oh!
we always keep two graves ready dug for Europeans.  We have to
bury very quickly here, you know,” he answered.  I turned
at bay.  I had had already a very heavy dose of details of this
sort that afternoon and was disinclined to believe another thing. 
So I said, “It’s exceedingly wrong to do a thing like that,
you only frighten people to death.  You can’t want new-dug
graves daily.  There are not enough white men in the whole place
to keep the institution up.”  “We do,” he replied,
“at any rate at this season.  Why, the other day we had two
white men to bury before twelve o’clock, and at four, another
dropped in on a steamer.”

“At 4.30,” said a companion, an exceedingly accurate
member of the staff.  “How you fellows do exaggerate!” 
Subsequent knowledge of the Gold Coast has convinced me fully that the
extra funeral being placed half-an-hour sooner than it occurred is the
usual percentage of exaggeration you will be able to find in stories
relating to the local mortality.  And at Accra, after I left it,
and all along the Gold Coast, came one of those dreadful epidemic outbursts
sweeping away more than half the white population in a few weeks.

But to return to our state journey along the Christiansborg road. 
We soon reached the castle, an exceedingly roomy and solid edifice built
by the Danes, and far better fitted for the climate than our modern
dwellings, in spite of our supposed advance in tropical hygiene. 
We entered by the sentry-guarded great gate into the courtyard; on the
right hand were the rest of the guard; most of them asleep on their
mats, but a few busy saying Dhikr, etc., towards Mecca, like the good
Mohammedans these Haussas are, others winding themselves into their
cummerbunds.  On the left hand was Sir Brandford Griffiths’
hobby – a choice and select little garden, of lovely eucharis lilies
mostly in tubs, and rare and beautiful flowers brought by him from his
Barbadian home; while shading it and the courtyard was a fine specimen
of that superb thing of beauty – a flamboyant tree – glorious with its
delicate-green acacia-like leaves and vermilion and yellow flowers,
and astonishing with its vast beans.  A flight of stone stairs
leads from the courtyard to the upper part of the castle where the living
rooms are, over the extensive series of cool tunnel-like slave barracoons,
now used as store chambers.  The upper rooms are high and large,
and full of a soft pleasant light and the thunder of the everlasting
surf breaking on the rocky spit on which the castle is built.

From the day the castle was built, now more than a hundred years
ago, the surf spray has been swept by the on-shore evening breeze into
every chink and cranny of the whole building, and hence the place is
mouldy – mouldy to an extent I, with all my experience in that paradise
for mould, West Africa, have never elsewhere seen.  The matting
on the floors took an impression of your foot as a light snowfall would. 
Beneath articles of furniture the cryptogams attained a size more in
keeping with the coal period than with the nineteenth century.

The Gold Coast is one of the few places in West Africa that I have
never felt it my solemn duty to go and fish in.  I really cannot
say why.  Seen from the sea it is a pleasant looking land. 
The long lines of yellow, sandy beach backed by an almost continuous
line of blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach, in
other places show in the dim distance.  It is hard to think that
it is so unhealthy as it is, from just seeing it as you pass by. 
It has high land and has not those great masses of mangrove-swamp one
usually, at first, associates with a bad fever district, but which prove
on acquaintance to be at any rate no worse than this well-elevated open-forested
Gold Coast land.  There are many things to be had here and in Lagos
which tend to make life more tolerable, that you cannot have elsewhere
until you are south of the Congo.  Horses, for example, do fairly
well at Accra, though some twelve miles or so behind the town there
is a belt of tsetse fly, specimens of which I have procured and had
identified at the British Museum, and it is certain death to a horse,
I am told, to take it to Aburi.

The food-supply, although bad and dear, is superior to that you get
down south.  Goats and sheep are fairly plentiful.  In addition
to fresh meat and tinned you are able to get a quantity of good sea
fish, for the great West African Bank, which fringes the coast in the
Bight of Benin, abounds in fish, although the native cook very rarely
knows how to cook them.  Then, too, you can get more fruit and
vegetables on the Gold Coast than at most places lower down: the plantain,
{28} not least among
them and very good when allowed to become ripe, and then cut into longitudinal
strips, and properly fried; the banana, which surpasses it when served
in the same manner, or beaten up and mixed with rice, butter, and eggs,
and baked.  Eggs, by the way, according to the great mass of native
testimony, are laid in this country in a state that makes them more
fit for electioneering than culinary purposes, and I shall never forget
one tribe I was once among, who, whenever I sat down on one of their
benches, used to smash eggs round me for ju-ju.  They meant well. 
But I will nobly resist the temptation to tell egg stories and industriously
catalogue the sour-sop, guava, grenadilla, aubergine or garden-egg,
yam, and sweet potato.

The sweet potato should be boiled, and then buttered and browned
in an oven, or fried.  When cooked in either way I am devoted to
them, but in the way I most frequently come across them I abominate
them, for they jeopardise my existence both in this world and the next. 
It is this way: you are coming home from a long and dangerous beetle-hunt
in the forest; you have battled with mighty beetles the size of pie
dishes, they have flown at your head, got into your hair and then nipped
you smartly.  You have been also considerably stung and bitten
by flies, ants, etc., and are most likely sopping wet with rain, or
with the wading of streams, and you are tired and your feet go low along
the ground, and it is getting, or has got, dark with that ever-deluding
tropical rapidity, and then you for your sins get into a piece of ground
which last year was a native’s farm, and, placing one foot under
the tough vine of a surviving sweet potato, concealed by rank herbage,
you plant your other foot on another portion of the same vine. 
Your head you then deposit promptly in some prickly ground crop, or
against a tree stump, and then, if there is human blood in you, you
say d–n!

Then there are also alligator-pears, limes, and oranges.  There
is something about those oranges I should like to have explained. 
They are usually green and sweetish in taste, nor have they much white
pith, but now and again you get a big bright yellow one from those trees
that have been imported, and these are very pithy and in full possession
of the flavour of verjuice.  They have also got the papaw on the
Coast, the Carica papaya of botanists.  It is an insipid
fruit.  To the newcomer it is a dreadful nuisance, for no sooner
does an old coaster set eyes on it than he straightway says, “Paw-paws
are awfully good for the digestion, and even if you just hang a tough
fowl or a bit of goat in the tree among the leaves, it gets tender in
no time, for there is an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-paw,” –
which there is not, papaine being its active principle.  After
hearing this hymn of praise to the papaw some hundreds of times, it
palls, and you usually arrive at this tired feeling about the thing
by the time you reach the Gold Coast, for it is a most common object,
and the same man will say the same thing about it a dozen times a day
if he gets the chance.  I got heartily sick of it on my first voyage
out, and rashly determined to check the old coaster in this habit of
his, preparatory to stamping the practice out.  It was one of my
many failures.  I soon met an old coaster with a papaw fruit in
sight, and before he had time to start, I boldly got away with “The
paw-paw is awfully good for the digestion,” hoping that this display
of knowledge would impress him and exempt me from hearing the rest of
the formula.  But no.  “Right you are,” said he
solemnly.  “It’s a powerful thing is the paw-paw. 
Why, the other day we had a sad case along here.  You know what
a nuisance young assistants are, bothering about their chop, and scorpions
in their beds and boots, and what not and a half, and then, when you
have pulled them through these, and often enough before, pegging out
with fever, or going on the fly in the native town.  Did you know
poor B—?  Well! he’s dead now, had fever and went off like
a babe in eight hours though he’d been out fourteen years for
A— and D—.  They sent him out a new book-keeper, a tender young
thing with a dairymaid complexion and the notion that he’d got
the indigestion.  He fidgeted about it something awful.  One
night there was a big paw-paw on the table for evening chop, and so
B—, who was an awfully good chap, told him about how good it was for
the digestion.  The book-keeper said his trouble always came on
two hours after eating, and asked if he might take a bit of the thing
to his room.  ‘Certainly,’ says B—, and as the paw-paw
wasn’t cut at that meal the book-keeper quietly took it off whole
with him.

“In the morning time he did not turn up.  B—, just before
breakfast, went to his room and he wasn’t there, but he noticed
the paw-paw was on the bed and that was all, so he thought the book-keeper
must have gone for a walk, being, as it were, a bit too tender to have
gone on the fly as yet.  So he just told the store clerk to tell
the people to return him to the firm when they found him straying around
lost, and thought no more about it, being, as it was, mail-day, and
him busy.

“Well!  Fortunately the steward boy put that paw-paw on
the table again for twelve o’clock chop.  If it hadn’t
been for that, not a living soul would have known the going of the book-keeper. 
For when B— cut it open, there, right inside it, were nine steel trouser-buttons,
a Waterbury watch, and the poor young fellow’s keys.  For
you see, instead of his digesting his dinner with that paw-paw, the
paw-paw took charge and digested him, dinner and all, and when B—
interrupted it, it was just getting a grip on the steel things. 
There’s an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-paw, and if you hang,
etc., etc.”

I collapsed, feebly murmuring that it was very interesting, but sad
for the poor young fellow’s friends.

“Not necessarily,” said the old coaster.  So he
had the last word, and never again will I attempt to alter the ways
of the genuine old coaster.  What you have got to do with him is
to be very thankful you have had the honour of knowing him.

Still I think we do over-estimate the value of the papaw, although
I certainly did once myself hang the leg of a goat no mortal man could
have got tooth into, on to a papaw tree with a bit of string for the
night.  In the morning it was clean gone, string and all; but whether
it was the pepsine, the papaine, or a purloining pagan that was the
cause of its departure there was no evidence to show.  Yet I am
myself, as Hans Breitmann says, “still skebdigal” as to
the papaw, and I dare say you are too.

But I must forthwith stop writing about the Gold Coast, or I shall
go on telling you stories and wasting your time, not to mention the
danger of letting out those which would damage the nerves of the cultured
of temperate climes, such as those relating to the youth who taught
himself French from a six months’ method book; of the man who
wore brass buttons; the moving story of three leeches and two gentlemen;
the doctor up a creek; and the reason why you should not eat pork along
here because all the natives have either got the guinea-worm, or kraw-kraw
or ulcers; and then the pigs go and – dear me! it was a near thing that
time.  I’ll leave off at once.

CHAPTER II.  FERNANDO PO AND THE BUBIS.

Giving some account of the occupation of this island by the whites
and the manners and customs of the blacks peculiar to it.

Our outward voyage really terminated at Calabar, and it terminated
gorgeously in fireworks and what not, in honour of the coming of Lady
MacDonald, the whole settlement, white and black, turning out to do
her honour to the best of its ability; and its ability in this direction
was far greater than, from my previous knowledge of Coast conditions,
I could have imagined possible.  Before Sir Claude MacDonald settled
down again to local work, he and Lady MacDonald crossed to Fernando
Po, still in the Batanga, and I accompanied them, thus getting
an opportunity of seeing something of Spanish official circles.

I had heard sundry noble legends of Fernando Po, and seen the coast
and a good deal of the island before, but although I had heard much
of the Governor, I had never met him until I went up to his residence
with Lady MacDonald and the Consul-General.  He was a delightful
person, who, as a Spanish naval officer, some time resident in Cuba,
had picked up a lot of English, with a strong American accent clinging
to it.  He gave a most moving account of how, as soon as his appointment
as Governor was announced, all his friends and acquaintances carefully
explained to him that this appointment was equivalent to execution,
only more uncomfortable in the way it worked out.  During the outward
voyage this was daily confirmed by the stories told by the sailors and
merchants personally acquainted with the place, who were able to support
their information with dates and details of the decease of the victims
to the climate.

Still he kept up a good heart, but when he arrived at the island
he found his predecessor had died of fever; and he himself, the day
after landing, went down with a bad attack and he was placed in a bed
– the same bed, he was mournfully informed, in which the last Governor
had expired.  Then he did believe, all in one awful lump, all the
stories he had been told, and added to their horrors a few original
conceptions of death and purgatory, and a lot of transparent semi-formed
images of his own delirium.  Fortunately both prophecy and personal
conviction alike miscarried, and the Governor returned from the jaws
of death.  But without a moment’s delay he withdrew from
the Port of Clarence and went up the mountain to Basile, which is in
the neighbourhood of the highest native village, where he built himself
a house, and around it a little village of homes for the most unfortunate
set of human beings I have ever laid eye on.  They are the remnant
of a set of Spanish colonists, who had been located at some spot in
the Spanish possessions in Morocco, and finding that place unfit to
support human life, petitioned the Government to remove them and let
them try colonising elsewhere.

The Spanish Government just then had one of its occasional fits of
interest in Fernando Po, and so shipped them here, and the Governor,
a most kindly and generous man, who would have been a credit to any
country, established them and their families around him at Basile, to
share with him the advantages of the superior elevation; advantages
he profoundly believed in, and which he has always placed at the disposal
of any sick white man on the island, of whatsoever nationality or religion. 
Undoubtedly the fever is not so severe at Basile as in the lowlands,
but there are here the usual drawbacks to West African high land, namely
an over supply of rain, and equally saturating mists, to say nothing
of sudden and extreme alternations of temperature, and so the colonists
still fall off, and their children die continuously from the various
entozoa which abound upon the island.

When the Governor first settled upon the mountain he was very difficult
to get at for business purposes, and a telephone was therefore run up
to him from Clarence through the forest, and Spain at large felt proud
at this dashing bit of enterprise in modern appliance.  Alas! the
primæval forests of Fernando Po were also charmed with the new
toy, and they talked to each other on it with their leaves and branches
to such an extent that a human being could not get a word in edgeways. 
So the Governor had to order the construction of a road along the course
of the wire to keep the trees off it, but unfortunately the telephone
is still an uncertain means of communication, because another interruption
in its usefulness still afflicts it, namely the indigenous natives’
habit of stealing bits out of its wire, for they are fully persuaded
that they cannot be found out in their depredations provided they take
sufficient care that they are not caught in the act.  The Governor
is thus liable to be cut off at any moment in the middle of a conversation
with Clarence, and the amount of “Hellos”  “Are
you theres?” and “Speak louder, pleases” in Spanish
that must at such times be poured out and wasted in the lonely forests
before the break is realised and an unfortunate man sent off as a messenger,
is terrible to think of.

But nothing would persuade the Governor to come a mile down towards
Clarence until the day he should go there to join the vessel that was
to take him home, and I am bound to say he looked as if the method was
a sound one, for he was an exceedingly healthy, cheery-looking man.

Fernando Po is said to be a comparatively modern island, and not
so very long ago to have been connected with the mainland, the strait
between them being only nineteen miles across, and not having any deep
soundings. {37} 
I fail to see what grounds there are for these ideas, for though Fernando
Po’s volcanoes are not yet extinct, but merely have their fires
banked, yet, on the other hand, the island has been in existence sufficiently
long to get itself several peculiar species of animals and plants, and
that is a thing which takes time.  I myself do not believe that
this island was ever connected with the continent, but arose from the
ocean as the result of a terrific upheaval in the chain of volcanic
activity which runs across the Atlantic from the Cameroon Mountains
in a SSW. direction to Anno Bom island, and possibly even to the Tristan
da Cunha group midway between the Cape and South America.

These volcanic islands are all of extreme beauty and fertility. 
They consist of Fernando Po (10,190 ft.); Principe (3000 ft.); San Thomé
(6,913 ft.); and Anno Bom (1,350 ft.).  San Thomé and Principe
are Portuguese possessions, Fernando Po and Anno Bom Spanish, and they
are all exceedingly unhealthy.  San Thomé is still called
“The Dutchman’s Church-yard,” on account of the devastation
its climate wrought among the Hollanders when they once occupied it;
as they seem, at one time or another, to have occupied all Portuguese
possessions out here, during the long war these two powers waged with
each other for supremacy in the Bights, a supremacy that neither of
them attained to.  Principe is said to be the most unhealthy, and
the reason of the difference in this particular between Principe and
Anno Bom is said to arise from the fact that the former is on the Guinea
Current – a hot current – and Anno Bom on the Equatorial, which averages
10° cooler than its neighbour.

The shores of San Thomé are washed by both currents, and the
currents round Fernando Po are in a mixed and uncertain state. 
It is difficult, unless you have haunted these seas, to realise the
interest we take down there in currents; particularly when you are navigating
small sailing boats, a pursuit I indulge in necessarily from my fishing
practices.  Their effect on the climate too is very marked. 
If we could only arrange for some terrific affair to take place in the
bed of the Atlantic, that would send that precious Guinea current to
the place it evidently comes from, and get the cool Equatorial alongside
the mainland shore, West Africa would be quite another place.

Fernando Po is the most important island as regards size on the West
African coast, and at the same time one of the most beautiful in the
world.  It is a great volcanic mass with many craters, and culminates
in the magnificent cone, Clarence Peak, called by the Spaniards, Pico
de Santa Isabel, by the natives of the island O Wassa.  Seen from
the sea or from the continent it looks like an immense single mountain
that has floated out to sea.  It is visible during clear weather
(and particularly sharply visible in the strange clearness you get after
a tornado) from a hundred miles to seawards, and anything more perfect
than Fernando Po when you sight it, as you occasionally do from far-away
Bonny Bar, in the sunset, floating like a fairy island made of gold
or of amethyst, I cannot conceive.  It is almost equally lovely
at close quarters, namely from the mainland at Victoria, nineteen miles
distant.  Its moods of beauty are infinite; for the most part gentle
and gorgeous, but I have seen it silhouetted hard against tornado-clouds,
and grandly grim from the upper regions of its great brother Mungo. 
And as for Fernando Po in full moonlight – well there! you had better
go and see it yourself.

The whole island is, or rather I should say was, heavily forested
almost to its peak, with a grand and varied type of forest, very rich
in oil palms and tree-ferns, and having an undergrowth containing an
immense variety and quantity of ferns and mosses.  Sugar-cane also
grows wild here, an uncommon thing in West Africa.  The last botanical
collection of any importance made from these forests was that of Herr
Mann, and its examination showed that Abyssinian genera and species
predominated, and that many species similar to those found in the mountains
of Mauritius, the Isle de Bourbon, and Madagascar, were present. 
The number of European plants (forty-three genera, twenty-seven species)
is strikingly large, most of the British forms being represented chiefly
at the higher elevations.  What was more striking was that it showed
that South African forms were extremely rare, and not one of the characteristic
types of St. Helena occurred.

Cocoa, coffee, and cinchona, alas! flourish in Fernando Po, as the
coffee suffers but little from the disease that harasses it on the mainland
at Victoria, and this is the cause of the great destruction of the forest
that is at present taking place.  San Thomé, a few years
ago, was discovered by its surprised neighbours to be amassing great
wealth by growing coffee, and so Fernando Po and Principe immediately
started to amass great wealth too, and are now hard at work with gangs
of miscellaneous natives got from all parts of the Coast save the Kru. 
For to the Kruboy, “Panier,” as he calls “Spaniard,”
is a name of horror worse even than Portugee, although he holds “God
made white man and God made black man, but dem debil make Portugee,”
and he also remembers an unfortunate affair that occurred some years
ago now, in connection with coffee-growing.

A number of Krumen engaged themselves for a two years’ term
of labour on the Island of San Thomé, and when they arrived there,
were set to work on coffee plantations by the Portuguese.  Now
agricultural work is “woman’s palaver,” but nevertheless
the Krumen made shift to get through with it, vowing the while no doubt,
as they hopefully notched away the moons on their tally-sticks, that
they would never let the girls at home know that they had been hoeing. 
But when their moons were all complete, instead of being sent home with
their pay to “We country,” they were put off from time to
time; and month after month went by and they were still on San Thomé,
and still hoeing.  At last the home-sick men, in despair of ever
getting free, started off secretly in ones and twos to try and get to
“We country” across hundreds of miles of the storm-haunted
Atlantic in small canoes, and with next to no provisions.  The
result was a tragedy, but it might easily have been worse; for a few,
a very few, were picked up alive by English vessels and taken back to
their beloved “We country” to tell the tale.  But many
a canoe was found with a dead Kruboy or so in it; and many a one which,
floating bottom upwards, graphically spoke of madness caused by hunger,
thirst, and despair having driven its occupants overboard to the sharks.

My Portuguese friends assure me that there was never thought of permanently
detaining the boys, and that they were only just keeping them until
other labourers arrived to take their place on the plantations. 
I quite believe them, for I have seen too much of the Portuguese in
Africa to believe that they would, in a wholesale way, be cruel to natives. 
But I am not in the least surprised that the poor Krumen took the Portuguese
logo and amanhã for Eternity itself, for I have
frequently done so.

The greatest length of the island lies N.E. and S.W., and amounts
to thirty-three miles; the mean breadth is seventeen miles.  The
port, Clarence Cove, now called Santa Isabel by the Spaniards – who
have been giving Spanish names to all the English-named places without
any one taking much notice of them – is a very remarkable place, and
except perhaps Gaboon the finest harbour on the West Coast.  The
point that brings Gaboon anchorage up in line with Clarence Cove is
its superior healthiness; for Clarence is a section of a circle, and
its shores are steep rocky cliffs from 100 to 200 feet high, and the
place, to put it very mildly, exceedingly hot and stuffy.  The
cove is evidently a partly submerged crater, the submerged rim of the
crater is almost a perfect semi-circle seawards – having on it 4, 5,
7, 8, and 10 fathoms of water save almost in the centre of the arc where
there is a passage with 12 to 14 fathoms.  Inside, in the crater,
there is deeper water, running in places from 30 to 45 fathoms, and
outside the submerged rim there is deeper water again, but rocky shoals
abound.  On the top of the shore cliffs stands the dilapidated
little town of Clarence, on a plateau that falls away slightly towards
the mountain for about a mile, when the ground commences to rise into
the slopes of the Cordillera.  On the narrow beach, tucked close
against the cliffs, are a few stores belonging to the merchants, where
goods are placed on landing, and there is a little pier too, but as
it is usually having something done to its head, or else is closed by
the authorities because they intend doing something by and by, the chances
are against its being available for use.  Hence it usually comes
about that you have to land on the beach, and when you have done this
you make your way up a very steep path, cut in the cliffside, to the
town.  When you get there you find yourself in the very dullest
town I know on the Coast.  I remember when I first landed in Clarence
I found its society in a flutter of expectation and alarm not untinged
with horror.  Clarence, nay, the whole of Fernando Po, was about
to become so rackety and dissipated as to put Paris and Monte Carlo
to the blush.  Clarence was going to have a café; and what
was going to go on in that café I shrink from reciting.

I have little hesitation now in saying this alarm was a false one. 
When I next arrived in Clarence it was just as sound asleep and its
streets as weed-grown as ever, although the café was open. 
My idea is that the sleepiness of the place infected the café
and took all the go out of it.  But again it may have been that
the inhabitants were too well guarded against its evil influence, for
there are on the island fifty-two white laymen, and fifty-four priests
to take charge of them {44}
– the extra two being, I presume, to look after the Governor’s
conduct, although this worthy man made a most spirited protest against
this view when I suggested it to him; and in addition to the priests
there are several missionaries of the Methodist mission, and also a
white gentleman who has invented a new religion.  Anyhow, the café
smoulders like a damp squib.

When you spend the day on shore and when, having exhausted the charms
of the town, – a thing that usually takes from between ten minutes to
a quarter of an hour, – you apply to an inhabitant for advice as to
the disposal of the rest of your shore leave, you are told to “go
and see the coals.”  You say you have not come to tropical
islands to see a coal heap, and applying elsewhere for advice you probably
get the same.  So, as you were told to “go and see the coals”
when you left your ship, you do as you are bid.  These coals, the
remnant of the store that was kept here for the English men-of-war,
were left here when the naval station was removed.  The Spaniards
at first thought of using them, and ran a tram-way from Clarence to
them.  But when the tramway was finished, their activity had run
out too, and to this day there the coals remain.  Now and again
some one has the idea that they are quite good, and can be used for
a steamer, and some people who have tried them say they are all right,
and others say they are all wrong.  And so the end of it will be
that some few thousand years hence there will be a serious quarrel among
geologists on the strange pocket of coal on Fernando Po, and they will
run up continents, and raise and lower oceans to explain them, and they
will doubtless get more excitement and pleasure out of them than you
can nowadays.

The history of the English occupation of Fernando Po seems often
misunderstood, and now and then one hears our Government reviled for
handing it over to the Spaniards.  But this was unavoidable, for
we had it as a loan from Spain in 1827 as a naval station for our ships,
at that time energetically commencing to suppress the slave trade in
the Bights; the idea being that this island would afford a more healthy
and convenient spot for a naval depot than any port on the coast itself.

More convenient Fernando Po certainly was, but not more healthy,
and ever since 1827 it has been accumulating for itself an evil reputation
for unhealthiness which is only languishing just at present because
there is an interval between its epidemics – fever in Fernando Po, even
more than on the mainland, having periodic outbursts of a more serious
type than the normal intermittent and remittent of the Coast. 
Moreover, Fernando Po shares with Senegal the undoubted yet doubtful
honour of having had regular yellow fever.  In 1862 and 1866 this
disease was imported by a ship that had come from Havana.  Since
then it has not appeared in the definite South American form, and therefore
does not seem to have obtained the foothold it has in Senegal, where
a few years ago all the money voted for the keeping of the Fête
Nationale was in one district devoted by public consent to the purchase
of coffins, required by an overwhelming outbreak of Yellow Jack.

In 1858 the Spanish Government thinking, presumably, that the slave
trade was suppressed enough, or at any rate to a sufficiently inconvenient
extent, re-claimed Fernando Po, to the horror of the Baptist missionaries
who had settled in Clarence apparently under the erroneous idea that
the island had been definitely taken over by the English.  This
mission had received from the West African Company a large grant of
land, and had collected round it a gathering of Sierra Leonians and
other artisan and trading Africans who were attracted to Clarence by
the work made by the naval station; and these people, with the English
traders who also settled here for a like reason, were the founders of
Clarence Town.  The declaration of the Spanish Government stating
that only Roman Catholic missions would be countenanced caused the Baptists
to abandon their possessions and withdraw to the mainland in Ambas Bay,
where they have since remained, and nowadays Protestantism is represented
by a Methodist Mission which has a sub-branch on the mainland on the
Akwayafe River and one on the Qua Ibo.

The Spaniards, on resuming possession of the island, had one of their
attacks of activity regarding it, and sent out with Don Carlos Chacon,
who was to take over the command, four Jesuit priests, a secretary,
a commissariat officer, a custom-house clerk, and a transport, the Santa
Maria, with a number of emigrant families.  This attempt to
colonise Fernando Po should have at least done the good of preventing
such experiments ever being tried again with women and children, for
of these unfortunate creatures – for whom, in spite of its being the
wet season, no houses had been provided – more than 20 per cent. died
in the space of five months.  Mr. Hutchinson, who was English Consul
at the time, tells us that “In a very short time gaunt figures
of men, women, and children might be seen crawling through the streets,
with scarcely an evidence of life in their faces, save the expression
of a sort of torpid carelessness as to how soon it might be their turn
to drop off and die.  The Portino, a steamer, carried back
fifty of them to Cadiz, who looked when they embarked more like living
skeletons of skin and bone than animated human beings.” {47} 
I quote this not to cast reproach on the Spanish Government, but merely
to give a fact, a case in point, of the deadly failure of endeavours
to colonise on the West Coast, a thing which is even now occasionally
attempted, always with the same sad results, though in most cases these
attempts are now made by religious but misinformed people under Bishop
Taylor’s mission.

The Spaniards did not entirely confine their attention to planting
colonists in a ready-made state on the island.  As soon as they
had settled themselves and built their barracks and Government House,
they set to work and cleared away the bush for an area of from four
to six miles round the town.  The ground soon became overgrown
again, but this clearing is still perceptible in the different type
of forest on it, and has enabled the gardens and little plantations
round Clarence to be made more easily.  My Spanish friends assure
me that the Portuguese, who discovered the island in 1471, {48a}
and who exchanged it and Anno Bom in 1778 to the Spaniards for the little
island of Catalina and the colony of Sacramento in South America, did
not do anything to develop it.  When they, the Spaniards, first
entered into possession they at once set to work to colonise and clear. 
Then the colonisation scheme went to the bad, the natives poisoned the
wells, it is said, and the attention of the Spaniards was in those days
turned, for some inscrutable reason, to the eastern shores of the island
– a district now quite abandoned by whites, on account of its unhealthiness
– and they lost in addition to the colonists a terrible quantity of
their sailors, in Concepcion Bay. {48b} 
A lull then followed, and the Spaniards willingly lent the place to
the English as aforesaid.  They say we did nothing except establish
Clarence as a headquarters, which they consider to have been a most
excellent enterprise, and import the Baptist Mission, which they hold
as a less estimable undertaking; but there! that’s nothing to
what the Baptist Mission hold regarding the Spaniards.  For my
own part, I wish the Spaniards better luck this time in their activity,
for in directing it to plantations they are on a truer and safer road
to wealth than they have been with their previous importations of Cuban
political prisoners and ready-made families of colonists, and I hope
they will send home those unfortunate wretches they have there now,
and commence, in their expected two years, to reap the profits of the
coffee and cocoa.  Certainly the chances are that they may, for
the soil of Fernando Po is of exceeding fertility; Mr. Hutchinson says
he has known Indian corn planted here on a Monday evening make its appearance
four inches above ground on the following Wednesday morning, within
a period, he carefully says, of thirty-six hours.  I have seen
this sort of thing over in Victoria, but I like to get a grown, strong
man, and a Consul of Her Britannic Majesty, to say it for me.

Having discoursed at large on the various incomers to Fernando Po
we may next turn to the natives, properly so-called, the Bubis. 
These people, although presenting a series of interesting problems to
the ethnologist, both from their insular position, and their differentiation
from any of the mainland peoples, are still but little known. 
To a great extent this has arisen from their exclusiveness, and their
total lack of enthusiasm in trade matters, a thing that differentiates
them more than any other characteristic from the mainlanders, who, young
and old, men and women, regard trade as the great affair of life, take
to it as soon as they can toddle, and don’t even leave it off
at death, according to their own accounts of the way the spirits of
distinguished traders still dabble and interfere in market matters. 
But it is otherwise with the Bubi.  A little rum, a few beads,
and finish – then he will turn the rest of his attention to catching
porcupines, or the beautiful little gazelles, gray on the back, and
white underneath, with which the island abounds.  And what time
he may have on hand after this, he spends in building houses and making
himself hats.  It is only his utterly spare moments that he employs
in making just sufficient palm oil from the rich supply of nuts at his
command to get that rum and those beads of his.  Cloth he does
not want; he utterly fails to see what good the stuff is, for he abhors
clothes.  The Spanish authorities insist that the natives who come
into the town should have something on, and so they array themselves
in a bit of cotton cloth, which before they are out of sight of the
town on their homeward way, they strip off and stuff into their baskets,
showing in this, as well as in all other particulars, how uninfluencible
by white culture they are.  For the Spaniards, like the Portuguese,
are great sticklers for clothes and insist on their natives wearing
them – usually with only too much success.  I shall never forget
the yards and yards of cotton the ladies of Loanda wore; and not content
with making cocoons of their bodies, they wore over their heads, as
a mantilla, some dozen yards or so of black cloth into the bargain. 
Moreover this insistence on drapery for the figure is not merely for
towns; a German officer told me the other day that when, a week or so
before, his ship had called at Anno Bom, they were simply besieged for
“clo’, clo’, clo’;” the Anno Bomians explaining
that they were all anxious to go across to Principe and get employment
on coffee plantations, but that the Portuguese planters would not engage
them in an unclothed state.

You must not, however, imagine that the Bubi is neglectful of his
personal appearance.  In his way he is quite a dandy.  But
his idea of decoration goes in the direction of a plaster of “tola”
pomatum over his body, and above all a hat.  This hat may be an
antique European one, or a bound-round handkerchief, but it is more
frequently a confection of native manufacture, and great taste and variety
are displayed in its make.  They are of plaited palm leaf – that’s
all you can safely generalise regarding them – for sometimes they have
broad brims, sometimes narrow, sometimes no brims at all.  So,
too, with the crown.  Sometimes it is thick and domed, sometimes
non-existent, the wearer’s hair aglow with red-tail parrots’
feathers sticking up where the crown should be.  As a general rule
these hats are much adorned with oddments of birds’ plumes, and
one chief I knew had quite a Regent-street Dolly Varden creation which
he used to affix to his wool in a most intelligent way with bonnet-pins
made of wood.  These hats are also a peculiarity of the Bubi, for
none of the mainlanders care a row of pins for hats, except “for
dandy,” to wear occasionally, whereas the Bubi wears his perpetually,
although he has by no means the same amount of sun to guard against
owing to the glorious forests of his island.

For earrings the Bubi wears pieces of wood stuck through the lobe
of the ear, and although this is not a decorative habit still it is
less undecorative than that of certain mainland friends of mine in this
region, who wear large and necessarily dripping lumps of fat in their
ears and in their hair.  His neck is hung round with jujus on strings
– bits of the backbones of pythons, teeth, feathers, and antelope horns,
and occasionally a bit of fat in a bag.  Round his upper arm are
bracelets, preferably made of ivory got from the mainland, for celluloid
bracelets carefully imported for his benefit he refuses to look at. 
Often these bracelets are made of beads, or a circlet of leaves, and
when on the war-path an armlet of twisted grass is always worn by the
men.  Men and women alike wear armlets, and in the case of the
women they seem to be put on when young, for you see puffs of flesh
growing out from between them.  They are not entirely for decoration,
serving also as pockets, for under them men stick a knife, and women
a tobacco pipe, a well-coloured clay.  Leglets of similar construction
are worn just under the knee on the right leg, while around the body
you see belts of tshibbu, small pieces cut from Achatectonia
shells, which form the native currency of the island.  These shells
are also made into veils worn by the women at their wedding.

This native coinage-equivalent is very interesting, for such things
are exceedingly rare in West Africa.  The only other instance I
personally know of a tribe in this part of the world using a native-made
coin is that of the Fans, who use little bundles of imitation axe-heads. 
Dr. Oscar Baumann, who knows more than any one else about these Bubis,
thinks, I believe, that these bits of Achatectonia shells may have been
introduced by the runaway Angola slaves in the old days, who used to
fly from their Portuguese owners on San Thomé to the Spaniards
on Fernando Po.  The villages of the Bubis are in the forest in
the interior of the island, and they are fairly wide apart.  They
are not a sea-beach folk, although each village has its beach, which
merely means the place to which it brings its trade, these beaches being
usually the dwelling places of the so-called Portos, {51}
negroes, who act as middle-men between the Bubis and the whites.

You will often be told that the Bubis are singularly bad house-builders,
indeed that they make no definite houses at all, but only rough shelters
of branches.  This is, however, a mistake.  Shelters of this
kind that you come across are merely the rough huts put up by hunters,
not true houses.  The village is usually fairly well built, and
surrounded with a living hedge of stakes.  The houses inside this
are four-cornered, the walls made of logs of wood stuck in edgeways,
and surmounted by a roof of thatch pitched at an extremely stiff angle,
and the whole is usually surrounded with a dug-out drain to carry off
surface water.  These houses, as usual on the West Coast, are divisible
into two classes – houses of assembly, and private living houses. 
The first are much the larger.  The latter are very low, and sometimes
ridiculously small, but still they are houses and better than those
awful Loango grass affairs you get on the Congo.

Herr Baumann says that the houses high up on the mountain have double
walls between which there is a free space; an arrangement which may
serve to minimise the extreme draughtiness of an ordinary Bubi house
– a very necessary thing in these relatively chilly upper regions. 
I may remark on my own account that the Bubi villages do not often lie
right on the path, but, like those you have to deal with up the Calabar,
some little way off it.  This is no doubt for the purpose of concealing
their whereabouts from strangers, and it does it successfully too, for
many a merry hour have I spent dodging up and down a path trying to
make out at what particular point it was advisable to dive into the
forest thicket to reach a village.  But this cultivates habits
of observation, and a short course of this work makes you recognise
which tree is which along miles of a bush path as easily as you would
shops in your own street at home.

The main interest of the Bubi’s life lies in hunting, for he
is more of a sportsman than the majority of mainlanders.  He has
not any big game to deal with, unless we except pythons – which attain
a great size on the island – and crocodiles.  Elephants, though
plentiful on the adjacent mainland, are quite absent from Fernando Po,
as are also hippos and the great anthropoid apes; but of the little
gazelles, small monkeys, porcupines, and squirrels he has a large supply,
and in the rivers a very pretty otter (Lutra poensis) with yellow
brown fur often quite golden underneath; a creature which is, I believe,
identical with the Angola otter.

The Bubis use in their hunting flint-lock guns, but chiefly traps
and nets, and, I am told, slings.  The advantage of these latter
methods are, I expect, the same as on the mainland, where a distinguished
sportsman once told me: “You go shoot thing with gun.  Berrah
well – but you no get him thing for sure.  No, sah.  Dem gun
make nize.  Berrah well.  You fren hear dem nize and come
look him, and you hab to go share what you done kill.  Or bad man
hear him nize, and he come look him, and you no fit to get share – you
fit to get kill yusself.  Chii! chii! traps be best.” 
I urged that the traps might also be robbed.  “No, sah,”
says he, “them bian (charm) he look after them traps, he fit to
make man who go tief swell up and bust.”

The Bubis also fish, mostly by basket traps, but they are not experts
either in this or in canoe management.  Their chief sea-shore sport
is hunting for the eggs of the turtles who lay in the sand from August
to October.  These eggs – about 200 in each nest – are about the
size of a billiard-ball, with a leathery envelope, and are much valued
for food, as are also the grubs of certain beetles got from the stems
of the palm-trees, and the honey of the wild bees which abound here.

Their domestic animals are the usual African list; cats, dogs, sheep,
goats, and poultry.  Pigs there are too, very domestic in Clarence
and in a wild state in the forest.  These pigs are the descendants
of those imported by the Spaniards, and not long ago became such an
awful nuisance in Clarence that the Government issued instructions that
all pigs without rings in their noses – i.e. all in a condition
to grub up back gardens – should be forthwith shot if found abroad. 
This proclamation was issued by the governmental bellman thus: – “I
say – I say – I say – I say.  Suppose pig walk – iron no live for
him nose!  Gun shoot.  Kill him one time.  Hear re! hear
re!”

However a good many pigs with no iron living in their noses got adrift
and escaped into the interior, and have flourished like the green bay-tree,
destroying the Bubi’s plantation and eating his yams, while the
Bubi retaliating kills and eats them.  So it’s a drawn battle,
for the Bubi enjoys the pig and the pig enjoys the yams, which are of
singular excellence in this island and celebrated throughout the Bight. 
Now, I am told, the Government are firmly discouraging the export of
these yams, which used to be quite a little branch of Fernando Po trade,
in the hope that this will induce the native to turn his attention to
working in the coffee and cacao plantations.  Hope springs eternal
in the human breast, for the Bubi has shown continually since the 16th
century that he takes no interest in these things whatsoever. 
Now and again a man or woman will come voluntarily and take service
in Clarence, submit to clothes, and rapidly pick up the ways of a house
or store.  And just when their owner thinks he owns a treasure,
and begins to boast that he has got an exception to all Bubidom, or
else that he knows how to manage them better than other men, then a
hole in that man’s domestic arrangements suddenly appears. 
The Bubi has gone, without giving a moment’s warning, and without
stealing his master’s property, but just softly and silently vanished
away.  And if hunted up the treasure will be found in his or her
particular village – clothes-less, comfortable, utterly unconcerned,
and unaware that he or she has lost anything by leaving Clarence and
Civilisation.  It is this conduct that gains for the Bubi the reputation
of being a bigger idiot than he really is.

For West Africans their agriculture is of a fairly high description
– the noteworthy point about it, however, is the absence of manioc. 
Manioc is grown on Fernando Po, but only by the Portos.  The Bubi
cultivated plants are yams (Dioscorea alata), koko (Colocasia
esculenta – the taro of the South Seas,) and plantains.  Their
farms are well kept, particularly those in the grass districts by San
Carlos Bay.  The yams of the Cordillera districts are the best
flavoured, but those of the east coast the largest.  Palm-oil is
used for domestic purposes in the usual ways, and palm wine both fresh
and fermented is the ordinary native drink.  Rum is held in high
esteem, but used in a general way in moderation as a cordial and a treat,
for the Bubi is, like the rest of the West African natives, by no means
an habitual drunkard.  Gin he dislikes. {55}

And I may remark you will find the same opinion in regard to the
Dualla in Cameroons river – on the undeniable authority of Dr. Buchner,
and my own extensive experience of the West Coast bears it out.

Physically the Bubis are a fairly well-formed race of medium height;
they are decidedly inferior to the Benga or the Krus, but quite on a
level with the Effiks.  The women indeed are very comely: their
colour is bronze and their skin the skin of the Bantu.  Beards
are not uncommon among the men, and these give their faces possibly
more than anything else, a different look to the faces of the Effiks
or the Duallas.  Indeed the people physically most like the Bubis
that I have ever seen, are undoubtedly the Bakwiri of Cameroons Mountain,
who are also liable to be bearded, or possibly I should say more liable
to wear beards, for a good deal of the African hairlessness you hear
commented on – in the West African at any rate – arises from his deliberately
pulling his hair out – his beard, moustache, whiskers, and, occasionally,
as among the Fans, his eyebrows.

Dr. Baumann, the great authority on the Bubi language says it is
a Bantu stock. {56} 
I know nothing of it myself save that it is harsh in sound.  Their
method of counting is usually by fives but they are notably weak in
arithmetical ability, differing in this particular from the mainlanders,
and especially from their Negro neighbours, who are very good at figures,
surpassing the Bantu in this, as indeed they do in most branches of
intellectual activity.

But the most remarkable instance of inferiority the Bubis display
is their ignorance regarding methods of working iron.  I do not
know that iron in a native state is found on Fernando Po, but scrap-iron
they have been in touch with for some hundreds of years.  The mainlanders
are all cognisant of native methods of working iron, although many tribes
of them now depend entirely on European trade for their supply of knives,
etc., and this difference between them and the Bubis would seem to indicate
that the migration of the latter to the island must have taken place
at a fairly remote period, a period before the iron-working tribes came
down to the coast.  Of course, if you take the Bubi’s usual
explanation of his origin, namely that he came out of the crater on
the top of Clarence Peak, this argument falls through; but he has also
another legend, one moreover which is likewise to be found upon the
mainland, which says he was driven from the district north of the Gaboon
estuary by the coming of the M’pongwe to the coast, and as this
legend is the more likely of the two I think we may accept it as true,
or nearly so.  But what adds another difficulty to the matter is
that the Bubi is not only unlearned in iron lore, but he was learned
in stone, and up to the time of the youth of many Porto-negroes on Fernando
Po, he was making and using stone implements, and none of the tribes
within the memory of man have done this on the mainland.  It is
true that up the Niger and about Benin and Axim you get polished stone
celts, but these are regarded as weird affairs, – thunderbolts – and
suitable only for grinding up and making into medicine; there is no
trace in the traditions of these places, as far as I have been able
to find, of any time at which stone implements were in common use, and
certainly the M’pongwe have not been a very long time on the coast,
for their coming is still remembered in their traditions.  The
Bubi stone implements I have seen twice, but on neither occasion could
I secure one, and although I have been long promised specimens from
Fernando Po, I have not yet received them.  They are difficult
to procure, because none of the present towns are on really old sites,
the Bubi, like most Bantus, moving pretty frequently, either because
the ground is witched, demonstrated by outbreaks of sickness, or because
another village-full of his fellow creatures, or a horrid white man
plantation-making, has come too close to him.  A Roman Catholic
priest in Ka Congo once told me a legend he laughed much over, of how
a fellow priest had enterprisingly settled himself one night in the
middle of a Bubi village with intent to devote the remainder of his
life to quietly but thoroughly converting it.  Next morning, when
he rose up, he found himself alone, the people having taken all their
portable possessions and vanished to build another village elsewhere. 
The worthy Father spent some time chivying his flock about the forest,
but in vain, and he returned home disgusted, deciding that the Creator,
for some wise purpose, had dedicated the Bubis to the Devil.

The spears used by this interesting people are even to this day made
entirely of wood, and have such a Polynesian look about them that I
intend some time or other to bring some home and experiment on that
learned Polynesian-culture-expert, Baron von Hügel, with them:
– intellectually experiment, not physically, pray understand.

The pottery has a very early-man look about it, but in this it does
not differ much from that of the mainland, which is quite as poor, and
similarly made without a wheel, and sun-baked.  Those pots of the
Bubis I have seen have, however, not had the pattern (any sort of pattern
does, and it need not be carefully done) that runs round mainland pots
to “keep their souls in” – i.e. to prevent their
breaking up on their own account.

The basket-work of the Bubis is of a superior order: the baskets
they make to hold the palm oil are excellent, and will hold water like
a basin, but I am in doubt whether this art is original, or imported
by the Portuguese runaway slaves, for they put me very much in mind
of those made by my old friends the Kabinders, from whom a good many
of those slaves were recruited.  I think there is little doubt
that several of the musical instruments own this origin, particularly
their best beloved one, the elibo.  This may be described as a
wooden bell having inside it for clappers several (usually five) pieces
of stick threaded on a bit of wood jammed into the dome of the bell
and striking the rim, beyond which the clappers just protrude. 
These bells are very like those you meet with in Angola, but I have
not seen on the island, nor does Dr. Baumann cite having seen, the peculiar
double bell of Angola – the engongui.  The Bubi bell is made out
of one piece of wood and worked – or played – with both hands. 
Dr. Baumann says it is customary on bright moonlight nights for two
lines of men to sit facing each other and to clap – one can hardly call
it ring – these bells vigorously, but in good time, accompanying this
performance with a monotonous song, while the delighted women and children
dance round.  The learned doctor evidently sees the picturesqueness
of this practice, but notes that the words of the songs are not “tiefsinnige”
(profound), as he has heard men for hours singing “The shark bites
the Bubi’s hand,” only that over and over again and nothing
more.  This agrees with my own observations of all Bantu native
songs.  I have always found that the words of these songs were
either the repetition of some such phrase as this, or a set of words
referring to the recent adventures or experiences of the singer or the
present company’s little peculiarities; with a very frequent chorus,
old and conventional.

The native tunes used with these songs are far superior, and I expect
many of them are very old.  They are often full of variety and
beauty, particularly those of the M’pongwe and Igalwa, of which
I will speak later.

The dances I have no personal knowledge of, but there is nothing
in Baumann’s description to make one think they are distinct in
themselves from the mainland dances.  I once saw a dance at Fernando
Po, but that was among Portos, and it was my old friend the Batuco in
all its beauty.  But there is a distinct peculiarity about the
places the dances are held on, every village having a kept piece of
ground outside it which is the dancing place for the village – the ball-room
as it were; and exceedingly picturesque these dances must be, for they
are mostly held during the nights of full moon.  These kept grounds
remind one very much of the similar looking patches of kept grass one
sees in villages in Ka Congo, but there is no similarity in their use,
for the Ka Congo lawns are of fetish, not frivolous, import.

The Bubis have an instrument I have never seen in an identical form
on the mainland.  It is made like a bow, with a tense string of
fibre.  One end of the bow is placed against the mouth, and the
string is then struck by the right hand with a small round stick, while
with the left it is scraped with a piece of shell or a knife-blade. 
This excruciating instrument, I warn any one who may think of living
among the Bubis, is very popular.  The drums used are both the
Dualla form – all wood – and the ordinary skin-covered drum, and I think
if I catalogue fifes made of wood, I shall have nearly finished the
Bubi orchestra.  I have doubts on this point because I rather question
whether I may be allowed to refer to a very old bullock hide – unmounted
– as a musical instrument without bringing down the wrath of musicians
on my head.  These stiff, dry pelts are much thought of, and played
by the artistes by being shaken as accompaniments to other instruments
– they make a noise, and that is after all the soul of most African
instrumental music.  These instruments are all that is left of
certain bullocks which many years ago the Spaniards introduced, hoping
to improve the food supply.  They seemed as if they would have
flourished well on the island, on the stretches of grass land in the
Cordillera and the East, but the Bubis, being great sportsmen, killed
them all off.

The festivities of the Bubis – dances, weddings, feasts, etc., –
at which this miscellaneous collection of instruments are used in concert,
usually take place in November, the dry season; but the Bubi is liable
to pour forth his soul in the bosom of his family at any time of the
day or night, from June to January, and when he pours it forth on that
bow affair it makes the lonely European long for home.

Divisions of time the Bubi can hardly be said to have, but this is
a point upon which all West Africans are rather weak, particularly the
Bantu.  He has, however, a definite name for November, December,
and January – the dry season months – calling them Lobos.

The Fetish of these people, although agreeing on broad lines with
the Bantu Fetish, has many interesting points, as even my small knowledge
of it showed me, and it is a subject that would repay further investigation;
and as by fetish I always mean the governing but underlying ideas of
a man’s life, we will commence with the child.  Nothing,
as far as I have been able to make out, happens to him, for fetish reasons,
when he first appears on the scene.  He receives at birth, as is
usual, a name which is changed for another on his initiation into the
secret society, this secret society having also, as usual, a secret
language.  About the age of three or five years the boy is decorated,
under the auspices of the witch doctor, with certain scars on the face. 
These scars run from the root of the nose across the cheeks, and are
sometimes carried up in a curve on to the forehead.

Tattooing, in the true sense of the word, they do not use much, but
they paint themselves, as the mainlanders do, with a red paint made
by burning some herb and mixing the ash with clay or oil, and they occasionally
– whether for ju-ju reasons or for mere decoration I do not know – paint
a band of yellow clay round the chest; but of the Bubi secret society
I know little, nor have I been able to find any one who knows much more. 
Hutchinson, {61}
in his exceedingly amusing description of a wedding he was once present
at among these people, would lead one to think the period of seclusion
of the women’s society was twelve months.

The chief god or spirit, O Wassa, resides in the crater of the highest
peak, and by his name the peak is known to the native.  Another
very important spirit, to whom goats and sheep are offered, is Lobe,
resident in a crater lake on the northern slope of the Cordilleras,
and the grass you sometimes see a Bubi wearing is said to come from
this lake and be a ju-ju of Lobe’s.  Dr. Baumann says that
the lake at Riabba from which the spirit Uapa rises is more holy, and
that he is small, and resides in a chasm in a rock whose declivity can
only be passed by means of bush ropes, and in the wet season he is not
get-at-able at all.  He will, if given suitable offerings, reveal
the future to Bubis, but Bubis only.  His priest is the King of
all the Bubis, upon whom it is never permitted to a white man, or a
Porto, to gaze.  Baumann also gives the residence of another important
spirit as being the grotto at Banni.  This is a sea-cave, only
accessible at low water in calm weather.  I have heard many legends
of this cave, but have never had an opportunity of seeing it, or any
one who has seen it first hand.

The charms used by these people are similar in form to those of the
mainland Bantu, but the methods of treating paths and gateways are somewhat
peculiar.  The gateways to the towns are sometimes covered by freshly
cut banana leaves, and during the religious feast in November, the paths
to the villages are barred across with a hedge of grass which no stranger
must pass through.

The government is a peculiar one for West Africa.  Every village
has its chief, but the whole tribe obey one great chief or king who
lives in the crater-ravine at Riabba.  This individual is called
Moka, but whether he is now the same man referred to by Rogoszinsky,
Mr. Holland, and the Rev. Hugh Brown, who attempted to interview him
in the seventies, I do not feel sure, for the Bubis are just the sort
of people to keep a big king going with a variety of individuals. 
Even the indefatigable Dr. Baumann failed to see Moka, though he evidently
found out a great deal about the methods of his administration and formed
a very high opinion of his ability, for he says that to this one chief
the people owe their present unity and orderliness; that before his
time the whole island was in a state of internecine war: murder was
frequent, and property unsafe.  Now their social condition, according
to the Doctor’s account, is a model to Europe, let alone Africa. 
Civil wars have been abolished, disputes between villages being referred
to arbitration, and murder is swiftly and surely punished.  If
the criminal has bolted into the forest and cannot be found, his village
is made responsible, and has to pay a fine in goats, sheep and tobacco
to the value of 16 pounds.  Theft is extremely rare and offences
against the moral code also, the Bubis having an extremely high standard
in this matter, even the little children having each a separate sleeping
hut.  In old days adultery was punished by cutting off the offender’s
hand.  I have myself seen women in Fernando Po who have had a hand
cut off at the wrist, but I believe those were slave women who had suffered
for theft.  Slaves the Bubis do have, but their condition is the
mild, poor relation or retainer form of slavery you find in Calabar,
and differs from the Dualla form, for the slaves live in the same villages
as their masters, while among the Duallas, as among most Bantu slave-holding
tribes, the slaves are excluded from the master’s village and
have separate villages of their own.  For marriage ceremonies I
refer you to Mr. Hutchinson.  Burial customs are exceedingly quaint
in the southern and eastern districts, where the bodies are buried in
the forest with their heads just sticking out of the ground.  In
other districts the body is also buried in the forest, but is completely
covered and an erection of stones put up to mark the place.

Little is known of all West African fetish, still less of that of
these strange people.  Dr. Oscar Baumann brought to bear on them
his careful unemotional German methods of observation, thereby giving
us more valuable information about them and their island than we otherwise
should possess.  Mr. Hutchinson resided many years on Fernando
Po, in the capacity of H. B. M.’s Consul, with his hands full
of the affairs of the Oil Rivers and in touch with the Portos of Clarence,
but he nevertheless made very interesting observations on the natives
and their customs.  The Polish exile and his courageous wife who
ascended Clarence Peak, Mr. Rogoszinsky, and another Polish exile, Mr.
Janikowski, about complete our series of authorities on the island. 
Dr. Baumann thinks they got their information from Porto sources – sources
the learned Doctor evidently regards as more full of imagination than
solid fact, but, as you know, all African travellers are occasionally
in the habit of pooh-poohing each other, and I own that I myself have
been chiefly in touch with Portos, and that my knowledge of the Bubi
language runs to the conventional greeting form: – “Ipori?” 
“Porto.”  “Ke Soko?’”  “Hatsi
soko”: – “Who are you?”  “Porto.” 
“What’s the news?”  “No news.”

Although these Portos are less interesting to the ethnologist than
the philanthropist, they being by-products of his efforts, I must not
leave Fernando Po without mentioning them, for on them the trade of
the island depends.  They are the middlemen between the Bubi and
the white trader.  The former regards them with little, if any,
more trust than he regards the white men, and his view of the position
of the Spanish Governor is that he is chief over the Portos.  That
he has any headship over Bubis or over the Bubi land – Itschulla as
he calls Fernando Po – he does not imagine possible.  Baumann says
he was once told by a Bubi: “White men are fish, not men. 
They are able to stay a little while on land, but at last they mount
their ships again and vanish over the horizon into the ocean. 
How can a fish possess land?”  If the coffee and cacao thrive
on Fernando Po to the same extent that they have already thriven on
San Thomé there is but little doubt that the Bubis will become
extinct; for work on plantations, either for other people, or themselves,
they will not, and then the Portos will become the most important class,
for they will go in for plantations.  Their little factories are
studded all round the shores of the coast in suitable coves and bays,
and here in fairly neat houses they live, collecting palm-oil from the
Bubis, and making themselves little cacao plantations, and bringing
these products into Clarence every now and then to the white trader’s
factory.  Then, after spending some time and most of their money
in the giddy whirl of that capital, they return to their homes and recover. 
There is a class of them permanently resident in Clarence, the city
men of Fernando Po, and these are very like the Sierra Leonians of Free
Town, but preferable.  Their origin is practically the same as
that of the Free Towners.  They are the descendants of liberated
slaves set free during the time of our occupation of the island as a
naval depot for suppressing the slave trade, and of Sierra Leonians
and Accras who have arrived and settled since then.  They have
some of the same “Black gennellum, Sar” style about them,
but not developed to the same ridiculous extent as in the Sierra Leonians,
for they have not been under our institutions.  The “Nanny
Po” ladies are celebrated for their beauty all along the West
Coast, and very justly.  They are not however, as they themselves
think, the most beautiful women in this part of the world.  Not
at least to my way of thinking.  I prefer an Elmina, or an Igalwa,
or a M’pongwe, or – but I had better stop and own that my affections
have got very scattered among the black ladies on the West Coast, and
I no sooner remember one lovely creature whose soft eyes, perfect form
and winning, pretty ways have captivated me than I think of another. 
The Nanny Po ladies have often a certain amount of Spanish blood in
them, which gives a decidedly greater delicacy to their features – delicate
little nostrils, mouths not too heavily lipped, a certain gloss on the
hair, and a light in the eye.  But it does not improve their colour,
and I am assured that it has an awful effect on their tempers, so I
think I will remain, for the present, the faithful admirer of my sable
Ingramina, the Igalwa, with the little red blossoms stuck in her night-black
hair, and a sweet soft look and word for every one, but particularly
for her ugly husband Isaac the “Jack Wash.”

CHAPTER III.  VOYAGE DOWN COAST.

Wherein the voyager before leaving the Rivers discourses on dangers,
to which is added some account of Mangrove swamps and the creatures
that abide therein.

I left Calabar in May and joined the Benguela off Lagos Bar. 
My voyage down coast in her was a very pleasant one and full of instruction,
for Mr. Fothergill, who was her purser, had in former years resided
in Congo Français as a merchant, and to Congo Français
I was bound with an empty hold as regards local knowledge of the district. 
He was one of that class of men, of which you most frequently find representatives
among the merchants, who do not possess the power so many men along
here do possess (a power that always amazes me), of living for a considerable
time in a district without taking any interest in it, keeping their
whole attention concentrated on the point of how long it will be before
their time comes to get out of it.  Mr. Fothergill evidently had
much knowledge and experience of the Fernan Vaz district and its natives. 
He had, I should say, overdone his experiences with the natives, as
far as personal comfort and pleasure at the time went, having been nearly
killed and considerably chivied by them.  Now I do not wish a man,
however much I may deplore his total lack of local knowledge, to go
so far as this.  Mr. Fothergill gave his accounts of these incidents
calmly, and in an undecorated way that gave them a power and convincingness
verging on being unpleasant, although useful, to a person who was going
into the district where they had occurred, for one felt there was no
mortal reason why one should not personally get involved in similar
affairs.  And I must here acknowledge the great subsequent service
Mr. Fothergill’s wonderfully accurate descriptions of the peculiar
characteristics of the Ogowé forests were to me when I subsequently
came to deal with these forests on my own account, as every district
of forest has peculiar characteristics of its own which you require
to know.  I should like here to speak of West Coast dangers because
I fear you may think that I am careless of, or do not believe in them,
neither of which is the case.  The more you know of the West Coast
of Africa, the more you realise its dangers.  For example, on your
first voyage out you hardly believe the stories of fever told by the
old Coasters.  That is because you do not then understand the type
of man who is telling them, a man who goes to his death with a joke
in his teeth.  But a short experience of your own, particularly
if you happen on a place having one of its periodic epidemics, soon
demonstrates that the underlying horror of the thing is there, a rotting
corpse which the old Coaster has dusted over with jokes to cover it
so that it hardly shows at a distance, but which, when you come yourself
to live alongside, you soon become cognisant of.  Many men, when
they have got ashore and settled, realise this, and let the horror get
a grip on them; a state briefly and locally described as funk, and a
state that usually ends fatally; and you can hardly blame them. 
Why, I know of a case myself.  A young man who had never been outside
an English country town before in his life, from family reverses had
to take a situation as book-keeper down in the Bights.  The factory
he was going to was in an isolated out-of-the-way place and not in a
settlement, and when the ship called off it, he was put ashore in one
of the ship’s boats with his belongings, and a case or so of goods. 
There were only the firm’s beach-boys down at the surf, and as
the steamer was in a hurry the officer from the ship did not go up to
the factory with him, but said good-bye and left him alone with a set
of naked savages as he thought, but really of good kindly Kru boys on
the beach.  He could not understand what they said, nor they what
he said, and so he walked up to the house and on to the verandah and
tried to find the Agent he had come out to serve under.  He looked
into the open-ended dining-room and shyly round the verandah, and then
sat down and waited for some one to turn up.  Sundry natives turned
up, and said a good deal, but no one white or comprehensible, so in
desperation he made another and a bolder tour completely round the verandah
and noticed a most peculiar noise in one of the rooms and an infinity
of flies going into the venetian shuttered window.  Plucking up
courage he went in and found what was left of the white Agent, a considerable
quantity of rats, and most of the flies in West Africa.  He then
presumably had fever, and he was taken off, a fortnight afterwards,
by a French boat, to whom the natives signalled, and he is not coming
down the Coast again.  Some men would have died right out from
a shock like this.

But most of the new-comers do not get a shock of this order. 
They either die themselves or get more gradually accustomed to this
sort of thing, when they come to regard death and fever as soldiers,
who on a battle-field sit down, and laugh and talk round a camp fire
after a day’s hard battle, in which they have seen their friends
and companions falling round them; all the time knowing that to-morrow
the battle comes again and that to-morrow night they themselves may
never see.

It is not hard-hearted callousness, it is only their way.  Michael
Scott put this well in Tom Cringle’s Log, in his account
of the yellow fever during the war in the West Indies.  Fever,
though the chief danger, particularly to people who go out to settlements,
is not the only one; but as the other dangers, except perhaps domestic
poisoning, are incidental to pottering about in the forests, or on the
rivers, among the unsophisticated tribes, I will not dwell on them. 
They can all be avoided by any one with common sense, by keeping well
out of the districts in which they occur; and so I warn the general
reader that if he goes out to West Africa, it is not because I said
the place was safe, or its dangers overrated.  The cemeteries of
the West Coast are full of the victims of those people who have said
that Coast fever is “Cork fever,” and a man’s own
fault, which it is not; and that natives will never attack you unless
you attack them: which they will – on occasions.

My main aim in going to Congo Français was to get up above
the tide line of the Ogowé River and there collect fishes; for
my object on this voyage was to collect fish from a river north of the
Congo.  I had hoped this river would have been the Niger, for Sir
George Goldie had placed at my disposal great facilities for carrying
on work there in comfort; but for certain private reasons I was disinclined
to go from the Royal Niger Protectorate into the Royal Niger Company’s
territory; and the Calabar, where Sir Claude MacDonald did everything
he possibly could to assist me, I did not find a good river for me to
collect fishes in.  These two rivers failing me, from no fault
of either of their own presiding genii, my only hope of doing anything
now lay on the South West Coast river, the Ogowé, and everything
there depended on Mr. Hudson’s attitude towards scientific research
in the domain of ichthyology.  Fortunately for me that gentleman
elected to take a favourable view of this affair, and in every way in
his power assisted me during my entire stay in Congo Français. 
But before I enter into a detailed description of this wonderful bit
of West Africa, I must give you a brief notice of the manners, habits
and customs of West Coast rivers in general, to make the thing more
intelligible.

There is an uniformity in the habits of West Coast rivers, from the
Volta to the Coanza, which is, when you get used to it, very taking. 
Excepting the Congo, the really great river comes out to sea with as
much mystery as possible; lounging lazily along among its mangrove swamps
in a what’s-it-matter-when-one-comes-out and where’s-the-hurry
style, through quantities of channels inter-communicating with each
other.  Each channel, at first sight as like the other as peas
in a pod, is bordered on either side by green-black walls of mangroves,
which Captain Lugard graphically described as seeming “as if they
had lost all count of the vegetable proprieties, and were standing on
stilts with their branches tucked up out of the wet, leaving their gaunt
roots exposed in midair.”  High-tide or low-tide, there is
little difference in the water; the river, be it broad or narrow, deep
or shallow, looks like a pathway of polished metal; for it is as heavy
weighted with stinking mud as water e’er can be, ebb or flow,
year out and year in.  But the difference in the banks, though
an unending alternation between two appearances, is weird.

At high-water you do not see the mangroves displaying their ankles
in the way that shocked Captain Lugard.  They look most respectable,
their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and
there by the white line of an aërial root, coming straight down
into the water from some upper branch as straight as a plummet, in the
strange, knowing way an aërial root of a mangrove does, keeping
the hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level,
and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the
water and grasp the mud.  Banks indeed at high water can hardly
be said to exist, the water stretching away into the mangrove swamps
for miles and miles, and you can then go, in a suitable small canoe,
away among these swamps as far as you please.

This is a fascinating pursuit.  But it is a pleasure to be indulged
in with caution; for one thing, you are certain to come across crocodiles. 
Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its
jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the
landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home
about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are
away among the swamps in a small dug-out canoe, and that crocodile and
his relations are awake – a thing he makes a point of being at flood
tide because of fish coming along – and when he has got his foot upon
his native heath – that is to say, his tail within holding reach of
his native mud – he is highly interesting, and you may not be able to
write home about him – and you get frightened on your own behalf; for
crocodiles can, and often do, in such places, grab at people in small
canoes.  I have known of several natives losing their lives in
this way; some native villages are approachable from the main river
by a short cut, as it were, through the mangrove swamps, and the inhabitants
of such villages will now and then go across this way with small canoes
instead of by the constant channel to the village, which is almost always
winding.  In addition to this unpleasantness you are liable – until
you realise the danger from experience, or have native advice on the
point – to get tide-trapped away in the swamps, the water falling round
you when you are away in some deep pool or lagoon, and you find you
cannot get back to the main river.  Of course if you really want
a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about Posterity, and
Posterity’s Science, you will jump over into the black batter-like,
stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the terrific sensation you
will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care you will be taken of then
by your fellow-creatures, in a museum.  But if you are a mere ordinary
person of a retiring nature, like me, you stop in your lagoon until
the tide rises again; most of your attention is directed to dealing
with an “at home” to crocodiles and mangrove flies, and
with the fearful stench of the slime round you.  What little time
you have over you will employ in wondering why you came to West Africa,
and why, after having reached this point of folly, you need have gone
and painted the lily and adorned the rose, by being such a colossal
ass as to come fooling about in mangrove swamps.

Still, even if your own peculiar tastes and avocations do not take
you in small dug-out canoes into the heart of the swamps, you can observe
the difference in the local scenery made by the flowing of the tide
when you are on a vessel stuck on a sand-bank, in the Rio del Rey for
example.  Moreover, as you will have little else to attend to,
save mosquitoes and mangrove flies, when in such a situation, you may
as well pursue the study.  At the ebb gradually the foliage of
the lower branches of the mangroves grows wet and muddy, until there
is a great black band about three feet deep above the surface of the
water in all directions; gradually a network of gray-white roots rises
up, and below this again, gradually, a slope of smooth and lead-grey
slime.  The effect is not in the least as if the water had fallen,
but as if the mangroves had, with one accord, risen up out of it, and
into it again they seem silently to sink when the flood comes. 
But by this more safe, if still unpleasant, method of observing mangrove-swamps,
you miss seeing in full the make of them, for away in their fastnesses
the mangroves raise their branches far above the reach of tide line,
and the great gray roots of the older trees are always sticking up in
mid-air.  But, fringing the rivers, there is always a hedge of
younger mangroves whose lower branches get immersed.

At corners here and there from the river face you can see the land
being made from the waters.  A mud-bank forms off it, a mangrove
seed lights on it, and the thing’s done.  Well! not done,
perhaps, but begun; for if the bank is high enough to get exposed at
low water, this pioneer mangrove grows.  He has a wretched existence
though.  You have only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form
to see this.  He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they
struggle on together, their network of roots stopping abundance of mud,
and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous débris
of palm leaves, or a floating tree-trunk, but they always die before
they attain any considerable height.  Still even in death they
collect.  Their bare white stems remaining like a net gripped in
the mud, so that these pioneer mangrove heroes may be said to have laid
down their lives to make that mud-bank fit for colonisation, for the
time gradually comes when other mangroves can and do colonise on it,
and flourish, extending their territory steadily; and the mud-bank joins
up with, and becomes a part of, Africa.

Right away on the inland fringe of the swamp – you may go some hundreds
of miles before you get there – you can see the rest of the process. 
The mangroves there have risen up, and dried the mud to an extent that
is more than good for themselves, have over civilised that mud in fact,
and so the brackish waters of the tide – which, although their enemy
when too deep or too strong in salt, is essential to their existence
– cannot get to their roots.  They have done this gradually, as
a mangrove does all things, but they have done it, and down on to that
mud come a whole set of palms from the old mainland, who in their early
colonisation days go through similarly trying experiences.  First
the screw-pines come and live among them; then the wine-palm and various
creepers, and then the oil-palm; and the débris of these
plants being greater and making better soil than dead mangroves, they
work quicker and the mangrove is doomed.  Soon the salt waters
are shut right out, the mangrove dies, and that bit of Africa is made. 
It is very interesting to get into these regions; you see along the
river-bank a rich, thick, lovely wall of soft-wooded plants, and behind
this you find great stretches of death; – miles and miles sometimes
of gaunt white mangrove skeletons standing on gray stuff that is not
yet earth and is no longer slime, and through the crust of which you
can sink into rotting putrefaction.  Yet, long after you are dead,
buried, and forgotten, this will become a forest of soft-wooded plants
and palms; and finally of hard-wooded trees.  Districts of this
description you will find in great sweeps of Kama country for example,
and in the rich low regions up to the base of the Sierra del Cristal
and the Rumby range.

You often hear the utter lifelessness of mangrove-swamps commented
on; why I do not know, for they are fairly heavily stocked with fauna,
though the species are comparatively few.  There are the crocodiles,
more of them than any one wants; there are quantities of flies, particularly
the big silent mangrove-fly which lays an egg in you under the skin;
the egg becomes a maggot and stays there until it feels fit to enter
into external life.  Then there are “slimy things that crawl
with legs upon a slimy sea,” and any quantity of hopping mud-fish,
and crabs, and a certain mollusc, and in the water various kinds of
cat-fish.  Birdless they are save for the flocks of gray parrots
that pass over them at evening, hoarsely squarking; and save for this
squarking of the parrots the swamps are silent all the day, at least
during the dry season; in the wet season there is no silence night or
day in West Africa, but that roar of the descending deluge of rain that
is more monotonous and more gloomy than any silence can be.  In
the morning you do not hear the long, low, mellow whistle of the plantain-eaters
calling up the dawn, nor in the evening the clock-bird nor the Handel-Festival-sized
choruses of frogs, or the crickets, that carry on their vesper controversy
of “she did” – “she didn’t” so fiercely
on hard land.

But the mangrove-swamp follows the general rule for West Africa,
and night in it is noisier than the day.  After dark it is full
of noises; grunts from I know not what, splashes from jumping fish,
the peculiar whirr of rushing crabs, and quaint creaking and groaning
sounds from the trees; and – above all in eeriness – the strange whine
and sighing cough of crocodiles.

Great regions of mangrove-swamps are a characteristic feature of
the West African Coast.  The first of these lies north of Sierra
Leone; then they occur, but of smaller dimensions – just fringes of
river-outfalls – until you get to Lagos, when you strike the greatest
of them all: – the swamps of the Niger outfalls (about twenty-three
rivers in all) and of the Sombreiro, New Calabar, Bonny, San Antonio,
Opobo (false and true), Kwoibo, Old Calabar (with the Cross Akwayafe
Qwa Rivers) and Rio del Rey Rivers.  The whole of this great stretch
of coast is a mangrove-swamp, each river silently rolling down its great
mass of mud-laden waters and constituting each in itself a very pretty
problem to the navigator by its network of intercommunicating creeks,
and the sand and mud bar which it forms off its entrance by dropping
its heaviest mud; its lighter mud is carried out beyond its bar and
makes the nasty-smelling brown soup of the South Atlantic Ocean, with
froth floating in lines and patches on it, for miles to seaward.

In this great region of swamps every mile appears like every other
mile until you get well used to it, and are able to distinguish the
little local peculiarities at the entrance of the rivers and in the
winding of the creeks, a thing difficult even for the most experienced
navigator to do during those thick wool-like mists called smokes, which
hang about the whole Bight from November till May (the dry season),
sometimes lasting all day, sometimes clearing off three hours after
sunrise.

The upper or north-westerly part of the swamp is round the mouths
of the Niger, and it successfully concealed this fact from geographers
down to 1830, when the series of heroic journeys made by Mungo Park,
Clapperton, and the two Landers finally solved the problem – a problem
that was as great and which cost more men’s lives than even the
discovery of the sources of the Nile.

That this should have been so may seem very strange to us who now
have been told the answer to the riddle; for the upper waters of this
great river were known of before Christ and spoken of by Herodotus,
Pliny and Ptolemy, and its mouths navigated continuously along by the
seaboard by trading vessels since the fifteenth century, but they were
not recognised as belonging to the Niger.  Some geographers held
that the Senegal or the Gambia was its outfall; others that it was the
Zaire (Congo); others that it did not come out on the West Coast at
all, but got mixed up with the Nile in the middle of the continent,
and so on.  Yet when you come to know the swamps this is not so
strange.  You find on going up what looks like a big river – say
Forcados, two and a half miles wide at the entrance and a real bit of
the Niger.  Before you are up it far great, broad, business-like-looking
river entrances open on either side, showing wide rivers mangrove-walled,
but two-thirds of them are utter frauds which will ground you within
half an hour of your entering them.  Some few of them do communicate
with other main channels to the great upper river, and others are main
channels themselves; but most of them intercommunicate with each other
and lead nowhere in particular, and you can’t even get there because
of their shallowness.  It is small wonder that the earlier navigators
did not get far up them in sailing ships, and that the problem had to
be solved by men descending the main stream of the Niger before it commences
to what we in Devonshire should call “squander itself about”
in all these channels.  And in addition it must be remembered that
the natives with whom these trading vessels dealt, first for slaves,
afterwards for palm-oil, were not, and are not now, members of the Lo
family of savages.  Far from it: they do not go in for “gentle
smiles,” but for murdering any unprotected boat’s crew they
happen to come across, not only for a love of sport but to keep white
traders from penetrating to the trade-producing interior, and spoiling
prices.  And the region is practically foodless.

The rivers of the great mangrove-swamp from the Sombreiro to the
Rio del Rey are now known pretty surely not to be branches of the Niger,
but the upper regions of this part of the Bight are much neglected by
English explorers.  I believe the great swamp region of the Bight
of Biafra is the greatest in the world, and that in its immensity and
gloom it has a grandeur equal to that of the Himalayas.

Take any man, educated or not, and place him on Bonny or Forcados
River in the wet season on a Sunday – Bonny for choice.  Forcados
is good.  You’ll keep Forcados scenery “indelibly limned
on the tablets of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page,”
after you have spent even a week waiting for the Lagos branch-boat on
its inky waters.  But Bonny!  Well, come inside the bar and
anchor off the factories: seaward there is the foam of the bar gleaming
and wicked white against a leaden sky and what there is left of Breaker
Island.  In every other direction you will see the apparently endless
walls of mangrove, unvarying in colour, unvarying in form, unvarying
in height, save from perspective.  Beneath and between you and
them lie the rotting mud waters of Bonny River, and away up and down
river, miles of rotting mud waters fringed with walls of rotting mud
mangrove-swamp.  The only break in them – one can hardly call it
a relief to the scenery – are the gaunt black ribs of the old hulks,
once used as trading stations, which lie exposed at low water near the
shore, protruding like the skeletons of great unclean beasts who have
died because Bonny water was too strong even for them.

Raised on piles from the mud shore you will see the white-painted
factories and their great store-houses for oil; each factory likely
enough with its flag at half-mast, which does not enliven the scenery
either, for you know it is because somebody is “dead again.” 
Throughout and over all is the torrential downpour of the wet-season
rain, coming down night and day with its dull roar.  I have known
it rain six mortal weeks in Bonny River, just for all the world as if
it were done by machinery, and the interval that came then was only
a few wet days, where-after it settled itself down to work again in
the good West Coast waterspout pour for more weeks.

While your eyes are drinking in the characteristics of Bonny scenery
you notice a peculiar smell – an intensification of that smell you noticed
when nearing Bonny, in the evening, out at sea.  That’s the
breath of the malarial mud, laden with fever, and the chances are you
will be down to-morrow.  If it is near evening time now, you can
watch it becoming incarnate, creeping and crawling and gliding out from
the side creeks and between the mangrove-roots, laying itself upon the
river, stretching and rolling in a kind of grim play, and finally crawling
up the side of the ship to come on board and leave its cloak of moisture
that grows green mildew in a few hours over all.  Noise you will
not be much troubled with: there is only that rain, a sound I have known
make men who are sick with fever well-nigh mad, and now and again the
depressing cry of the curlews which abound here.  This combination
is such that after six or eight hours of it you will be thankful to
hear your shipmates start to work the winch.  I take it you are
hard up when you relish a winch.  And you will say – let your previous
experience of the world be what it may – Good Heavens, what a place!

Five times have I been now in Bonny River and I like it.  You
always do get to like it if you live long enough to allow the strange
fascination of the place to get a hold on you; but when I first entered
it, on a ship commanded by Captain Murray in ’93, in the wet season,
i.e. in August, in spite of the confidence I had by this time
acquired in his skill and knowledge of the West Coast, a sense of horror
seized on me as I gazed upon the scene, and I said to the old Coaster
who then had charge of my education, “Good Heavens! what an awful
accident.  We’ve gone and picked up the Styx.” 
He was evidently hurt and said, “Bonny was a nice place when you
got used to it,” and went on to discourse on the last epidemic
here, when nine men out of the resident eleven died in about ten days
from yellow fever.  Next to the scenery of “a River,”
commend me for cheerfulness to the local conversation of its mangrove-swamp
region; and every truly important West African river has its mangrove-swamp
belt, which extends inland as far as the tide waters make it brackish,
and which has a depth and extent from the banks depending on the configuration
of the country.  Above this belt comes uniformly a region of high
forest, having towards the river frontage clay cliffs, sometimes high,
as in the case of the Old Calabar at Adiabo, more frequently dwarf cliffs,
as in the Forcados up at Warree, and in the Ogowé, – for a long
stretch through Kama country.  After the clay cliffs region you
come to a region of rapids, caused by the river cutting its way through
a mountain range; such ranges are the Pallaballa, causing the Livingstone
rapids of the Congo; the Sierra del Cristal, those of the Ogowé,
and many lesser rivers; the Rumby and Omon ranges, those of the Old
Calabar and Cross Rivers.

Naturally in different parts these separate regions vary in size. 
The mangrove-swamp may be only a fringe at the mouth of the river, or
it may cover hundreds of square miles.  The clay cliffs may extend
for only a mile or so along the bank, or they may, as on the Ogowé,
extend for 130.  And so it is also with the rapids: in some rivers,
for instance the Cameroons, there are only a few miles of them, in others
there are many miles; in the Ogowé there are as many as 500;
and these rapids may be close to the river mouth, as in most of the
Gold Coast rivers, save the Ancobra and the Volta; or they may be far
in the interior, as in the Cross River, where they commence at about
200 miles; and on the Ogowé, where they commence at about 208
miles from the sea coast; this depends on the nearness or remoteness
from the coast line of the mountain ranges which run down the west side
of the continent; ranges (apparently of very different geological formations),
which have no end of different names, but about which little is known
in detail. {80}

And now we will leave generalisations on West African rivers and
go into particulars regarding one little known in England, and called
by its owners, the French, the greatest strictly equatorial river in
the world – the Ogowé.

CHAPTER IV.  THE OGOWÉ.

Wherein the voyager gives extracts from the Log of the Mové
and of the Éclaireur, and an account of the voyager’s
first meeting with “those fearful Fans,” also an awful warning
to all young persons who neglect the study of the French language.

On the 20th of May I reached Gaboon, now called Libreville – the
capital of Congo Français, and, thanks to the kindness of Mr.
Hudson, I was allowed a passage on a small steamer then running from
Gaboon to the Ogowé River, and up it when necessary as far as
navigation by steamer is possible – this steamer is, I deeply regret
to say, now no more.  As experiences of this kind contain such
miscellaneous masses of facts, I am forced to commit the literary crime
of giving you my Ogowé set of experiences in the form of diary.

June 5th, 1895. – Off on Mové at 9.30. 
Passengers, Mr. Hudson, Mr. Woods, Mr. Huyghens, Père Steinitz,
and I.  There are black deck-passengers galore; I do not know their
honourable names, but they are evidently very much married men, for
there is quite a gorgeously coloured little crowd of ladies to see them
off.  They salute me as I pass down the pier, and start inquiries. 
I say hastily to them: “Farewell, I’m off up river,”
for I notice Mr. Fildes bearing down on me, and I don’t want him
to drop in on the subject of society interest.  I expect it is
settled now, or pretty nearly.  There is a considerable amount
of mild uproar among the black contingent, and the Mové
firmly clears off before half the good advice and good wishes for the
black husbands are aboard.  She is a fine little vessel; far finer
than I expected.  The accommodation I am getting is excellent. 
A long, narrow cabin, with one bunk in it and pretty nearly everything
one can wish for, and a copying press thrown in.  Food is excellent,
society charming, captain and engineer quite acquisitions.  The
saloon is square and roomy for the size of the vessel, and most things,
from rowlocks to teapots, are kept under the seats in good nautical
style.  We call at the guard-ship to pass our papers, and then
steam ahead out of the Gaboon estuary to the south, round Pongara Point,
keeping close into the land.  About forty feet from shore there
is a good free channel for vessels with a light draught which if you
do not take, you have to make a big sweep seaward to avoid a reef. 
Between four and five miles below Pongara, we pass Point Gombi, which
is fitted with a lighthouse, a lively and conspicuous structure by day
as well as night.  It is perched on a knoll, close to the extremity
of the long arm of low, sandy ground, and is painted black and white,
in horizontal bands, which, in conjunction with its general figure,
give it a pagoda-like appearance.

Alongside it are a white-painted, red-roofed house for the lighthouse
keeper, and a store for its oil.  The light is either a flashing
or a revolving or a stationary one, when it is alight.  One must
be accurate about these things, and my knowledge regarding it is from
information received, and amounts to the above.  I cannot throw
in any personal experience, because I have never passed it at night-time,
and seen from Glass it seems just steady.  Most lighthouses on
this Coast give up fancy tricks, like flashing or revolving, pretty
soon after they are established.  Seventy-five per cent. of them
are not alight half the time at all.  “It’s the climate.” 
Gombi, however, you may depend on for being alight at night, and I have
no hesitation in saying you can see it, when it is visible, seventeen
miles out to sea, and that the knoll on which the lighthouse stands
is a grass-covered sand cliff, about forty or fifty feet above sea-level. 
As we pass round Gombi point, the weather becomes distinctly rough,
particularly at lunch-time.  The Mové minds it less
than her passengers, and stamps steadily along past the wooded shore,
behind which shows a distant range of blue hills.  Silence falls
upon the black passengers, who assume recumbent positions on the deck,
and suffer.  All the things from under the saloon seats come out
and dance together, and play puss-in-the-corner, after the fashion of
loose gear when there is any sea on.  As the night comes down,
the scene becomes more and more picturesque.  The moonlit sea,
shimmering and breaking on the darkened shore, the black forest and
the hills silhouetted against the star-powdered purple sky, and, at
my feet, the engine-room stoke-hole, lit with the rose-coloured glow
from its furnace, showing by the great wood fire the two nearly naked
Krumen stokers, shining like polished bronze in their perspiration,
as they throw in on to the fire the billets of red wood that look like
freshly-cut chunks of flesh.  The white engineer hovers round the
mouth of the pit, shouting down directions and ever and anon plunging
down the little iron ladder to carry them out himself.  At intervals
he stands on the rail with his head craned round the edge of the sun
deck to listen to the captain, who is up on the little deck above, for
there is no telegraph to the engines, and our gallant commander’s
voice is not strong.  While the white engineer is roosting on the
rail, the black engineer comes partially up the ladder and gazes hard
at me; so I give him a wad of tobacco, and he plainly regards me as
inspired, for of course that was what he wanted.  Remember that
whenever you see a man, black or white, filled with a nameless longing,
it is tobacco he requires.  Grim despair accompanied by a gusty
temper indicates something wrong with his pipe, in which case offer
him a straightened-out hairpin.  The black engineer having got
his tobacco, goes below to the stoke-hole again and smokes a short clay
as black and as strong as himself.  The captain affects an immense
churchwarden.  How he gets through life, waving it about as he
does, without smashing it every two minutes, I cannot make out.

At last we anchor for the night just inside Nazareth Bay, for Nazareth
Bay wants daylight to deal with, being rich in low islands and sand
shoals.  We crossed the Equator this afternoon.

June 6th. – Off at daybreak into Nazareth Bay.  Anxiety
displayed by navigators, sounding taken on both sides of the bows with
long bamboo poles painted in stripes, and we go “slow ahead”
and “hard astern” successfully, until we get round a good-sized
island, and there we stick until four o’clock, high water, when
we come off all right, and steam triumphantly but cautiously into the
Ogowé.  The shores of Nazareth Bay are fringed with mangroves,
but once in the river the scenery soon changes, and the waters are walled
on either side with a forest rich in bamboo, oil and wine-palms. 
These forest cliffs seem to rise right up out of the mirror-like brown
water.  Many of the highest trees are covered with clusters of
brown-pink young shoots that look like flowers, and others are decorated
by my old enemy the climbing palm, now bearing clusters of bright crimson
berries.  Climbing plants of other kinds are wreathing everything,
some blossoming with mauve, some with yellow, some with white flowers,
and every now and then a soft sweet heavy breath of fragrance comes
out to us as we pass by.  There is a native village on the north
bank, embowered along its plantations with some very tall cocoa-palms
rising high above them.

The river winds so that it seems to close in behind us, opening out
in front fresh vistas of superb forest beauty, with the great brown
river stretching away unbroken ahead like a broad road of burnished
bronze.  Astern, it has a streak of frosted silver let into it
by the Mové’s screw.  Just about six o’clock,
we run up to the Fallaba, the Mové’s predecessor
in working the Ogowé, now a hulk, used as a depot by Hatton and
Cookson.  She is anchored at the entrance of a creek that runs
through to the Fernan Vaz; some say it is six hours’ run, others
that it is eight hours for a canoe; all agree that there are plenty
of mosquitoes.

The Fallaba looks grimly picturesque, and about the last spot
in which a person of a nervous disposition would care to spend the night. 
One half of her deck is dedicated to fuel logs, on the other half are
plank stores for the goods, and a room for the black sub-trader in charge
of them.  I know that there must be scorpions which come out of
those logs and stroll into the living room, and goodness only knows
what one might not fancy would come up the creek or rise out of the
floating grass, or the limitless-looking forest.  I am told she
was a fine steamer in her day, but those who had charge of her did not
make allowances for the very rapid rotting action of the Ogowé
water, so her hull rusted through before her engines were a quarter
worn out; and there was nothing to be done with her then, but put a
lot of concrete in, and make her a depot, in which state of life she
is very useful, for during the height of the dry season, the Mové
cannot get through the creek to supply the firm’s Fernan Vaz factories.

Subsequently I heard much of the Fallaba, which seems to have
been a celebrated, or rather notorious, vessel.  Every one declared
her engines to have been of immense power, but this I believe to have
been a mere local superstition; because in the same breath, the man
who referred to them, as if it would have been quite unnecessary for
new engines to have been made for H.M.S.  Victorious if
those Fallaba engines could have been sent to Chatham dockyard,
would mention that “you could not get any pace up on her”;
and all who knew her sadly owned “she wouldn’t steer,”
so naturally she spent the greater part of her time on the Ogowé
on a sand-bank, or in the bush.  All West African steamers have
a mania for bush, and the delusion that they are required to climb trees. 
The Fallaba had the complaint severely, because of her defective
steering powers, and the temptation the magnificent forest, and the
rapid currents, and the sharp turns of the creek district, offered her;
she failed, of course – they all fail – but it is not for want of practice. 
I have seen many West Coast vessels up trees, but never more than fifteen
feet or so.

The trade of this lower part of the Ogowé, from the mouth
to Lembarene, a matter of 130 miles, is almost nil.  Above
Lembarene, you are in touch with the rubber and ivory trade.

This Fallaba creek is noted for mosquitoes, and the black
passengers made great and showy preparations in the evening time to
receive their onslaught, by tying up their strong chintz mosquito bars
to the stanchions and the cook-house.  Their arrangements being
constantly interrupted by the white engineer making alarums and excursions
amongst them; because when too many of them get on one side the Mové
takes a list and burns her boilers.  Conversation and atmosphere
are full of mosquitoes.  The decision of widely experienced sufferers
amongst us is, that next to the lower Ogowé, New Orleans is the
worst place for them in this world.

The day closed with a magnificent dramatic beauty.  Dead ahead
of us, up through a bank of dun-coloured mist rose the moon, a great
orb of crimson, spreading down the oil-like, still river, a streak of
blood-red reflection.  Right astern, the sun sank down into the
mist, a vaster orb of crimson, and when he had gone out of view, sent
up flushes of amethyst, gold, carmine and serpent-green, before he left
the moon in undisputed possession of the black purple sky.

Forest and river were absolutely silent, but there was a pleasant
chatter and laughter from the black crew and passengers away forward,
that made the Mové seem an island of life in a land of
death.  I retired into my cabin, so as to get under the mosquito
curtains to write; and one by one I heard my companions come into the
saloon adjacent, and say to the watchman: “You sabe six o’clock? 
When them long arm catch them place, and them short arm catch them place,
you call me in the morning time.”  Exit from saloon – silence
– then: “You sabe five o’clock?  When them long arm
catch them place, and them short arm catch them place, you call me in
the morning time.”  Exit – silence – then: “You sabe
half-past five o’clock?  When them long arm – ” 
Oh, if I were a watchman!  Anyhow, that five o’clocker will
have the whole ship’s company roused in the morning time.

June 7th. – Every one called in the morning time by the reflex
row from the rousing of the five o’clocker.  Glorious morning. 
The scene the reversal of that of last night.  The forest to the
east shows a deep blue-purple, mounted on a background that changes
as you watch it from daffodil and amethyst to rose-pink, as the sun
comes up through the night mists.  The moon sinks down among them,
her pale face flushing crimson as she goes; and the yellow-gold sunshine
comes, glorifying the forest and gilding the great sweep of tufted papyrus
growing alongside the bank; and the mist vanishes, little white flecks
of it lingering among the water reeds and lying in the dark shadows
of the forest stems.  The air is full of the long, soft, rich notes
of the plantain warblers, and the uproar consequent upon the Mové
taking on fuel wood, which comes alongside in canoe loads from the Fallaba.

Père Steinitz and Mr. Woods are busy preparing their respective
canoes for their run to Fernan Vaz through the creek.  Their canoes
are very fine ones, with a remarkably clean run aft.  The Père’s
is quite the travelling canoe, with a little stage of bamboo aft, covered
with a hood of palm thatch, under which you can make yourself quite
comfortable, and keep yourself and your possessions dry, unless something
desperate comes on in the way of rain.

By 10.25 we have got all our wood aboard, and run off up river full
speed.  The river seems broader above the Fallaba, but this
is mainly on account of its being temporarily unencumbered with islands. 
A good deal of the bank we have passed by since leaving Nazareth Bay
on the south side has been island shore, with a channel between the
islands and the true south bank.

The day soon grew dull, and looked threatening, after the delusive
manner of the dry season.  The climbing plants are finer here than
I have ever before seen them.  They form great veils and curtains
between and over the trees, often hanging so straight and flat, in stretches
of twenty to forty feet or so wide, and thirty to sixty or seventy feet
high, that it seems incredible that no human hand has trained or clipped
them into their perfect forms.  Sometimes these curtains are decorated
with large bell-shaped, bright-coloured flowers, sometimes with delicate
sprays of white blossoms.  This forest is beyond all my expectations
of tropical luxuriance and beauty, and it is a thing of another world
to the forest of the Upper Calabar, which, beautiful as it is, is a
sad dowdy to this.  There you certainly get a great sense of grimness
and vastness; here you have an equal grimness and vastness with the
addition of superb colour.  This forest is a Cleopatra to which
Calabar is but a Quaker.  Not only does this forest depend on flowers
for its illumination, for there are many kinds of trees having their
young shoots, crimson, brown-pink, and creamy yellow: added to this
there is also the relieving aspect of the prevailing fashion among West
African trees, of wearing the trunk white with here and there upon it
splashes of pale pink lichen, and vermilion-red fungus, which alone
is sufficient to prevent the great mass of vegetation from being a monotony
in green.

All day long we steam past ever-varying scenes of loveliness whose
component parts are ever the same, yet the effect ever different. 
Doubtless it is wrong to call it a symphony, yet I know no other word
to describe the scenery of the Ogowé.  It is as full of
life and beauty and passion as any symphony Beethoven ever wrote: the
parts changing, interweaving, and returning.  There are leit
motifs here in it, too.  See the papyrus ahead; and you know
when you get abreast of it you will find the great forest sweeping away
in a bay-like curve behind it against the dull gray sky, the splendid
columns of its cotton and red woods looking like a façade of
some limitless inchoate temple.  Then again there is that stretch
of sword-grass, looking as if it grew firmly on to the bottom, so steady
does it stand; but as the Mové goes by, her wash sets
it undulating in waves across its broad acres of extent, showing it
is only riding at anchor; and you know after a grass patch you will
soon see a red dwarf clay cliff, with a village perched on its top,
and the inhabitants thereof in their blue and red cloths standing by
to shout and wave to the Mové, or legging it like lamp-lighters
from the back streets and the plantation to the river frontage, to be
in time to do so, and through all these changing phases there is always
the strain of the vast wild forest, and the swift, deep, silent river.

At almost every village that we pass – and they are frequent after
the Fallaba – there is an ostentatious display of firewood deposited
either on the bank, or on piles driven into the mud in front of it,
mutely saying in their uncivilised way, “Try our noted chunks:
best value for money” – (that is to say, tobacco, etc.), to the
Mové or any other little steamer that may happen to come
along hungry for fuel.

We stayed a few minutes this afternoon at Ashchyouka, where there
came off to us in a canoe an enterprising young Frenchman who has planted
and tended a coffee plantation in this out-of-the-way region, and which
is now, I am glad to hear, just coming into bearing.  After leaving
Ashchyouka, high land showed to the N.E., and at 5.15, without evident
cause to the uninitiated, the Mové took to whistling like
a liner.  A few minutes later a factory shows up on the hilly north
bank, which is Woermann’s; then just beyond and behind it we see
the Government Post; then Hatton and Cookson’s factory, all in
a line.  Opposite Hatton and Cookson’s there was a pretty
little stern-wheel steamer nestling against the steep clay bank of Lembarene
Island when we come in sight, but she instantly swept out from it in
a perfect curve, which lay behind her marked in frosted silver on the
water as she dropt down river.  I hear now she was the Éclaireur,
the stern-wheeler which runs up and down the Ogowé in connection
with the Chargeurs Réunis Company, subsidised by the Government,
and when the Mové whistled, she was just completing taking
on 3,000 billets of wood for fuel.  She comes up from the Cape
(Lopez) stoking half wood and half coal as far as Njole and back to
Lembarene; from Lembarene to the sea downwards she does on wood. 
In a few minutes we have taken her berth close to the bank, and tied
up to a tree.  The white engineer yells to the black engineer “Tom-Tom:
Haul out some of them fire and open them drains one time,” and
the stokers, with hooks, pull out the glowing logs on to the iron deck
in front of the furnace door, and throw water over them, and the Mové
sends a cloud of oil-laden steam against the bank, coming perilously
near scalding some of her black admirers assembled there.  I dare
say she felt vicious because they had been admiring the Éclaireur.

After a few minutes, I am escorted on to the broad verandah of Hatton
and Cookson’s factory, and I sit down under a lamp, prepared to
contemplate, until dinner time, the wild beauty of the scene. 
This idea does not get carried out; in the twinkling of an eye I am
stung all round the neck, and recognise there are lots too many mosquitoes
and sandflies in the scenery to permit of contemplation of any kind. 
Never have I seen sandflies and mosquitoes in such appalling quantities. 
With a wild ping of joy the latter made for me, and I retired promptly
into a dark corner of the verandah, swearing horribly, but internally,
and fought them.  Mr. Hudson, Agent-general, and Mr. Cockshut,
Agent for the Ogowé, walk up and down the beach in front, doubtless
talking cargo, apparently unconscious of mosquitoes; but by and by,
while we are having dinner, they get their share.  I behave exquisitely,
and am quite lost in admiration of my own conduct, and busily deciding
in my own mind whether I shall wear one of those plain ring haloes,
or a solid plate one, à la Cimabue, when Mr. Hudson says
in a voice full of reproach to Mr. Cockshut, “You have got mosquitoes
here, Mr. Cockshut.”  Poor Mr. Cockshut doesn’t deny
it; he has got four on his forehead and his hands are sprinkled with
them, but he says: “There are none at Njole,” which we all
feel is an absurdly lame excuse, for Njole is some ninety miles above
Lembarene, where we now are.  Mr. Hudson says this to him, tersely,
and feeling he has utterly crushed Mr. Cockshut, turns on me, and utterly
failing to recognise me as a suffering saint, says point blank and savagely,
“You don’t seem to feel these things, Miss Kingsley.” 
Not feel them, indeed!  Why, I could cry over them.  Well!
that’s all the thanks one gets for trying not to be a nuisance
in this world.

After dinner I go back on to the Mové for the night,
for it is too late to go round to Kangwe and ask Mme. Jacot, of the
Mission Evangelique, if she will take me in.  The air is stiff
with mosquitoes, and saying a few suitable words to them, I dash under
the mosquito bar and sleep, lulled by their shrill yells of baffled
rage.

June 8th. – In the morning, up at five.  Great activity
on beach.  Mové synchronously taking on wood fuel
and discharging cargo.  A very active young French pastor from
the Kangwe mission station is round after the mission’s cargo. 
Mr. Hudson kindly makes inquiries as to whether I may go round to Kangwe
and stay with Mme. Jacot.  He says: “Oh, yes,” but
as I find he is not M. Jacot, I do not feel justified in accepting this
statement without its having personal confirmation from Mme. Jacot,
and so, leaving my luggage with the Mové, I get them to
allow me to go round with him and his cargo to Kangwe, about three-quarters
of an hour’s paddle round the upper part of Lembarene Island,
and down the broad channel on the other side of it.  Kangwe is
beautifully situated on a hill, as its name denotes, on the mainland
and north bank of the river.  Mme. Jacot most kindly says I may
come, though I know I shall be a fearful nuisance, for there is no room
for me save M. Jacot’s beautifully neat, clean, tidy study. 
I go back in the canoe and fetch my luggage from the Mové;
and say good-bye to Mr. Hudson, who gave me an immense amount of valuable
advice about things, which was subsequently of great use to me, and
a lot of equally good warnings which, if I had attended to, would have
enabled me to avoid many, if not all, my misadventures in Congo Français.

I camped out that night in M. Jacot’s study, wondering how
he would like it when he came home and found me there; for he was now
away on one of his usual evangelising tours.  Providentially Mme.
Jacot let me have the room that the girls belonging to the mission school
usually slept in, to my great relief, before M. Jacot came home.

I will not weary you with my diary during my first stay at Kangwe. 
It is a catalogue of the collection of fish, etc., that I made, and
a record of the continuous, never-failing kindness and help that I received
from M. and Mme. Jacot, and of my attempts to learn from them the peculiarities
of the region, the natives, and their language and customs, which they
both know so well and manage so admirably.  I daily saw there what
it is possible to do, even in the wildest and most remote regions of
West Africa, and recognised that there is still one heroic form of human
being whose praise has never adequately been sung, namely, the missionary’s
wife.

Wishing to get higher up the Ogowé, I took the opportunity
of the river boat of the Chargeurs Réunis going up to the Njole
on one of her trips, and joined her.

June 22nd. – Éclaireur, charming little stern
wheel steamer, exquisitely kept.  She has an upper and a lower
deck.  The lower deck for business, the upper deck for white passengers
only.  On the upper deck there is a fine long deck-house, running
almost her whole length.  In this are the officers’ cabins,
the saloon and the passengers’ cabins (two), both large and beautifully
fitted up.  Captain Verdier exceedingly pleasant and constantly
saying “N’est-ce pas?”  A quiet and singularly
clean engineer completes the white staff.

The passengers consist of Mr. Cockshut, going up river to see after
the sub-factories; a French official bound for Franceville, which it
will take him thirty-six days, go as quick as he can, in a canoe after
Njole; a tremendously lively person who has had black water fever four
times, while away in the bush with nothing to live on but manioc, a
diet it would be far easier to die on under the circumstances. 
He is excellent company; though I do not know a word he says, he is
perpetually giving lively and dramatic descriptions of things which
I cannot but recognise.  M. S—, with his pince-nez, the Doctor,
and, above all, the rapids of the Ogowé, rolling his hands round
and round each other and clashing them forward with a descriptive ejaculation
of “Whish, flash, bum, bum, bump,” and then comes what evidently
represents a terrific fight for life against terrific odds.  Wish
to goodness I knew French, for wishing to see these rapids, I cannot
help feeling anxious and worried at not fully understanding this dramatic
entertainment regarding them.  There is another passenger, said
to be the engineer’s brother, a quiet, gentlemanly man. 
Captain argues violently with every one; with Mr. Cockshut on the subject
of the wicked waste of money in keeping the Mové and not
shipping all goods by the Éclaireur, “N’est-ce
pas?” and with the French official on goodness knows what, but
I fancy it will be pistols for two and coffee for one in the morning
time.  When the captain feels himself being worsted in argument,
he shouts for support to the engineer and his brother.  “N’est-ce
pas?” he says, turning furiously to them.  “Oui, oui,
certainement,” they say dutifully and calmly, and then he, refreshed
by their support, dashes back to his controversial fray.  He even
tries to get up a row with me on the subject of the English merchants
at Calabar, whom he asserts have sworn a kind of blood oath to ship
by none but British and African Company’s steamers.  I cannot
stand this, for I know my esteemed and honoured friends the Calabar
traders would ship by the Flying Dutchman or the Devil himself
if either of them would take the stuff at 15 shillings the ton. 
We have, however, to leave off this row for want of language, to our
mutual regret, for it would have been a love of a fight.

Soon after leaving Lembarene Island, we pass the mouth of the chief
southern affluent of the Ogowé, the Ngunie; it flows in unostentatiously
from the E.S.E., a broad, quiet river here with low banks and two islands
(Walker’s Islands) showing just off its entrance.  Higher
up, it flows through a mountainous country, and at Samba, its furthest
navigable point, there is a wonderfully beautiful waterfall, the whole
river coming down over a low cliff, surrounded by an amphitheatre of
mountains.  It takes the Éclaireur two days steaming
from the mouth of the Ngunie to Samba, when she can get up; but now,
in the height of the long dry season neither she nor the Mové
can go because of the sandbanks; so Samba is cut off until next October. 
Hatton and Cookson have factories up at Samba, for it is an outlet for
the trade of Achango land in rubber and ivory, a trade worked by the
Akele tribe, a powerful, savage and difficult lot to deal with, and
just in the same condition, as far as I can learn, as they were when
Du Chaillu made his wonderful journeys among them.  While I was
at Lembarene, waiting for the Éclaireur, a notorious chief
descended on a Ngunie sub-factory, and looted it.  The wife of
the black trading agent made a gallant resistance, her husband was away
on a trading expedition, but the chief had her seized and beaten, and
thrown into the river.  An appeal was made to the Doctor then Administrator
of the Ogowé, a powerful and helpful official, and he soon came
up with the little canoniere, taking Mr. Cockshut with him and fully
vindicated the honour of the French flag, under which all factories
here are.

The banks of the Ogowé just above Lembarene Island are low;
with the forest only broken by village clearings and seeming to press
in on those, ready to absorb them should the inhabitants cease their
war against it.  The blue Ntyankâlâ mountains of Achango
land show away to the E.S.E. in a range.  Behind us, gradually
sinking in the distance, is the high land on Lembarene Island.

Soon we run up alongside a big street of a village with four high
houses rising a story above the rest, which are strictly ground floor;
it has also five or six little low open thatched huts along the street
in front. {96} 
These may be fetish huts, or, as the captain of the Sparrow would
say, “again they mayn’t.”  For I have seen similar
huts in the villages round Libreville, which were store places for roof
mats, of which the natives carefully keep a store dry and ready for
emergencies in the way of tornadoes, or to sell.  We stop abreast
of this village.  Inhabitants in scores rush out and form an excited
row along the vertical bank edge, several of the more excited individuals
falling over it into the water.

Yells from our passengers on the lower deck.  Yells from inhabitants
on shore.  Yells of vite, vite from the Captain.  Dogs
bark, horns bray, some exhilarated individual thumps the village drum,
canoes fly out from the bank towards us.  Fearful scrimmage heard
going on all the time on the deck below.  As soon as the canoes
are alongside, our passengers from the lower deck, with their bundles
and their dogs, pour over the side into them.  Canoes rock wildly
and wobble off rapidly towards the bank, frightening the passengers
because they have got their best clothes on, and fear that the Éclaireur
will start and upset them altogether with her wash.

On reaching the bank, the new arrivals disappear into brown clouds
of wives and relations, and the dogs into fighting clusters of resident
dogs.  Happy, happy day!  For those men who have gone ashore
have been away on hire to the government and factories for a year, and
are safe home in the bosoms of their families again, and not only they
themselves, but all the goods they have got in pay.  The remaining
passengers below still yell to their departed friends; I know not what
they say, but I expect it’s the Fan equivalent for “Mind
you write.  Take care of yourself.  Yes, I’ll come and
see you soon,” etc., etc.  While all this is going on, the
Éclaireur quietly slides down river, with the current,
broadside on as if she smelt her stable at Lembarene.  This I find
is her constant habit whenever the captain, the engineer, and the man
at the wheel are all busy in a row along the rail, shouting overside,
which occurs whenever we have passengers to land.  Her iniquity
being detected when the last canoe load has left for the shore, she
is spun round and sent up river again at full speed.

We go on up stream; now and again stopping at little villages to
land passengers or at little sub-factories to discharge cargo, until
evening closes in, when we anchor and tie up at O’Saomokita, where
there is a sub-factory of Messrs. Woermann’s, in charge of which
is a white man, the only white man between Lembarene and Njole. 
He comes on board and looks only a boy, but is really aged twenty. 
He is a Frenchman, and was at Hatton and Cookson’s first, then
he joined Woermann’s, who have put him in charge of this place. 
The isolation for a white man must be terrible; sometimes two months
will go by without his seeing another white face but that in his looking-glass,
and when he does see another, it is only by a fleeting visit such as
we now pay him, and to make the most of this, he stays on board to dinner.

June 23rd. – Start off steaming up river early in the morning
time.  Land ahead showing mountainous.  Rather suddenly the
banks grow higher.  Here and there in the forest are patches which
look like regular hand-made plantations, which they are not, but only
patches of egombie-gombie trees, showing that at this place was once
a native town.  Whenever land is cleared along here, this tree
springs up all over the ground.  It grows very rapidly, and has
great leaves something like a sycamore leaf, only much larger. 
These leaves growing in a cluster at the top of the straight stem give
an umbrella-like appearance to the affair; so the natives call them
and an umbrella by the same name, but whether they think the umbrella
is like the tree or the tree is like the umbrella, I can’t make
out.  I am always getting myself mixed over this kind of thing
in my attempts “to contemplate phenomena from a scientific standpoint,”
as Cambridge ordered me to do.  I’ll give the habit up. 
“You can’t do that sort of thing out here – It’s the
climate,” and I will content myself with stating the fact, that
when a native comes into a store and wants an umbrella, he asks for
an egombie-gombie.

The uniformity of the height of the individual trees in one of these
patches is striking, and it arises from their all starting fair. 
I cannot make out other things about them to my satisfaction, for you
very rarely see one of them in the wild bush, and then it does not bear
a fruit that the natives collect and use, and then chuck away the stones
round their domicile.  Anyhow, there they are all one height, and
all one colour, and apparently allowing no other vegetation to make
any headway among them.  But I found when I carefully investigated
egombie-gombie patches that there were a few of the great, slower-growing
forest trees coming up amongst them, and in time when these attain a
sufficient height, their shade kills off the egombie-gombie, and the
patch goes back into the great forest from which it came.  The
frequency of these patches arises from the nomadic habits of the chief
tribe in these regions, the Fans.  They rarely occupy one site
for a village for any considerable time on account – firstly, of their
wasteful method of collecting rubber by cutting down the vine, which
soon stamps it out of a district; and, secondly, from their quarrelsome
ways.  So when a village of Fans has cleared all the rubber out
of its district, or has made the said district too hot to hold it by
rows with other villages, or has got itself very properly shelled out
and burnt for some attack on traders or the French flag in any form,
its inhabitants clear off into another district, and build another village;
for bark and palm thatch are cheap, and house removing just nothing;
when you are an unsophisticated cannibal Fan you don’t require
a pantechnicon van to stow away your one or two mushroom-shaped stools,
knives, and cooking-pots, and a calabash or so.  If you are rich,
maybe you will have a box with clothes in as well, but as a general
rule all your clothes are on your back.  So your wives just pick
up the stools and the knives and the cooking-pots, and the box, and
the children toddle off with the calabashes.  You have, of course,
the gun to carry, for sleeping or waking a Fan never parts with his
gun, and so there you are “finish,” as M. Pichault would
say, and before your new bark house is up, there grows the egombie-gombie,
where your house once stood.  Now and again, for lack of immediate
neighbouring villages to quarrel with, one end of a village will quarrel
with the other end.  The weaker end then goes off and builds itself
another village, keeping an eye lifting for any member of the stronger
end who may come conveniently into its neighbourhood to be killed and
eaten.  Meanwhile, the egombie-gombie grows over the houses of
the empty end, pretending it’s a plantation belonging to the remaining
half.  I once heard a new-comer hold forth eloquently as to how
those Fans were maligned.  “They say,” said he, with
a fine wave of his arm towards such a patch, “that these people
do not till the soil – that they are not industrious – that the few
plantations they do make are ill-kept – that they are only a set of
wandering hunters and cannibals.  Look there at those magnificent
plantations!”  I did look, but I did not alter my opinion
of the Fans, for I know my old friend egombie-gombie when I see him.

This morning the French official seems sad and melancholy. 
I fancy he has got a Monday head (Kipling), but he revives as the day
goes on.  As we go on, the banks become hills and the broad river,
which has been showing sheets of sandbanks in all directions, now narrows
and shows only neat little beaches of white sand in shallow places along
the bank.  The current is terrific.  The Éclaireur
breathes hard, and has all she can do to fight her way up against it. 
Masses of black weathered rock in great boulders show along the exposed
parts of both banks, left dry by the falling waters.  Each bank
is steep, and quantities of great trees, naked and bare, are hanging
down from them, held by their roots and bush-rope entanglement from
being swept away with the rushing current, and they make a great white
fringe to the banks.  The hills become higher and higher, and more
and more abrupt, and the river runs between them in a gloomy ravine,
winding to and fro; we catch sight of a patch of white sand ahead, which
I mistake for a white painted house, but immediately after doubling
round a bend we see the houses of the Talagouga Mission Station. 
The Éclaireur forthwith has an hysteric fit on her whistle,
so as to frighten M. Forget and get him to dash off in his canoe to
her at once.  Apparently he knows her, and does not hurry, but
comes on board quietly.  I find there will be no place for me to
stay at at Njole, so I decide to go on in the Éclaireur
and use her as an hotel while there, and then return and stay with Mme.
Forget if she will have me.  I consult M. Forget on this point. 
He says, “Oh, yes,” but seems to have lost something of
great value recently, and not to be quite clear where.  Only manner,
I suppose.  When M. Forget has got his mails he goes, and the Éclaireur
goes on; indeed, she has never really stopped, for the water is too
deep to anchor in here, and the terrific current would promptly whisk
the steamer down out of Talagouga gorge were she to leave off fighting
it.  We run on up past Talagouga Island, where the river broadens
out again a little, but not much, and reach Njole by nightfall, and
tie up to a tree by Dumas’ factory beach.  Usual uproar,
but as Mr. Cockshut says, no mosquitoes.  The mosquito belt ends
abruptly at O’Soamokita.

Next morning I go ashore and start on a walk.  Lovely road,
bright yellow clay, as hard as paving stone.  On each side it is
most neatly hedged with pine-apples; behind these, carefully tended,
acres of coffee bushes planted in long rows.  Certainly coffee
is one of the most lovely of crops.  Its grandly shaped leaves
are like those of our medlar tree, only darker and richer green, the
berries set close to the stem, those that are ripe, a rich crimson;
these trees, I think, are about three years old, and just coming into
bearing; for they are covered with full-sized berries, and there has
been a flush of bloom on them this morning, and the delicious fragrance
of their stephanotis-shaped and scented flowers lingers in the air. 
The country spreads before me a lovely valley encompassed by purple-blue
mountains.  Mount Talagouga looks splendid in a soft, infinitely
deep blue, although it is quite close, just the other side of the river. 
The road goes on into the valley, as pleasantly as ever and more so. 
How pleasant it would be now, if our government along the Coast had
the enterprise and public spirit of the French, and made such roads
just on the remote chance of stray travellers dropping in on a steamer
once in ten years or so and wanting a walk.  Observe extremely
neatly Igalwa built huts, people sitting on the bright clean ground
outside them, making mats and baskets.  “Mboloani,”
say I.  “Ai! Mbolo,” say they, and knock off work to
stare.  Observe large wired-in enclosures on left-hand side of
road – investigate – find they are tenanted by animals – goats, sheep,
chickens, etc.  Clearly this is a jardin d’acclimatation. 
No wonder the colony does not pay, if it goes in for this sort of thing,
206 miles inland, with simply no public to pay gate-money.  While
contemplating these things, hear awful hiss.  Serpents!  No,
geese.  Awful fight.  Grand things, good, old-fashioned, long
skirts are for Africa!  Get through geese and advance in good order,
but somewhat rapidly down road, turn sharply round corner of native
houses.  Turkey cock – terrific turn up.  Flight on my part
forwards down road, which is still going strong, now in a northerly
direction, apparently indefinitely.  Hope to goodness there will
be a turning that I can go down and get back by, without returning through
this ferocious farmyard.  Intent on picking up such an outlet,
I go thirty yards or so down the road.  Hear shouts coming from
a clump of bananas on my left.  Know they are directed at me, but
it does not do to attend to shouts always.  Expect it is only some
native with an awful knowledge of English, anxious to get up my family
history – therefore accelerate pace.  More shouts, and louder,
of “Madame Gacon!  Madame Gacon!” and out of the banana
clump comes a big, plump, pleasant-looking gentleman, clad in a singlet
and a divided skirt.  White people must be attended to, so advance
carefully towards him through a plantation of young coffee, apologising
humbly for intruding on his domain.  He smiles and bows beautifully,
but – horror! – he knows no English, I no French.  Situation très
inexplicable et très interessante, as I subsequently heard
him remark; and the worst of it is he is evidently bursting to know
who I am, and what I am doing in the middle of his coffee plantation,
for his it clearly is, as appears from his obsequious bodyguard of blacks,
highly interested in me also.  We gaze at each other, and smile
some more, but stiffly, and he stands bareheaded in the sun in an awful
way.  It’s murder I’m committing, hard all!  He,
as is fitting for his superior sex, displays intelligence first and
says, “Interpreter,” waving his hand to the south. 
I say “Yes,” in my best Fan, an enthusiastic, intelligent
grunt which any one must understand.  He leads the way back towards
those geese – perhaps, by the by, that is why he wears those divided
skirts – and we enter a beautifully neatly built bamboo house, and sit
down opposite to each other at a table and wait for the interpreter
who is being fetched.  The house is low on the ground and of native
construction, but most beautifully kept, and arranged with an air of
artistic feeling quite as unexpected as the rest of my surroundings. 
I notice upon the walls sets of pictures of terrific incidents in Algerian
campaigns, and a copy of that superb head of M. de Brazza in Arab headgear. 
Soon the black minions who have been sent to find one of the plantation
hands who is supposed to know French and English, return with the “interpreter.” 
That young man is a fraud.  He does not know English – not even
coast English – and all he has got under his precious wool is an abysmal
ignorance darkened by terror; and so, after one or two futile attempts
and some frantic scratching at both those regions which an African seems
to regard as the seats of intellectual inspiration, he bolts out of
the door.  Situation terrible!  My host and I smile
wildly at each other, and both wonder in our respective languages what,
in the words of Mr. Squeers as mentioned in the classics – we “shall
do in this ’ere most awful go.”  We are both going
mad with the strain of the situation, when in walks the engineer’s
brother from the Éclaireur.  He seems intensely surprised
to find me sitting in his friend the planter’s parlour after my
grim and retiring conduct on the Éclaireur on my voyage
up.  But the planter tells him all, sousing him in torrents of
words, full of the violence of an outbreak of pent-up emotion. 
I do not understand what he says, but I catch “très
inexplicable” and things like that.  The calm brother
of the engineer sits down at the table, and I am sure tells the planter
something like this: “Calm yourself, my friend, we picked up this
curiosity at Lembarene.  It seems quite harmless.” 
And then the planter calmed, and mopped a perspiring brow, and so did
I, and we smiled more freely, feeling the mental atmosphere had become
less tense and cooler.  We both simply beamed on our deliverer,
and the planter gave him lots of things to drink.  I had nothing
about me except a head of tobacco in my pocket, which I did not feel
was a suitable offering.  Now the engineer’s brother, although
he would not own to it, knew English, so I told him how the beauty of
the road had lured me on, and how I was interested in coffee-planting,
and how much I admired the magnificence of this plantation, and all
the enterprise and energy it represented.

“Oui, oui, certainement,” said he, and translated. 
My friend the planter seemed charmed; it was the first sign of anything
approaching reason he had seen in me.  He wanted me to have eau
sucrée more kindly than ever, and when I rose, intending
to bow myself off and go, geese or no geese, back to the Éclaireur,
he would not let me go.  I must see the plantation, toute la
plantation.  So presently all three of us go out and thoroughly
do the plantation, the most well-ordered, well-cultivated plantation
I have ever seen, and a very noble monument to the knowledge and industry
of the planter.  For two hot hours these two perfect gentlemen
showed me over it.  I also behaved well, for petticoats, great
as they are, do not prevent insects and catawumpuses of sorts walking
up one’s ankles and feeding on one as one stands on the long grass
which has been most wisely cut and laid round the young trees for mulching. 
This plantation is of great extent on the hill-sides and in the valley
bottom, portions of it are just coming into bearing.  The whole
is kept as perfectly as a garden, amazing as the work of one white man
with only a staff of unskilled native labourers – at present only eighty
of them.  The coffee planted is of three kinds, the Elephant berry,
the Arabian, and the San Thomé.  During our inspection,
we only had one serious misunderstanding, which arose from my seeing
for the first time in my life tree-ferns growing in the Ogowé. 
There were three of them, evidently carefully taken care of, among some
coffee plants.  It was highly exciting, and I tried to find out
about them.  It seemed, even in this centre of enterprise, unlikely
that they had been brought just “for dandy” from the Australasian
region, and I had never yet come across them in my wanderings save on
Fernando Po.  Unfortunately, my friends thought I wanted them to
keep, and shouted for men to bring things and dig them up; so I had
a brisk little engagement with the men, driving them from their prey
with the point of my umbrella, ejaculating Kor Kor, like an agitated
crow.  When at last they understood that my interest in the ferns
was scientific, not piratical, they called the men off and explained
that the ferns had been found among the bush, when it was being cleared
for the plantation.

Ultimately, with many bows and most sincere thanks from me, we parted,
providentially beyond the geese, and I returned down the road to Njole,
where I find Mr. Cockshut waiting outside his factory.  He insists
on taking me to the Post to see the Administrator, and from there he
says I can go on to the Éclaireur from the Post beach,
as she will be up there from Dumas’.  Off we go up the road
which skirts the river bank, a dwarf clay cliff, overgrown with vegetation,
save where it is cleared for beaches.  The road is short, but exceedingly
pretty; on the other side from the river is a steep bank on which is
growing a plantation of cacao.  Lying out in the centre of the
river you see Njole Island, a low, sandy one, timbered not only with
bush, but with orange and other fruit trees; for formerly the Post and
factories used to be situated on the island – now only their trees remain
for various reasons, one being that in the wet season it is a good deal
under water.  Everything is now situated on the mainland north
bank, in a straggling but picturesque line; first comes Woermann’s
factory, then Hatton and Cookson’s, and John Holt’s, close
together with a beach in common in a sweetly amicable style for factories,
who as a rule firmly stockade themselves off from their next door neighbours. 
Then Dumas’ beach, a little native village, the cacao patch and
the Post at the up river end of things European, an end of things European,
I am told, for a matter of 500 miles.  Immediately beyond the Post
is a little river falling into the Ogowé, and on its further
bank a small village belonging to a chief, who, hearing of the glories
of the Government, came down like the Queen of Sheba – in intention,
I mean, not personal appearance – to see it, and so charmed has he been
that here he stays to gaze on it.

Although Mr. Cockshut hunted the Administrator of the Ogowé
out of his bath, that gentleman is exceedingly amiable and charming,
all the more so to me for speaking good English.  Personally, he
is big, handsome, exuberant, and energetic.  He shows me round
with a gracious enthusiasm, all manner of things – big gorilla teeth
and heads, native spears and brass-nail-ornamented guns; and explains,
while we are in his study, that the little model canoe full of Kola
nuts is the supply of Kola to enable him to sit up all night and work. 
Then he takes us outside to see the new hospital which he, in his capacity
as Administrator, during the absence of the professional Administrator
on leave in France, has granted to himself in his capacity as Doctor;
and he shows us the captive chief and headmen from Samba busily quarrying
a clay cliff behind it so as to enlarge the governmental plateau, and
the ex-ministers of the ex-King of Dahomey, who are deported to Njole,
and apparently comfortable and employed in various non-menial occupations. 
Then we go down the little avenue of cacao trees in full bearing, and
away to the left to where there is now an encampment of Adoomas, who
have come down as a convoy from Franceville, and are going back with
another under the command of our vivacious fellow passenger, who, I
grieve to see, will have a rough time of it in the way of accommodation
in those narrow, shallow canoes which are lying with their noses tied
to the bank, and no other white man to talk to.  What a blessing
he will be conversationally to Franceville when he gets in.  The
Adooma encampment is very picturesque, for they have got their bright-coloured
chintz mosquito-bars erected as tents.

Dr. Pélessier then insists on banging down monkey bread-fruit
with a stick, to show me their inside.  Of course they burst over
his beautiful white clothes.  I said they would, but men will be
men.  Then we go and stand under the two lovely odeaka trees that
make a triumphal-arch-like gateway to the Post’s beach from the
river, and the Doctor discourses in a most interesting way on all sorts
of subjects.  We go on waiting for the Éclaireur,
who, although it is past four o’clock, is still down at Dumas’
beach.  I feel nearly frantic at detaining the Doctor, but neither
he nor Mr. Cockshut seem in the least hurry.  But at last I can
stand it no longer.  The vision of the Administrator of the Ogowé,
worn out, but chewing Kola nut to keep himself awake all night while
he finishes his papers to go down on the Éclaireur to-morrow
morning, is too painful; so I say I will walk back to Dumas’ and
go on the Éclaireur there, and try to liberate the Administrator
from his present engagements, so that he may go back and work. 
No good!  He will come down to Dumas’ with Mr. Cockshut and
me.  Off we go, and just exactly as we are getting on to Dumas’
beach, off starts the Éclaireur with a shriek for the
Post beach.  So I say good-bye to Mr. Cockshut, and go back to
the Post with Dr. Pélessier, and he sees me on board, and to
my immense relief he stays on board a good hour and a half, talking
to other people, so it is not on my head if he is up all night.

June 25th. – Éclaireur has to wait for the Administrator
until ten, because he has not done his mails.  At ten he comes
on board like an amiable tornado, for he himself is going to Cape Lopez. 
I am grieved to see them carrying on board, too, a French official very
ill with fever.  He is the engineer of the canoniere and they are
taking him down to Cape Lopez, where they hope to get a ship to take
him up to Gaboon, and to the hospital on the Minervé. 
I heard subsequently that the poor fellow died about forty hours after
leaving Njole at Achyouka in Kama country.

We get away at last, and run rapidly down river, helped by the terrific
current.  The Éclaireur has to call at Talagouga
for planks from M. Gacon’s sawmill.  As soon as we are past
the tail of Talagouga Island, the Éclaireur ties her whistle
string to a stanchion, and goes off into a series of screaming fits,
as only she can.  What she wants is to get M. Forget or M. Gacon,
or better still both, out in their canoes with the wood waiting for
her, because “she cannot anchor in the depth,”  “nor
can she turn round,” and “backing plays the mischief with
any ship’s engines,” and “she can’t hold her
own against the current,” and – then Captain Verdier says things
I won’t repeat, and throws his weight passionately on the whistle
string, for we are in sight of the narrow gorge of Talagouga, with the
Mission Station apparently slumbering in the sun.  This puts the
Éclaireur in an awful temper.  She goes down towards
it as near as she dare, and then frisks round again, and runs up river
a little way and drops down again, in violent hysterics the whole time. 
Soon M. Gacon comes along among the trees on the bank, and laughs at
her.  A rope is thrown to him, and the panting Éclaireur
tied up to a tree close in to the bank, for the water is deep enough
here to moor a liner in, only there are a good many rocks.  In
a few minutes M. Forget and several canoe loads of beautiful red-brown
mahogany planks are on board, and things being finished, I say good-bye
to the captain, and go off with M. Forget in a canoe, to the shore.

CHAPTER V. THE RAPIDS OF THE OGOWÉ.

The Log of an Adooma canoe during a voyage undertaken to the rapids
of the River Ogowé, with some account of the divers disasters
that befell thereon.

Mme. Forget received me most kindly, and, thanks to her ever thoughtful
hospitality, I spent a very pleasant time at Talagouga, wandering about
the forest and collecting fishes from the native fishermen: and seeing
the strange forms of some of these Talagouga region fishes and the marked
difference between them and those of Lembarene, I set my heart on going
up into the region of the Ogowé rapids.  For some time no
one whom I could get hold of regarded it as a feasible scheme, but,
at last, M. Gacon thought it might be managed; I said I would give a
reward of 100 francs to any one who would lend me a canoe and a crew,
and I would pay the working expenses, food, wages, etc.  M. Gacon
had a good canoe and could spare me two English-speaking Igalwas, one
of whom had been part of the way with MM. Allégret and Teisserès,
when they made their journey up to Franceville and then across to Brazzaville
and down the Congo two years ago.  He also thought we could get
six Fans to complete the crew.  I was delighted, packed my small
portmanteau with a few things, got some trade goods, wound up my watch,
ascertained the date of the day of the month, and borrowed three hair-pins
from Mme. Forget, then down came disappointment.  On my return
from the bush that evening, Mme. Forget said M. Gacon said “it
was impossible,” the Fans round Talagouga wouldn’t go at
any price above Njole, because they were certain they would be killed
and eaten by the up-river Fans.  Internally consigning the entire
tribe to regions where they will get a rise in temperature, even on
this climate, I went with Mme. Forget to M. Gacon, and we talked it
over; finally, M. Gacon thought he could let me have two more Igalwas
from Hatton and Cookson’s beach across the river.  Sending
across there we found this could be done, so I now felt I was in for
it, and screwed my courage to the sticking point – no easy matter after
all the information I had got into my mind regarding the rapids of the
River Ogowé.

I establish myself on my portmanteau comfortably in the canoe, my
back is against the trade box, and behind that is the usual mound of
pillows, sleeping mats, and mosquito-bars of the Igalwa crew; the whole
surmounted by the French flag flying from an indifferent stick.

M. and Mme. Forget provide me with everything I can possibly require,
and say that the blood of half my crew is half alcohol; on the whole
it is patent they don’t expect to see me again, and I forgive
them, because they don’t seem cheerful over it; but still it is
not reassuring – nothing is about this affair, and it’s going
to rain.  It does, as we go up the river to Njole, where there
is another risk of the affair collapsing, by the French authorities
declining to allow me to proceed.  On we paddled, M’bo the
head man standing in the bows of the canoe in front of me, to steer,
then I, then the baggage, then the able-bodied seamen, including the
cook also standing and paddling; and at the other extremity of the canoe
– it grieves me to speak of it in this unseamanlike way, but in these
canoes both ends are alike, and chance alone ordains which is bow and
which is stern – stands Pierre, the first officer, also steering; the
paddles used are all of the long-handled, leaf-shaped Igalwa type. 
We get up just past Talagouga Island and then tie up against the bank
of M. Gazenget’s plantation, and make a piratical raid on its
bush for poles.  A gang of his men come down to us, but only to
chat.  One of them, I notice, has had something happen severely
to one side of his face.  I ask M’bo what’s the matter,
and he answers, with a derisive laugh, “He be fool man, he go
for tief plantain and done got shot.”  M’bo does not
make it clear where the sin in this affair is exactly located; I expect
it is in being “fool man.”  Having got our supply of
long stout poles we push off and paddle on again.  Before we reach
Njole I recognise my crew have got the grumbles, and at once inquire
into the reason.  M’bo sadly informs me that “they
no got chop,” having been provided only with plantain, and no
meat or fish to eat with it.  I promise to get them plenty at Njole,
and contentment settles on the crew, and they sing.  After about
three hours we reach Njole, and I proceed to interview the authorities. 
Dr. Pélessier is away down river, and the two gentlemen in charge
don’t understand English; but Pierre translates, and the letter
which M. Forget has kindly written for me explains things and so the
palaver ends satisfactorily, after a long talk.  First, the official
says he does not like to take the responsibility of allowing me to endanger
myself in those rapids.  I explain I will not hold any one responsible
but myself, and I urge that a lady has been up before, a Mme. Quinee. 
He says “Yes, that is true, but Madame had with her a husband
and many men, whereas I am alone and have only eight Igalwas and not
Adoomas, the proper crew for the rapids, and they are away up river
now with the convoy.”  “True, oh King!” I answer,
“but Madame Quinee went right up to Lestourville, whereas I only
want to go sufficiently high up the rapids to get typical fish. 
And these Igalwas are great men at canoe work, and can go in a canoe
anywhere that any mortal man can go” – this to cheer up my Igalwa
interpreter – “and as for the husband, neither the Royal Geographical
Society’s list, in their ‘Hints to Travellers,’ nor
Messrs.  Silver, in their elaborate lists of articles necessary
for a traveller in tropical climates, make mention of husbands.” 
However, the official ultimately says Yes, I may go, and parts with
me as with one bent on self destruction.  This affair being settled
I start off, like an old hen with a brood of chickens to provide for,
to get chop for my men, and go first to Hatton and Cookson’s factory. 
I find its white Agent is down river after stores, and John Holt’s
Agent says he has got no beef nor fish, and is precious short of provisions
for himself; so I go back to Dumas’, where I find a most amiable
French gentleman, who says he will let me have as much fish or beef
as I want, and to this supply he adds some delightful bread biscuits. 
M’bo and the crew beam with satisfaction; mine is clouded by finding,
when they have carried off the booty to the canoe, that the Frenchman
will not let me pay for it.  Therefore taking the opportunity of
his back being turned for a few minutes, I buy and pay for, across the
store counter, some trade things, knives, cloth, etc.  Then I say
goodbye to the Agent.  “Adieu, Mademoiselle,” says
he in a for-ever tone of voice.  Indeed I am sure I have caught
from these kind people a very pretty and becoming mournful manner, and
there’s not another white station for 500 miles where I can show
it off.  Away we go, still damp from the rain we have come through,
but drying nicely with the day, and cheerful about the chop.

The Ogowé is broad at Njole and its banks not mountainous,
as at Talagouga; but as we go on it soon narrows, the current runs more
rapidly than ever, and we are soon again surrounded by the mountain
range.  Great masses of black rock show among the trees on the
hillsides, and under the fringe of fallen trees that hang from the steep
banks.  Two hours after leaving Njole we are facing our first rapid. 
Great gray-black masses of smoothed rock rise up out of the whirling
water in all directions.  These rocks have a peculiar appearance
which puzzle me at the time, but in subsequently getting used to it
I accepted it quietly and admired.  When the sun shines on them
they have a soft light blue haze round them, like a halo.  The
effect produced by this, with the forested hillsides and the little
beaches of glistening white sand was one of the most perfect things
I have ever seen.

We kept along close to the right-hand bank, dodging out of the way
of the swiftest current as much as possible.  Ever and again we
were unable to force our way round projecting parts of the bank, so
we then got up just as far as we could to the point in question, yelling
and shouting at the tops of our voices.  M’bo said “Jump
for bank, sar,” and I “up and jumped,” followed by
half the crew.  Such banks! sheets, and walls, and rubbish heaps
of rock, mixed up with trees fallen and standing.  One appalling
corner I shall not forget, for I had to jump at a rock wall, and hang
on to it in a manner more befitting an insect than an insect-hunter,
and then scramble up it into a close-set forest, heavily burdened with
boulders of all sizes.  I wonder whether the rocks or the trees
were there first? there is evidence both ways, for in one place you
will see a rock on the top of a tree, the tree creeping out from underneath
it, and in another place you will see a tree on the top of a rock, clasping
it with a network of roots and getting its nourishment, goodness knows
how, for these are by no means tender, digestible sandstones, but uncommon
hard gneiss and quartz which has no idea of breaking up into friable
small stuff, and which only takes on a high polish when it is vigorously
sanded and canvassed by the Ogowé.  While I was engaged
in climbing across these promontories, the crew would be busy shouting
and hauling the canoe round the point by means of the strong chain provided
for such emergencies fixed on to the bow.  When this was done,
in we got again and paddled away until we met our next affliction.

M’bo had advised that we should spend our first night at the
same village that M. Allégret did: but when we reached it, a
large village on the north bank, we seemed to have a lot of daylight
still in hand, and thought it would be better to stay at one a little
higher up, so as to make a shorter day’s work for to-morrow, when
we wanted to reach Kondo Kondo; so we went against the bank just to
ask about the situation and character of the up-river villages. 
The row of low, bark huts was long, and extended its main frontage close
to the edge of the river bank.  The inhabitants had been watching
us as we came, and when they saw we intended calling that afternoon,
they charged down to the river-edge hopeful of excitement.  They
had a great deal to say, and so had we.  After compliments, as
they say, in excerpts of diplomatic communications, three of their men
took charge of the conversation on their side, and M’bo did ours. 
To M’bo’s questions they gave a dramatic entertainment as
answer, after the manner of these brisk, excitable Fans.  One chief,
however, soon settled down to definite details, prefacing his remarks
with the silence-commanding “Azuna!  Azuna!” and his
companions grunted approbation of his observations.  He took a
piece of plantain leaf and tore it up into five different sized bits. 
These he laid along the edge of our canoe at different intervals of
space, while he told M’bo things, mainly scandalous, about the
characters of the villages these bits of leaf represented, save of course
about bit A, which represented his own.  The interval between the
bits was proportional to the interval between the villages, and the
size of the bits was proportional to the size of the village. 
Village number four was the only one he should recommend our going to. 
When all was said, I gave our kindly informants some heads of tobacco
and many thanks.  Then M’bo sang them a hymn, with the assistance
of Pierre, half a line behind him in a different key, but every bit
as flat.  The Fans seemed impressed, but any crowd would be by
the hymn-singing of my crew, unless they were inmates of deaf and dumb
asylums.  Then we took our farewell, and thanked the village elaborately
for its kind invitation to spend the night there on our way home, shoved
off and paddled away in great style just to show those Fans what Igalwas
could do.

We hadn’t gone 200 yards before we met a current coming round
the end of a rock reef that was too strong for us to hold our own in,
let alone progress.  On to the bank I was ordered and went; it
was a low slip of rugged confused boulders and fragments of rocks, carelessly
arranged, and evidently under water in the wet season.  I scrambled
along, the men yelled and shouted and hauled the canoe, and the inhabitants
of the village, seeing we were becoming amusing again, came, legging
it like lamp-lighters, after us, young and old, male and female, to
say nothing of the dogs.  Some good souls helped the men haul,
while I did my best to amuse the others by diving headlong from a large
rock on to which I had elaborately climbed, into a thick clump of willow-leaved
shrubs.  They applauded my performance vociferously, and then assisted
my efforts to extricate myself, and during the rest of my scramble they
kept close to me, with keen competition for the front row, in hopes
that I would do something like it again.  But I refused the encore,
because, bashful as I am, I could not but feel that my last performance
was carried out with all the superb reckless abandon of a Sarah
Bernhardt, and a display of art of this order should satisfy any African
village for a year at least.  At last I got across the rocks on
to a lovely little beach of white sand, and stood there talking, surrounded
by my audience, until the canoe got over its difficulties and arrived
almost as scratched as I; and then we again said farewell and paddled
away, to the great grief of the natives, for they don’t get a
circus up above Njole every week, poor dears.

Now there is no doubt that that chief’s plantain-leaf chart
was an ingenious idea and a credit to him.  There is also no doubt
that the Fan mile is a bit Irish, a matter of nine or so of those of
ordinary mortals, but I am bound to say I don’t think, even allowing
for this, that he put those pieces far enough apart.  On we paddled
a long way before we picked up village number one, mentioned in that
chart.  On again, still longer, till we came to village number
two.  Village number three hove in sight high up on a mountain
side soon after, but it was getting dark and the water worse, and the
hill-sides growing higher and higher into nobly shaped mountains, forming,
with their forest-graced steep sides, a ravine that, in the gathering
gloom, looked like an alley-way made of iron, for the foaming Ogowé. 
Village number four we anxiously looked for; village number four we
never saw; for round us came the dark, seeming to come out on to the
river from the forests and the side ravines, where for some hours we
had seen it sleeping, like a sailor with his clothes on in bad weather. 
On we paddled, looking for signs of village fires, and seeing them not. 
The Erd-geist knew we wanted something, and seeing how we personally
lacked it, thought it was beauty; and being in a kindly mood, gave it
us, sending the lovely lingering flushes of his afterglow across the
sky, which, dying, left it that divine deep purple velvet which no one
has dared to paint.  Out in it came the great stars blazing high
above us, and the dark round us was be-gemmed with fire-flies: but we
were not as satisfied with these things as we should have been; what
we wanted were fires to cook by and dry ourselves by, and all that sort
of thing.  The Erd-geist did not understand, and so left
us when the afterglow had died away, with only enough starlight to see
the flying foam of the rapids ahead and around us, and not enough to
see the great trees that had fallen from the bank into the water. 
These, when the rapids were not too noisy, we could listen for, because
the black current rushes through their branches with an impatient “lish,
swish”; but when there was a rapid roaring close alongside we
ran into those trees, and got ourselves mauled, and had ticklish times
getting on our course again.  Now and again we ran up against great
rocks sticking up in the black water – grim, isolated fellows, who seemed
to be standing silently watching their fellow rocks noisily fighting
in the arena of the white water.  Still on we poled and paddled. 
About 8 P.M. we came to a corner, a bad one; but we were unable to leap
on to the bank and haul round, not being able to see either the details
or the exact position of the said bank, and we felt, I think naturally,
disinclined to spring in the direction of such bits of country as we
had had experience of during the afternoon, with nothing but the aid
we might have got from a compass hastily viewed by the transitory light
of a lucifer match, and even this would not have informed us how many
tens of feet of tree fringe lay between us and the land, so we did not
attempt it.  One must be careful at times, or nasty accidents may
follow.  We fought our way round that corner, yelling defiance
at the water, and dealt with succeeding corners on the vi et armis
plan, breaking, ever and anon, a pole.  About 9.30 we got into
a savage rapid.  We fought it inch by inch.  The canoe jammed
herself on some barely sunken rocks in it.  We shoved her off over
them.  She tilted over and chucked us out.  The rocks round
being just awash, we survived and got her straight again, and got into
her and drove her unmercifully; she struck again and bucked like a broncho,
and we fell in heaps upon each other, but stayed inside that time –
the men by the aid of their intelligent feet, I by clinching my hands
into the bush rope lacing which ran round the rim of the canoe and the
meaning of which I did not understand when I left Talagouga.  We
sorted ourselves out hastily and sent her at it again.  Smash went
a sorely tried pole and a paddle.  Round and round we spun in an
exultant whirlpool, which, in a light-hearted, maliciously joking way,
hurled us tail first out of it into the current.  Now the grand
point in these canoes of having both ends alike declared itself; for
at this juncture all we had to do was to revolve on our own axis and
commence life anew with what had been the bow for the stern.  Of
course we were defeated, we could not go up any further without the
aid of our lost poles and paddles, so we had to go down for shelter
somewhere, anywhere, and down at a terrific pace in the white water
we went.  While hitched among the rocks the arrangement of our
crew had been altered, Pierre joining M’bo in the bows; this piece
of precaution was frustrated by our getting turned round; so our position
was what you might call precarious, until we got into another whirlpool,
when we persuaded Nature to start us right end on.  This was only
a matter of minutes, whirlpools being plentiful, and then M’bo
and Pierre, provided with our surviving poles, stood in the bows to
fend us off rocks, as we shot towards them; while we midship paddles
sat, helping to steer, and when occasion arose, which occasion did with
lightning rapidity, to whack the whirlpools with the flat of our paddles,
to break their force.  Cook crouched in the stern concentrating
his mind on steering only.  A most excellent arrangement in theory
and the safest practical one no doubt, but it did not work out what
you might call brilliantly well; though each department did its best. 
We dashed full tilt towards high rocks, things twenty to fifty feet
above water.  Midship backed and flapped like fury; M’bo
and Pierre received the shock on their poles; sometimes we glanced successfully
aside and flew on; sometimes we didn’t.  The shock being
too much for M’bo and Pierre they were driven back on me, who
got flattened on to the cargo of bundles which, being now firmly tied
in, couldn’t spread the confusion further aft; but the shock of
the canoe’s nose against the rock did so in style, and the rest
of the crew fell forward on to the bundles, me, and themselves. 
So shaken up together were we several times that night, that it’s
a wonder to me, considering the hurry, that we sorted ourselves out
correctly with our own particular legs and arms.  And although
we in the middle of the canoe did some very spirited flapping, our whirlpool-breaking
was no more successful than M’bo and Pierre’s fending off,
and many a wild waltz we danced that night with the waters of the River
Ogowé.

Unpleasant as going through the rapids was, when circumstances took
us into the black current we fared no better.  For good all-round
inconvenience, give me going full tilt in the dark into the branches
of a fallen tree at the pace we were going then – and crash, swish,
crackle and there you are, hung up, with a bough pressing against your
chest, and your hair being torn out and your clothes ribboned by others,
while the wicked river is trying to drag away the canoe from under you. 
After a good hour and more of these experiences, we went hard on to
a large black reef of rocks.  So firm was the canoe wedged that
we in our rather worn-out state couldn’t move her so we wisely
decided to “lef ’em” and see what could be done towards
getting food and a fire for the remainder of the night.  Our eyes,
now trained to the darkness, observed pretty close to us a big lump
of land, looming up out of the river.  This we subsequently found
out was Kembe Island.  The rocks and foam on either side stretched
away into the darkness, and high above us against the star-lit sky stood
out clearly the summits of the mountains of the Sierra del Cristal.

The most interesting question to us now was whether this rock reef
communicated sufficiently with the island for us to get to it. 
Abandoning conjecture; tying very firmly our canoe up to the rocks,
a thing that seemed, considering she was jammed hard and immovable,
a little unnecessary – but you can never be sufficiently careful in
this matter with any kind of boat – off we started among the rock boulders. 
I would climb up on to a rock table, fall off it on the other side on
to rocks again, with more or less water on them – then get a patch of
singing sand under my feet, then with varying suddenness get into more
water, deep or shallow, broad or narrow pools among the rocks; out of
that over more rocks, etc., etc., etc.: my companions, from their noises,
evidently were going in for the same kind of thing, but we were quite
cheerful, because the probability of reaching the land seemed increasing. 
Most of us arrived into deep channels of water which here and there
cut in between this rock reef and the bank, M’bo was the first
to find the way into certainty; he was, and I hope still is, a perfect
wonder at this sort of work.  I kept close to M’bo, and when
we got to the shore, the rest of the wanderers being collected, we said
“chances are there’s a village round here”; and started
to find it.  After a gay time in a rock-encumbered forest, growing
in a tangled, matted way on a rough hillside, at an angle of 45 degrees,
M’bo sighted the gleam of fires through the tree stems away to
the left, and we bore down on it, listening to its drum.  Viewed
through the bars of the tree stems the scene was very picturesque. 
The village was just a collection of palm mat-built huts, very low and
squalid.  In its tiny street, an affair of some sixty feet long
and twenty wide, were a succession of small fires.  The villagers
themselves, however, were the striking features in the picture. 
They were painted vermilion all over their nearly naked bodies, and
were dancing enthusiastically to the good old rump-a-tump-tump-tump
tune, played energetically by an old gentleman on a long, high-standing,
white-and-black painted drum.  They said that as they had been
dancing when we arrived they had failed to hear us.  M’bo
secured a – well, I don’t exactly know what to call it – for my
use.  It was, I fancy, the remains of the village club-house. 
It had a certain amount of palm-thatch roof and some of its left-hand
side left, the rest of the structure was bare old poles with filaments
of palm mat hanging from them here and there; and really if it hadn’t
been for the roof one wouldn’t have known whether one was inside
or outside it.  The floor was trodden earth and in the middle of
it a heap of white ash and the usual two bush lights, laid down with
their burning ends propped up off the ground with stones, and emitting,
as is their wont, a rather mawkish, but not altogether unpleasant smell,
and volumes of smoke which finds its way out through the thatch, leaving
on the inside of it a rich oily varnish of a bright warm brown colour. 
They give a very good light, provided some one keeps an eye on them
and knocks the ash off the end as it burns gray; the bush lights’
idea of being snuffed.  Against one of the open-work sides hung
a drum covered with raw hide, and a long hollow bit of tree trunk, which
served as a cupboard for a few small articles.  I gathered in all
these details as I sat on one of the hard wood benches, waiting for
my dinner, which Isaac was preparing outside in the street.  The
atmosphere of the hut, in spite of its remarkable advantages in the
way of ventilation, was oppressive, for the smell of the bush lights,
my wet clothes, and the natives who crowded into the hut to look at
me, made anything but a pleasant combination.  The people were
evidently exceedingly poor; clothes they had very little of.  The
two head men had on old French military coats in rags; but they were
quite satisfied with their appearance, and evidently felt through them
in touch with European culture, for they lectured to the others on the
habits and customs of the white man with great self-confidence and superiority. 
The majority of the village had a slight acquaintance already with this
interesting animal, being, I found, Adoomas.  They had made a settlement
on Kembe Island some two years or so ago.  Then the Fans came and
attacked them, and killed and ate several.  The Adoomas left and
fled to the French authority at Njole and remained under its guarding
shadow until the French came up and chastised the Fans and burnt their
village; and the Adoomas – when things had quieted down again and the
Fans had gone off to build themselves a new village for their burnt
one – came back to Kembe Island and their plantain patch.  They
had only done this a few months before my arrival and had not had time
to rebuild, hence the dilapidated state of the village.  They are,
I am told, a Congo region tribe, whose country lies south-west of Franceville,
and, as I have already said, are the tribe used by the French authorities
to take convoys up and down the Ogowé to Franceville, more to
keep this route open than for transport purposes; the rapids rendering
it impracticable to take heavy stores this way, and making it a thirty-six
days’ journey from Njole with good luck.  The practical route
is viâ Loango and Brazzaville.  The Adoomas told us
the convoy which had gone up with the vivacious Government official
had had trouble with the rapids and had spent five days on Kondo Kondo,
dragging up the canoes empty by means of ropes and chains, carrying
the cargo that was in them along on land until they had passed the worst
rapid and then repacking.  They added the information that the
rapids were at their worst just now, and entertained us with reminiscences
of a poor young French official who had been drowned in them last year
– indeed they were just as cheering as my white friends.  As soon
as my dinner arrived they politely cleared out, and I heard the devout
M’bo holding a service for them, with hymns, in the street, and
this being over they returned to their drum and dance, keeping things
up distinctly late, for it was 11.10 P.M. when we first entered the
village.

While the men were getting their food I mounted guard over our little
possessions, and when they turned up to make things tidy in my hut,
I walked off down to the shore by a path, which we had elaborately avoided
when coming to the village, a very vertically inclined, slippery little
path, but still the one whereby the natives went up and down to their
canoes, which were kept tied up amongst the rocks.  The moon was
rising, illumining the sky, but not yet sending down her light on the
foaming, flying Ogowé in its deep ravine.  The scene was
divinely lovely; on every side out of the formless gloom rose the peaks
of the Sierra del Cristal.  Lomba-ngawku on the further side of
the river surrounded by his companion peaks, looked his grandest, silhouetted
hard against the sky.  In the higher valleys where the dim light
shone faintly, one could see wreaths and clouds of silver-gray mist
lying, basking lazily or rolling to and fro.  Olangi seemed to
stretch right across the river, blocking with his great blunt mass all
passage; while away to the N.E. a cone-shaped peak showed conspicuous,
which I afterwards knew as Kangwe.  In the darkness round me flitted
thousands of fire-flies and out beyond this pool of utter night flew
by unceasingly the white foam of the rapids; sound there was none save
their thunder.  The majesty and beauty of the scene fascinated
me, and I stood leaning with my back against a rock pinnacle watching
it.  Do not imagine it gave rise, in what I am pleased to call
my mind, to those complicated, poetical reflections natural beauty seems
to bring out in other people’s minds.  It never works that
way with me; I just lose all sense of human individuality, all memory
of human life, with its grief and worry and doubt, and become part of
the atmosphere.  M’bo, I found, had hung up my mosquito-bar
over one of the hard wood benches, and going cautiously under it I lit
a night-light and read myself asleep with my damp dilapidated old Horace.

Woke at 4 A.M. lying on the ground among the plantain stems, having
by a reckless movement fallen out of the house.  Thanks be there
are no mosquitoes.  I don’t know how I escaped the rats which
swarm here, running about among the huts and the inhabitants in the
evening, with a tameness shocking to see.  I turned in again until
six o’clock, when we started getting things ready to go up river
again, carefully providing ourselves with a new stock of poles, and
subsidising a native to come with us and help us to fight the rapids.

The greatest breadth of the river channel we now saw, in the daylight,
to be the S.S.W. branch; this was the one we had been swept into, and
was almost completely barred by rock.  The other one to the N.N.W.
was more open, and the river rushed through it, a terrific, swirling
mass of water.  Had we got caught in this, we should have got past
Kembe Island, and gone to Glory.  Whenever the shelter of the spits
of land or of the reefs was sufficient to allow the water to lay down
its sand, strange shaped sandbanks showed, as regular in form as if
they had been smoothed by human hands.  They rise above the water
in a slope, the low end or tail against the current; the down-stream
end terminating in an abrupt miniature cliff, sometimes six and seven
feet above the water; that they are the same shape when they have not
got their heads above water you will find by sticking on them in a canoe,
which I did several times, with a sort of automatic devotion to scientific
research peculiar to me.  Your best way of getting off is to push
on in the direction of the current, carefully preparing for the shock
of suddenly coming off the cliff end.

We left the landing place rocks of Kembe Island about 8, and no sooner
had we got afloat, than, in the twinkling of an eye, we were swept,
broadside on, right across the river to the north bank, and then engaged
in a heavy fight with a severe rapid.  After passing this, the
river is fairly uninterrupted by rock for a while, and is silent and
swift.  When you are ascending such a piece the effect is strange;
you see the water flying by the side of your canoe, as you vigorously
drive your paddle into it with short rapid strokes, and you forthwith
fancy you are travelling at the rate of a North-Western express; but
you just raise your eyes, my friend, and look at that bank, which is
standing very nearly still, and you will realise that you and your canoe
are standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are
only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that
it’s the water that is going the pace.  It’s a most
quaint and unpleasant disillusionment.

Above the stretch of swift silent water we come to the Isangaladi
Islands, and the river here changes its course from N.N.W., S.S.E. to
north and south.  A bad rapid, called by our ally from Kembe Island
“Unfanga,” being surmounted, we seem to be in a mountain-walled
lake, and keeping along the left bank of this, we get on famously for
twenty whole restful minutes, which lulls us all into a false sense
of security, and my crew sing M’pongwe songs, descriptive of how
they go to their homes to see their wives, and families, and friends,
giving chaffing descriptions of their friends’ characteristics
and of their failings, which cause bursts of laughter from those among
us who recognise the allusions, and how they go to their boxes, and
take out their clothes, and put them on – a long bragging inventory
of these things is given by each man as a solo, and then the chorus,
taken heartily up by his companions, signifies their admiration and
astonishment at his wealth and importance – and then they sing how,
being dissatisfied with that last dollar’s worth of goods they
got from “Holty’s,” they have decided to take their
next trade to Hatton and Cookson, or vice versa; and then comes
the chorus, applauding the wisdom of such a decision, and extolling
the excellence of Hatton and Cookson’s goods or Holty’s. 
These M’pongwe and Igalwa boat songs are all very pretty, and
have very elaborate tunes in a minor key.  I do not believe there
are any old words to them; I have tried hard to find out about them,
but I believe the tunes, which are of a limited number and quite distinct
from each other, are very old.  The words are put in by the singer
on the spur of the moment, and only restricted in this sense, that there
would always be the domestic catalogue – whatever its component details
might be – sung to the one fixed tune, the trade information sung to
another, and so on.  A good singer, in these parts, means the man
who can make up the best song – the most impressive, or the most amusing;
I have elsewhere mentioned pretty much the same state of things among
the Ga’s and Krumen and Bubi, and in all cases the tunes are only
voice tunes, not for instrumental performance.  The instrumental
music consists of that marvellously developed series of drum tunes –
the attempt to understand which has taken up much of my time, and led
me into queer company – and the many tunes played on the ’mrimba
and the orchid-root-stringed harp: they are, I believe, entirely distinct
from the song tunes.  And these peaceful tunes my men were now
singing were, in their florid elaboration very different from the one
they fought the rapids to, of – So Sir – So Sur – So Sir – So Sur –
Ush!  So Sir, etc.

On we go singing elaborately, thinking no evil of nature, when a
current, a quiet devil of a thing, comes round from behind a point of
the bank and catches the nose of our canoe; wringing it well, it sends
us scuttling right across the river in spite of our ferocious swoops
at the water, upsetting us among a lot of rocks with the water boiling
over them; this lot of rocks being however of the table-top kind, and
not those precious, close-set pinnacles rising up sheer out of profound
depths, between which you are so likely to get your canoe wedged in
and split.  We, up to our knees in water that nearly tears our
legs off, push and shove the canoe free, and re-embarking return singing
“So Sir” across the river, to have it out with that current. 
We do; and at its head find a rapid, and notice on the mountain-side
a village clearing, the first sign of human habitation we have seen
to-day.

Above this rapid we get a treat of still water, the main current
of the Ogowé flying along by the south bank.  On our side
there are sandbanks with their graceful sloping backs and sudden ends,
and there is a very strange and beautiful effect produced by the flakes
and balls of foam thrown off the rushing main current into the quiet
water.  These whirl among the eddies and rush backwards and forwards
as though they were still mad with wild haste, until, finding no current
to take them down, they drift away into the landlocked bays, where they
come to a standstill as if they were bewildered and lost and were trying
to remember where they were going to and whence they had come; the foam
of which they are composed is yellowish-white, with a spongy sort of
solidity about it.  In a little bay we pass we see eight native
women, Fans clearly, by their bright brown faces, and their loads of
brass bracelets and armlets; likely enough they had anklets too, but
we could not see them, as the good ladies were pottering about waist-deep
in the foam-flecked water, intent on breaking up a stockaded fish-trap. 
We pause and chat, and watch them collecting the fish in baskets, and
I acquire some specimens; and then, shouting farewells when we are well
away, in the proper civil way, resume our course.

The middle of the Ogowé here is simply forested with high
rocks, looking, as they stand with their grim forms above the foam,
like a regiment of strange strong creatures breasting it, with their
straight faces up river, and their more flowing curves down, as though
they had on black mantles which were swept backwards.  Across on
the other bank rose the black-forested spurs of Lomba-njaku.  Our
channel was free until we had to fight round the upper end of our bay
into a long rush of strong current with bad whirlpools curving its face;
then the river widens out and quiets down and then suddenly contracts
– a rocky forested promontory running out from each bank.  There
is a little village on the north bank’s promontory, and, at the
end of each, huge monoliths rise from the water, making what looks like
a gateway which had once been barred and through which the Ogowé
had burst.

For the first time on this trip I felt discouraged; it seemed so
impossible that we, with our small canoe and scanty crew, could force
our way up through that gateway, when the whole Ogowé was rushing
down through it.  But we clung to the bank and rocks with hands,
poles, and paddle, and did it; really the worst part was not in the
gateway but just before it, for here there is a great whirlpool, its
centre hollowed some one or two feet below its rim.  It is caused,
my Kembe islander says, by a great cave opening beneath the water. 
Above the gate the river broadens out again and we see the arched opening
to a large cave in the south bank; the mountain-side is one mass of
rock covered with the unbroken forest; and the entrance to this cave
is just on the upper wall of the south bank’s promontory; so,
being sheltered from the current here, we rest and examine it leisurely. 
The river runs into it, and you can easily pass in at this season, but
in the height of the wet season, when the river level would be some
twenty feet or more above its present one, I doubt if you could. 
They told me this place is called Boko Boko, and that the cave is a
very long one, extending on a level some way into the hill, and then
ascending and coming out near a mass of white rock that showed as a
speck high up on the mountain.

If you paddle into it you go “far far,” and then “no
more water live,” and you get out and go up the tunnel, which
is sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, sometimes high, sometimes so low
that you have to crawl, and so get out at the other end.

One French gentleman has gone through this performance, and I am
told found “plenty plenty” bats, and hedgehogs, and snakes. 
They could not tell me his name, which I much regretted.  As we
had no store of bush lights we went no further than the portals; indeed,
strictly between ourselves, if I had had every bush light in Congo Français
I personally should not have relished going further.  I am terrified
of caves; it sends a creaming down my back to think of them.

We went across the river to see another cave entrance on the other
bank, where there is a narrow stretch of low rock-covered land at the
foot of the mountains, probably under water in the wet season. 
The mouth of this other cave is low, between tumbled blocks of rock. 
It looked so suspiciously like a short cut to the lower regions, that
I had less exploring enthusiasm about it than even about its opposite
neighbour; although they told me no man had gone down “them thing.” 
Probably that much-to-be-honoured Frenchman who explored the other cave,
allowed like myself, that if one did want to go from the Equator to
Hades, there were pleasanter ways to go than this.  My Kembe Island
man said that just hereabouts were five cave openings, the two that
we had seen and another one we had not, on land, and two under the water,
one of the sub-fluvial ones being responsible for the whirlpool we met
outside the gateway of Boko Boko.

The scenery above Boko Boko was exceedingly lovely, the river shut
in between its rim of mountains.  As you pass up it opens out in
front of you and closes in behind, the closely-set confused mass of
mountains altering in form as you view them from different angles, save
one, Kangwe – a blunt cone, evidently the record of some great volcanic
outburst; and the sandbanks show again wherever the current deflects
and leaves slack water, their bright glistening colour giving a relief
to the scene.

For a long period we paddle by the south bank, and pass a vertical
cleft-like valley, the upper end of which seems blocked by a finely
shaped mountain, almost as conical as Kangwe.  The name of this
mountain is Njoko, and the name of the clear small river, that apparently
monopolises the valley floor, is the Ovata.  Our peace was not
of long duration, and we were soon again in the midst of a bristling
forest of rock; still the current running was not dangerously strong,
for the river-bed comes up in a ridge, too high for much water to come
over at this season of the year; but in the wet season this must be
one of the worst places.  This ridge of rock runs two-thirds across
the Ogowé, leaving a narrow deep channel by the north bank. 
When we had got our canoe over the ridge, mostly by standing in the
water and lifting her, we found the water deep and fairly quiet.

On the north bank we passed by the entrance of the Okana River. 
Its mouth is narrow, but, the natives told me, always deep, even in
the height of the dry season.  It is a very considerable river,
running inland to the E.N.E.  Little is known about it, save that
it is narrowed into a ravine course above which it expands again; the
banks of it are thickly populated by Fans, who send down a considerable
trade, and have an evil reputation.  In the main stream of the
Ogowé below the Okana’s entrance, is a long rocky island
called Shandi.  When we were getting over our ridge and paddling
about the Okana’s entrance my ears recognised a new sound. 
The rush and roar of the Ogowé we knew well enough, and could
locate which particular obstacle to his headlong course was making him
say things; it was either those immovable rocks, which threw him back
in foam, whirling wildly, or it was that fringe of gaunt skeleton trees
hanging from the bank playing a “pull devil, pull baker”
contest that made him hiss with vexation.  But this was an elemental
roar.  I said to M’bo: “That’s a thunderstorm
away among the mountains.”  “No, sir,” says he,
“that’s the Alemba.”

We paddled on towards it, hugging the right-hand bank again to avoid
the mid-river rocks.  For a brief space the mountain wall ceased,
and a lovely scene opened before us; we seemed to be looking into the
heart of the chain of the Sierra del Cristal, the abruptly shaped mountains
encircling a narrow plain or valley before us, each one of them steep
in slope, every one of them forest-clad; one, whose name I know not
unless it be what is sometimes put down as Mt. Okana on the French maps,
had a conical shape which contrasted beautifully with the more irregular
curves of its companions.  The colour down this gap was superb,
and very Japanese in the evening glow.  The more distant peaks
were soft gray-blues and purples, those nearer, indigo and black. 
We soon passed this lovely scene and entered the walled-in channel,
creeping up what seemed an interminable hill of black water, then through
some whirlpools and a rocky channel to the sand and rock shore of our
desired island Kondo Kondo, along whose northern side tore in thunder
the Alemba.  We made our canoe fast in a little cove among the
rocks, and landed, pretty stiff and tired and considerably damp. 
This island, when we were on it, must have been about half a mile or
so long, but during the long wet season a good deal of it is covered,
and only the higher parts – great heaps of stone, among which grows
a long branched willow-like shrub – are above or nearly above water. 
The Adooma from Kembe Island especially drew my attention to this shrub,
telling me his people who worked the rapids always regarded it with
an affectionate veneration; for he said it was the only thing that helped
a man when his canoe got thrown over in the dreaded Alemba, for its
long tough branches swimming in, or close to, the water are veritable
life lines, and his best chance; a chance which must have failed some
poor fellow, whose knife and leopard-skin belt we found wedged in among
the rocks on Kondo Kondo.  The main part of the island is sand,
with slabs and tables of polished rock sticking up through it; and in
between the rocks grew in thousands most beautiful lilies, their white
flowers having a very strong scent of vanilla and their bright light-green
leaves looking very lovely on the glistening pale sand among the black-gray
rock.  How they stand the long submersion they must undergo I do
not know; the natives tell me they begin to spring up as soon as ever
the water falls and leaves the island exposed; that they very soon grow
up and flower, and keep on flowering until the Ogowé comes down
again and rides roughshod over Kondo Kondo for months.  While the
men were making their fire I went across the island to see the great
Alemba rapid, of which I had heard so much, that lay between it and
the north bank.  Nobler pens than mine must sing its glory and
its grandeur.  Its face was like nothing I have seen before. 
Its voice was like nothing I have heard.  Those other rapids are
not to be compared to it; they are wild, headstrong, and malignant enough,
but the Alemba is not as they.  It does not struggle, and writhe,
and brawl among the rocks, but comes in a majestic springing dance,
a stretch of waltzing foam, triumphant.

The beauty of the night on Kondo Kondo was superb; the sun went down
and the afterglow flashed across the sky in crimson, purple, and gold,
leaving it a deep violet-purple, with the great stars hanging in it
like moons, until the moon herself arose, lighting the sky long before
she sent her beams down on us in this valley.  As she rose, the
mountains hiding her face grew harder and harder in outline, and deeper
and deeper black, while those opposite were just enough illumined to
let one see the wefts and floating veils of blue-white mist upon them,
and when at last, and for a short time only, she shone full down on
the savage foam of the Alemba, she turned it into a soft silver mist. 
Around, on all sides, flickered the fire-flies, who had come to see
if our fire was not a big relation of their own, and they were the sole
representatives, with ourselves, of animal life.  When the moon
had gone, the sky, still lit by the stars, seeming indeed to be in itself
lambent, was very lovely, but it shared none of its light with us, and
we sat round our fire surrounded by an utter darkness.  Cold, clammy
drifts of almost tangible mist encircled us; ever and again came cold
faint puffs of wandering wind, weird and grim beyond description.

I will not weary you further with details of our ascent of the Ogowé
rapids, for I have done so already sufficiently to make you understand
the sort of work going up them entails, and I have no doubt that, could
I have given you a more vivid picture of them, you would join me in
admiration of the fiery pluck of those few Frenchmen who traverse them
on duty bound.  I personally deeply regret it was not my good fortune
to meet again the French official I had had the pleasure of meeting
on the Éclaireur.  He would have been truly great
in his description of his voyage to Franceville.  I wonder how
he would have “done” his unpacking of canoes and his experiences
on Kondo Kondo, where, by the by, we came across many of the ashes of
his expedition’s attributive fires.  Well! he must have been
a pleasure to Franceville, and I hope also to the good Fathers at Lestourville,
for those places must be just slightly sombre for Parisians.

Going down big rapids is always, everywhere, more dangerous than
coming up, because when you are coming up and a whirlpool or eddy does
jam you on rocks, the current helps you off – certainly only with a
view to dashing your brains out and smashing your canoe on another set
of rocks it’s got ready below; but for the time being it helps,
and when off, you take charge and convert its plan into an incompleted
fragment; whereas in going down the current is against your backing
off.  M’bo had a series of prophetic visions as to what would
happen to us on our way down, founded on reminiscence and tradition. 
I tried to comfort him by pointing out that, were any one of his prophecies
fulfilled, it would spare our friends and relations all funeral expenses;
and, unless they went and wasted their money on a memorial window, that
ought to be a comfort to our well-regulated minds.  M’bo
did not see this, but was too good a Christian to be troubled by the
disagreeable conviction that was in the minds of other members of my
crew, namely, that our souls, unliberated by funeral rites from this
world, would have to hover for ever over the Ogowé near the scene
of our catastrophe.  I own this idea was an unpleasant one – fancy
having to pass the day in those caves with the bats, and then come out
and wander all night in the cold mists!  However, like a good many
likely-looking prophecies, those of M’bo did not quite come off,
and a miss is as good as a mile.  Twice we had a near call, by
being shot in between two pinnacle rocks, within half an inch of being
fatally close to each other for us; but after some alarming scrunching
sounds, and creaks from the canoe, we were shot ignominiously out down
river.  Several times we got on to partially submerged table rocks,
and were unceremoniously bundled off them by the Ogowé, irritated
at the hindrance we were occasioning; but we never met the rocks of
M’bo’s prophetic soul – that lurking, submerged needle,
or knife-edge of a pinnacle rock which was to rip our canoe from stem
to stern, neat and clean into two pieces.

The course we had to take coming down was different to that we took
coming up.  Coming up we kept as closely as might be to the most
advisable bank, and dodged behind every rock we could, to profit by
the shelter it afforded us from the current.  Coming down, fallen-tree-fringed
banks and rocks were converted from friends to foes; so we kept with
all our power in the very centre of the swiftest part of the current
in order to avoid them.  The grandest part of the whole time was
coming down, below the Alemba, where the whole great Ogowé takes
a tiger-like spring for about half a mile, I should think, before it
strikes a rock reef below.  As you come out from among the rocks
in the upper rapid it gives you – or I should perhaps confine myself
to saying, it gave me – a peculiar internal sensation to see that stretch
of black water, shining like a burnished sheet of metal, sloping down
before one, at such an angle.  All you have got to do is to keep
your canoe-head straight – quite straight, you understand – for any
failure so to do will land you the other side of the tomb, instead of
in a cheerful no-end-of-a-row with the lower rapid’s rocks. 
This lower rapid is one of the worst in the dry season; maybe it is
so in the wet too, for the river’s channel here turns an elbow-sharp
curve which infuriates the Ogowé in a most dangerous manner.

I hope to see the Ogowé next time in the wet season – there
must be several more of these great sheets of water then over what are
rocky rapids now.  Just think what coming down over that ridge
above Boko Boko will be like!  I do not fancy however it would
ever be possible to get up the river, when it is at its height, with
so small a crew as we were when we went and played our knock-about farce,
before King Death, in his amphitheatre in the Sierra del Cristal.

CHAPTER VI.  LEMBARENE.

In which is given some account of the episode of the Hippopotame,
and of the voyager’s attempts at controlling an Ogowé canoe;
and also of the Igalwa tribe.

I say good-bye to Talagouga with much regret, and go on board the
Éclaireur, when she returns from Njole, with all my bottles
and belongings.  On board I find no other passenger; the Captain’s
English has widened out considerably; and he is as pleasant, cheery,
and spoiling for a fight as ever; but he has a preoccupied manner, and
a most peculiar set of new habits, which I find are shared by the Engineer. 
Both of them make rapid dashes to the rail, and nervously scan the river
for a minute and then return to some occupation, only to dash from it
to the rail again.  During breakfast their conduct is nerve-shaking. 
Hastily taking a few mouthfuls, the Captain drops his knife and fork
and simply hurls his seamanlike form through the nearest door out on
to the deck.  In another minute he is back again, and with just
a shake of his head to the Engineer, continues his meal.  The Engineer
shortly afterwards flies from his seat, and being far thinner than the
Captain, goes through his nearest door with even greater rapidity; returns,
and shakes his head at the Captain, and continues his meal.  Excitement
of this kind is infectious, and I also wonder whether I ought not to
show a sympathetic friendliness by flying from my seat and hurling myself
on to the deck through my nearest door, too.  But although there
are plenty of doors, as four enter the saloon from the deck, I do not
see my way to doing this performance aimlessly, and what in this world
they are both after I cannot think.  So I confine myself to woman’s
true sphere, and assist in a humble way by catching the wine and Vichy
water bottles, glasses, and plates of food, which at every performance
are jeopardised by the members of the nobler sex starting off with a
considerable quantity of the ample table cloth wrapped round their legs. 
At last I can stand it no longer, so ask the Captain point-blank what
is the matter.  “Nothing,” says he, bounding out of
his chair and flying out of his doorway; but on his return he tells
me he has got a bet on of two bottles of champagne with Woermann’s
Agent for Njole, as to who shall reach Lembarene first, and the German
agent has started off some time before the Éclaireur in
his little steam launch.

During the afternoon we run smoothly along; the free pulsations of
the engines telling what a very different thing coming down the Ogowé
is to going up against its terrific current.  Every now and again
we stop to pick up cargo, or discharge over-carried cargo, and the Captain’s
mind becomes lulled by getting no news of the Woermann’s launch
having passed down.  He communicates this to the Engineer; it is
impossible she could have passed the Éclaireur since they
started, therefore she must be some where behind at a subfactory, “N’est-ce
pas?”  “Oui, oui, certainement,” says the
Engineer.  The Engineer is, by these considerations, also lulled,
and feels he may do something else but scan the river à la
sister Ann.  What that something is puzzles me; it evidently requires
secrecy, and he shrinks from detection.  First he looks down one
side of the deck, no one there; then he looks down the other, no one
there; good so far.  I then see he has put his head through one
of the saloon portholes; no one there; he hesitates a few seconds until
I begin to wonder whether his head will suddenly appear through my port;
but he regards this as an unnecessary precaution, and I hear him enter
his cabin which abuts on mine and there is silence for some minutes. 
Writing home to his mother, think I, as I go on putting a new braid
round the bottom of a worn skirt.  Almost immediately after follows
the sound of a little click from the next cabin, and then apparently
one of the denizens of the infernal regions has got its tail smashed
in a door and the heavy hot afternoon air is reft by an inchoate howl
of agony.  I drop my needlework and take to the deck; but it is
after all only that shy retiring young man practising secretly on his
clarionet.

The Captain is drowsily looking down the river.  But repose
is not long allowed to that active spirit; he sees something in the
water – what?  “Hippopotame,” he ejaculates. 
Now both he and the Engineer frequently do this thing, and then fly
off to their guns – bang, bang, finish; but this time he does not dash
for his gun, nor does the Engineer, who flies out of his cabin at the
sound of the war shout “Hippopotame.”  In vain
I look across the broad river with its stretches of yellow sandbanks,
where the “hippopotame” should be, but I can see
nothing but four black stumps sticking up in the water away to the right. 
Meanwhile the Captain and the Engineer are flying about getting off
a crew of blacks into the canoe we are towing alongside.  This
being done the Captain explains to me that on the voyage up “the
Engineer had fired at, and hit a hippopotamus, and without doubt this
was its body floating.”  We are now close enough even for
me to recognise the four stumps as the deceased’s legs, and soon
the canoe is alongside them and makes fast to one, and then starts to
paddle back, hippo and all, to the Éclaireur.  But
no such thing; let them paddle and shout as hard as they like, the hippo’s
weight simply anchors them.  The Éclaireur by now
has dropped down the river past them, and has to sweep round and run
back.  Recognising promptly what the trouble is, the energetic
Captain grabs up a broom, ties a light cord belonging to the leadline
to it, and holding the broom by the end of its handle, swings it round
his head and hurls it at the canoe.  The arm of a merciful Providence
being interposed, the broom-tomahawk does not hit the canoe, wherein,
if it had, it must infallibly have killed some one, but falls short,
and goes tearing off with the current, well out of reach of the canoe. 
The Captain seeing this gross dereliction of duty by a Chargeur Réunis
broom, hauls it in hand over hand and talks to it.  Then he ties
the other end of its line to the mooring rope, and by a better aimed
shot sends the broom into the water, about ten yards above the canoe,
and it drifts towards it.  Breathless excitement! surely they will
get it now.  Alas, no!  Just when it is within reach of the
canoe, a fearful shudder runs through the broom.  It throws up
its head and sinks beneath the tide.  A sensation of stun comes
over all of us.  The crew of the canoe, ready and eager to grasp
the approaching aid, gaze blankly at the circling ripples round where
it sank.  In a second the Captain knows what has happened. 
That heavy hawser which has been paid out after it has dragged it down,
so he hauls it on board again.

The Éclaireur goes now close enough to the hippo-anchored
canoe for a rope to be flung to the man in her bows; he catches it and
freezes on gallantly.  Saved!  No!  Oh horror! 
The lower deck hums with fear that after all it will not taste that
toothsome hippo chop, for the man who has caught the rope is as nearly
as possible jerked flying out of the canoe when the strain of the Éclaireur
contending with the hippo’s inertia flies along it, but his companion
behind him grips him by the legs and is in his turn grabbed, and the
crew holding on to each other with their hands, and on to their craft
with their feet, save the man holding on to the rope and the whole situation;
and slowly bobbing towards us comes the hippopotamus, who is shortly
hauled on board by the winners in triumph.

My esteemed friends, the Captain and the Engineer, who of course
have been below during this hauling, now rush on to the upper deck,
each coatless, and carrying an enormous butcher’s knife. 
They dash into the saloon, where a terrific sharpening of these instruments
takes place on the steel belonging to the saloon carving-knife, and
down stairs again.  By looking down the ladder, I can see the pink,
pig-like hippo, whose colour has been soaked out by the water, lying
on the lower deck and the Captain and Engineer slitting down the skin
intent on gralloching operations.  Providentially, my prophetic
soul induces me to leave the top of the ladder and go forward – “run
to win’ard,” as Captain Murray would say – for within two
minutes the Captain and Engineer are up the ladder as if they had been
blown up by the boilers bursting, and go as one man for the brandy bottle;
and they wanted it if ever man did; for remember that hippo had been
dead and in the warm river-water for more than a week.

The Captain had had enough of it, he said, but the Engineer stuck
to the job with a courage I profoundly admire, and he saw it through
and then retired to his cabin; sand-and-canvassed himself first, and
then soaked and saturated himself in Florida water.  The flesh
gladdened the hearts of the crew and lower-deck passengers and also
of the inhabitants of Lembarene, who got dashes of it on our arrival
there.  Hippo flesh is not to be despised by black man or white;
I have enjoyed it far more than the stringy beef or vapid goat’s
flesh one gets down here.

I stayed on board the Éclaireur all night; for it was
dark when we reached Lembarene, too dark to go round to Kangwe; and
next morning, after taking a farewell of her – I hope not a final one,
for she is a most luxurious little vessel for the Coast, and the feeding
on board is excellent and the society varied and charming – I went round
to Kangwe.

I remained some time in the Lembarene district and saw and learnt
many things; I owe most of what I learnt to M. and Mme. Jacot, who knew
a great deal about both the natives and the district, and I owe much
of what I saw to having acquired the art of managing by myself a native
canoe.  This “recklessness” of mine I am sure did not
merit the severe criticism it has been subjected to, for my performances
gave immense amusement to others (I can hear Lembarene’s shrieks
of laughter now) and to myself they gave great pleasure.

My first attempt was made at Talagouga one very hot afternoon. 
M. and Mme. Forget were, I thought, safe having their siestas, Oranie
was with Mme. Gacon.  I knew where Mme. Gacon was for certain;
she was with M. Gacon; and I knew he was up in the sawmill shed, out
of sight of the river, because of the soft thump, thump, thump of the
big water-wheel.  There was therefore no one to keep me out of
mischief, and I was too frightened to go into the forest that afternoon,
because on the previous afternoon I had been stalked as a wild beast
by a cannibal savage, and I am nervous.  Besides, and above all,
it is quite impossible to see other people, even if they are only black,
naked savages, gliding about in canoes, without wishing to go and glide
about yourself.  So I went down to where the canoes were tied by
their noses to the steep bank, and finding a paddle, a broken one, I
unloosed the smallest canoe.  Unfortunately this was fifteen feet
or so long, but I did not know the disadvantage of having, as it were,
a long-tailed canoe then – I did shortly afterwards.

The promontories running out into the river on each side of the mission
beach give a little stretch of slack water between the bank and the
mill-race-like current of the Ogowé, and I wisely decided to
keep in the slack water, until I had found out how to steer – most important
thing steering.  I got into the bow of the canoe, and shoved off
from the bank all right; then I knelt down – learn how to paddle standing
up by and by – good so far.  I rapidly learnt how to steer from
the bow, but I could not get up any pace.  Intent on acquiring
pace, I got to the edge of the slack water; and then displaying more
wisdom, I turned round to avoid it, proud as a peacock, you understand,
at having found out how to turn round.  At this moment, the current
of “the greatest equatorial river in the world,” grabbed
my canoe by its tail.  We spun round and round for a few seconds,
like a teetotum, I steering the whole time for all I was worth, and
then the current dragged the canoe ignominiously down river, tail foremost.

Fortunately a big tree was at that time temporarily hanging against
the rock in the river, just below the sawmill beach.  Into that
tree the canoe shot with a crash, and I hung on, and shipping my paddle,
pulled the canoe into the slack water again, by the aid of the branches
of the tree, which I was in mortal terror would come off the rock, and
insist on accompanying me and the canoe, viâ Kama country,
to the Atlantic Ocean; but it held, and when I had got safe against
the side of the pinnacle-rock I wiped a perspiring brow, and searched
in my mind for a piece of information regarding Navigation that would
be applicable to the management of long-tailed Adooma canoes. 
I could not think of one for some minutes.  Captain Murray has
imparted to me at one time and another an enormous mass of hints as
to the management of vessels, but those vessels were all pre-supposed
to have steam power.  But he having been the first man to take
an ocean-going steamer up to Matadi on the Congo, through the terrific
currents that whirl and fly in Hell’s Cauldron, knew about currents,
and I remembered he had said regarding taking vessels through them,
“Keep all the headway you can on her.”  Good! that
hint inverted will fit this situation like a glove, and I’ll keep
all the tailway I can off her.  Feeling now as safe as only a human
being can feel who is backed up by a sound principle, I was cautiously
crawling to the tail-end of the canoe, intent on kneeling in it to look
after it, when I heard a dreadful outcry on the bank.  Looking
there I saw Mme. Forget, Mme. Gacon, M. Gacon, and their attributive
crowd of mission children all in a state of frenzy.  They said
lots of things in chorus.  “What?” said I.  They
said some more and added gesticulations.  Seeing I was wasting
their time as I could not hear, I drove the canoe from the rock and
made my way, mostly by steering, to the bank close by; and then tying
the canoe firmly up I walked over the mill stream and divers other things
towards my anxious friends.  “You’ll be drowned,”
they said.  “Gracious goodness!” said I, “I thought
that half an hour ago, but it’s all right now; I can steer.” 
After much conversation I lulled their fears regarding me, and having
received strict orders to keep in the stern of the canoe, because that
is the proper place when you are managing a canoe single-handed, I returned
to my studies.  I had not however lulled my friends’ interest
regarding me, and they stayed on the bank watching.

I found first, that my education in steering from the bow was of
no avail; second, that it was all right if you reversed it.  For
instance, when you are in the bow, and make an inward stroke with the
paddle on the right-hand side, the bow goes to the right; whereas, if
you make an inward stroke on the right-hand side, when you are sitting
in the stern, the bow then goes to the left.  Understand? 
Having grasped this law, I crept along up river; and, by Allah! before
I had gone twenty yards, if that wretch, the current of the greatest,
etc., did not grab hold of the nose of my canoe, and we teetotummed
round again as merrily as ever.  My audience screamed.  I
knew what they were saying, “You’ll be drowned!  Come
back!  Come back!” but I heard them and I heeded not. 
If you attend to advice in a crisis you’re lost; besides, I couldn’t
“Come back” just then.  However, I got into the slack
water again, by some very showy, high-class steering.  Still steering,
fine as it is, is not all you require and hanker after.  You want
pace as well, and pace, except when in the clutches of the current,
I had not so far attained.  Perchance, thought I, the pace region
in a canoe may be in its centre; so I got along on my knees into the
centre to experiment.  Bitter failure; the canoe took to sidling
down river broadside on, like Mr. Winkle’s horse.  Shouts
of laughter from the bank.  Both bow and stern education utterly
inapplicable to centre; and so, seeing I was utterly thrown away there,
I crept into the bows, and in a few more minutes I steered my canoe,
perfectly, in among its fellows by the bank and secured it there. 
Mme. Forget ran down to meet me and assured me she had not laughed so
much since she had been in Africa, although she was frightened at the
time lest I should get capsized and drowned.  I believe it, for
she is a sweet and gracious lady; and I quite see, as she demonstrated,
that the sight of me, teetotumming about, steering in an elaborate and
showy way all the time, was irresistibly comic.  And she gave a
most amusing account of how, when she started looking for me to give
me tea, a charming habit of hers, she could not see me in among my bottles,
and so asked the little black boy where I was.  “There,”
said he, pointing to the tree hanging against the rock out in the river;
and she, seeing me hitched with a canoe against the rock, and knowing
the danger and depth of the river, got alarmed.

Well, when I got down to Lembarene I naturally went on with my canoeing
studies, in pursuit of the attainment of pace.  Success crowned
my efforts, and I can honestly and truly say that there are only two
things I am proud of – one is that Doctor Günther has approved
of my fishes, and the other is that I can paddle an Ogowé canoe. 
Pace, style, steering and all, “All same for one” as if
I were an Ogowé African.  A strange, incongruous pair of
things: but I often wonder what are the things other people are really
most proud of; it would be a quaint and repaying subject for investigation.

Mme. Jacot gave me every help in canoeing, for she is a remarkably
clear-headed woman, and recognised that, as I was always getting soaked,
anyhow, I ran no extra danger in getting soaked in a canoe; and then,
it being the dry season, there was an immense stretch of water opposite
Andande beach, which was quite shallow.  So she saw no need of
my getting drowned.

The sandbanks were showing their yellow heads in all directions when
I came down from Talagouga, and just opposite Andande there was sticking
up out of the water a great, graceful, palm frond.  It had been
stuck into the head of the pet sandbank, and every day was visited by
the boys and girls in canoes to see how much longer they would have
to wait for the sandbank’s appearance.  A few days after
my return it showed, and in two days more there it was, acres and acres
of it, looking like a great, golden carpet spread on the surface of
the centre of the clear water – clear here, down this side of Lembarene
Island, because the river runs fairly quietly, and has time to deposit
its mud.  Dark brown the Ogowé flies past the other side
of the island, the main current being deflected that way by a bend,
just below the entrance of the Nguni.

There was great rejoicing.  Canoe-load after canoe-load of boys
and girls went to the sandbank, some doing a little fishing round its
rim, others bringing the washing there, all skylarking and singing. 
Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sandbank – the
merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy-coloured
patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread
out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright
flowers.  By night when it was moonlight there would be bands of
dancers on it with bush-light torches, gyrating, intermingling and separating
till you could think you were looking at a dance of stars.

They commenced affairs very early on that sandbank, and they kept
them up very late; and all the time there came from it a soft murmur
of laughter and song.  Ah me! if the aim of life were happiness
and pleasure, Africa should send us missionaries instead of our sending
them to her – but, fortunately for the work of the world, happiness
is not.  One thing I remember which struck me very much regarding
the sandbank, and this was that Mme. Jacot found such pleasure in taking
her work on to the verandah, where she could see it.  I knew she
did not care for the songs and the dancing.  One day she said to
me, “It is such a relief.”  “A relief?”
I said.  “Yes, do you not see that until it shows there is
nothing but forest, forest, forest, and that still stretch of river? 
That bank is the only piece of clear ground I see in the year, and that
only lasts a few weeks until the wet season comes, and then it goes,
and there is nothing but forest, forest, forest, for another year. 
It is two years now since I came to this place; it may be I know not
how many more before we go home again.”  I grieve to say,
for my poor friend’s sake, that her life at Kangwe was nearly
at its end.  Soon after my return to England I heard of the death
of her husband from malignant fever.  M. Jacot was a fine, powerful,
energetic man, in the prime of life.  He was a teetotaler and a
vegetarian; and although constantly travelling to and fro in his district
on his evangelising work, he had no foolish recklessness in him. 
No one would have thought that he would have been the first to go of
us who used to sit round his hospitable table.  His delicate wife,
his two young children or I would have seemed far more likely. 
His loss will be a lasting one to the people he risked his life to (what
he regarded) save.  The natives held him in the greatest affection
and respect, and his influence over them was considerable, far more
profound than that of any other missionary I have ever seen.  His
loss is also great to those students of Africa who are working on the
culture or on the languages; his knowledge of both was extensive, particularly
of the little known languages of the Ogowé district.  He
was, when I left, busily employed in compiling a dictionary of the Fan
tongue, and had many other works on language in contemplation. 
His work in this sphere would have had a high value, for he was a man
with a University education and well grounded in Latin and Greek, and
thoroughly acquainted with both English and French literature, for although
born a Frenchman, he had been brought up in America.  He was also
a cultivated musician, and he and Mme. Jacot in the evenings would sing
old French songs, Swiss songs, English songs, in their rich full voices;
and then if you stole softly out on to the verandah, you would often
find it crowded with a silent, black audience, listening intently.

The amount of work M. and Mme. Jacot used to get through was, to
me, amazing, and I think the Ogowé Protestant mission sadly short-handed
– its missionaries not being content to follow the usual Protestant
plan out in West Africa, namely, quietly sitting down and keeping house,
with just a few native children indoors to do the housework, and close
by a school and a little church where a service is held on Sundays. 
The representatives of the Mission Évangélique go to and
fro throughout the district round each station on evangelising work,
among some of the most dangerous and uncivilised tribes in Africa, frequently
spending a fortnight at a time away from their homes, on the waterways
of a wild and dangerous country.  In addition to going themselves,
they send trained natives as evangelists and Bible-readers, and keep
a keen eye on the trained native, which means a considerable amount
of worry and strain too.  The work on the stations is heavy in
Ogowé districts, because when you have got a clearing made and
all the buildings up, you have by no means finished with the affair,
for you have to fight the Ogowé forest back, as a Dutchman fights
the sea.  But the main cause of work is the store, which in this
exhausting climate is more than enough work for one man alone.

Payments on the Ogowé are made in goods; the natives do not
use any coinage-equivalent, save in the strange case of the Fans, which
does not touch general trade and which I will speak of later. 
They have not even the brass bars and cheetems that are in us in Calabar,
or cowries as in Lagos.  In order to expedite and simplify this
goods traffic, a written or printed piece of paper is employed – practically
a cheque, which is called a “bon” or “book,”
and these “bons” are cashed – i.e. gooded, at the
store.  They are for three amounts.  Five fura = a dollar. 
One fura = a franc.  Desu = fifty centimes = half a fura. 
The value given for these “bons” is the same from Government,
Trade, and Mission.  Although the Mission Évangélique
does not trade – i.e. buy produce and sell it at a profit, its
representatives have a great deal of business to attend to through the
store, which is practically a bank.  All the native evangelists,
black teachers, Bible-readers and labourers on the stations are paid
off in these bons; and when any representative of the mission is away
on a journey, food bought for themselves and their canoe crews is paid
for in bons, which are brought in by the natives at their convenience,
and changed for goods at the store.  Therefore for several hours
every weekday the missionary has to devote himself to store work, and
store work out here is by no means playing at shop.  It is very
hard, tiring, exasperating work when you have to deal with it in full,
as a trader, when it is necessary for you to purchase produce at a price
that will give you a reasonable margin of profit over storing, customs’
duties, shipping expenses, etc., etc.  But it is quite enough to
try the patience of any Saint when you are only keeping store to pay
on bons, à la missionary; for each class of article used
in trade – and there are some hundreds of them – has a definite and
acknowledged value, but where the trouble comes in is that different
articles have the same value; for example, six fish hooks and one pocket-handkerchief
have the same value, or you can make up that value in lucifer matches,
pomatum, a mirror, a hair comb, tobacco, or scent in bottles.

Now, if you are a trader, certain of these articles cost you more
than others, although they have an identical value to the native, and
so it is to your advantage to pay what we should call, in Cameroons,
“a Kru, cheap copper,” and you have a lot of worry to effect
this.  To the missionary this does not so much matter.  It
makes absolutely no difference to the native, mind you; so he is by
no means done by the trader.  Take powder for an example. 
There is no profit on powder for the trader in Congo Français,
but the native always wants it because he can get a tremendous profit
on it from his black brethren in the bush; hence it pays the trader
to give him his bon out in Boma check, etc., better than in gunpowder. 
This is a fruitful spring of argument and persuasion.  However,
whether the native is passing in a bundle of rubber or a tooth of ivory,
or merely cashing a bon for a week’s bush catering, he is in Congo
Français incapable of deciding what he will have when it comes
to the point.  He comes into the shop with a bon in his hand, and
we will say, for example, the idea in his head that he wants fish-hooks
– “jupes,” he calls them – but, confronted with the visible
temptation of pomatum, he hesitates, and scratches his head violently. 
Surrounding him there are ten or twenty other natives with their minds
in a similar wavering state, but yet anxious to be served forthwith. 
In consequence of the stimulating scratch, he remembers that one of
his wives said he was to bring some Lucifer matches, another wanted
cloth for herself, and another knew of some rubber she could buy very
cheap, in tobacco, of a Fan woman who had stolen it.  This rubber
he knows he can take to the trader’s store and sell for pocket-handkerchiefs
of a superior pattern, or gunpowder, or rum, which he cannot get at
the mission store.  He finally gets something and takes it home,
and likely enough brings it back, in a day or so, somewhat damaged,
desirous of changing it for some other article or articles.  Remember
also that these Bantu, like the Negroes, think externally, in a loud
voice; like Mr. Kipling’s ’oont, “’e smells
most awful vile,” and, if he be a Fan, he accompanies his observations
with violent dramatic gestures, and let the customer’s tribe or
sex be what it may, the customer is sadly, sadly liable to pick up any
portable object within reach, under the shadow of his companions’
uproar, and stow it away in his armpits, between his legs, or, if his
cloth be large enough, in that.  Picture to yourself the perplexities
of a Christian minister, engaged in such an occupation as storekeeping
under these circumstances, with, likely enough, a touch of fever on
him and jiggers in his feet; and when the store is closed the goods
in it requiring constant vigilance to keep them free from mildew and
white ants.

Then in addition to the store work, a fruitful source of work and
worry are the schools, for both boys and girls.  It is regarded
as futile to attempt to get any real hold over the children unless they
are removed from the influence of the country fashions that surround
them in their village homes; therefore the schools are boarding; hence
the entire care of the children, including feeding and clothing, falls
on the missionary.

The instruction given in the Mission Évangélique Schools
does not include teaching the boys trades.  The girls fare somewhat
better, as they get instruction in sewing and washing and ironing, but
I think in this district the young ladies would be all the better for
being taught cooking.

It is strange that all the cooks employed by the Europeans should
be men, yet all the cooking among the natives themselves is done by
women, and done abominably badly in all the Bantu tribes I have ever
come across; and the Bantu are in this particular, and indeed in most
particulars, far inferior to the true Negro; though I must say this
is not the orthodox view.  The Negroes cook uniformly very well,
and at moments are inspired in the direction of palm-oil chop and fish
cooking.  Not so the Bantu, whose methods cry aloud for improvement,
they having just the very easiest and laziest way possible of dealing
with food.  The food supply consists of plantain, yam, koko, sweet
potatoes, maize, pumpkin, pineapple, and ochres, fish both wet and smoked,
and flesh of many kinds – including human in certain districts – snails,
snakes, and crayfish, and big maggot-like pupæ of the rhinoceros
beetle and the Rhyncophorus palmatorum.  For sweetmeats
the sugar-cane abounds, but it is only used chewed au naturel. 
For seasoning there is that bark that tastes like an onion, an onion
distinctly passé, but powerful and permanent, particularly
if it has been used in one of the native-made, rough earthen pots. 
These pots have a very cave-man look about them; they are unglazed,
unlidded bowls.  They stand the fire wonderfully well, and you
have got to stand, as well as you can, the taste of the aforesaid bark
that clings to them, and that of the smoke which gets into them during
cooking operations over an open wood fire, as well as the soot-like
colour they impart to even your own white rice.  Out of all this
varied material the natives of the Congo Français forests produce,
dirtily, carelessly and wastefully, a dull, indigestible diet. 
Yam, sweet potatoes, ochres, and maize are not so much cultivated or
used as among the Negroes, and the daily food is practically plantain
– picked while green and the rind pulled off, and the tasteless woolly
interior baked or boiled and the widely distributed manioc treated in
the usual way.  The sweet or non-poisonous manioc I have rarely
seen cultivated, because it gives a much smaller yield, and is much
longer coming to perfection.  The poisonous kind is that in general
use; its great dahlia-like roots are soaked in water to remove the poisonous
principle, and then dried and grated up, or more commonly beaten up
into a kind of dough in a wooden trough that looks like a model canoe,
with wooden clubs, which I have seen the curiosity hunter happily taking
home as war clubs to alarm his family with.  The thump, thump,
thump of this manioc beating is one of the most familiar sounds in a
bush village.  The meal, when beaten up, is used for thickening
broths, and rolled up into bolsters about a foot long and two inches
in diameter, and then wrapped in plantain leaves, and tied round with
tie-tie and boiled, or more properly speaking steamed, for a lot of
the rolls are arranged in a brass skillet.  A small quantity of
water is poured over the rolls of plantain, a plantain leaf is tucked
in over the top tightly, so as to prevent the steam from escaping, and
the whole affair is poised on the three cooking-stones over a wood fire,
and left there until the contents are done, or more properly speaking,
until the lady in charge of it has delusions on the point, and the bottom
rolls are a trifle burnt or the whole insufficiently cooked.

This manioc meal is the staple food, the bread equivalent, all along
the coast.  As you pass along you are perpetually meeting with
a new named food, fou-fou on the Leeward, kank on the Windward, m’vada
in Corisco, ogooma in the Ogowé; but acquaintance with it demonstrates
that it is all the same – manioc.

It is a good food when it is properly prepared; but when a village
has soaked its soil-laden manioc tubers in one and the same pool of
water for years, the water in that pool becomes a trifle strong, and
both it and the manioc get a smell which once smelt is never to be forgotten;
it is something like that resulting from bad paste with a dash of vinegar,
but fit to pass all these things, and has qualities of its own that
have no civilised equivalent.

I believe that this way of preparing the staple article of diet is
largely responsible for that dire and frequent disease “cut him
belly,” and several other quaint disorders, possibly even for
the sleep disease.  The natives themselves say that a diet too
exclusively maniocan produces dimness of vision, ending in blindness
if the food is not varied; the poisonous principle cannot be anything
like soaked out in the surcharged water, and the meal when it is made
up and cooked has just the same sour, acrid taste you would expect it
to have from the smell.

The fish is boiled, or wrapped in leaves and baked.  The dried
fish, very properly known as stink-fish, is much preferred; this is
either eaten as it is, or put into stews as seasoning, as also are the
snails.  The meat is eaten either fresh or smoked, boiled or baked. 
By baked I always mean just buried in the ground and a fire lighted
on top, or wrapped in leaves and buried in hot embers.

The smoked meat is badly prepared, just hung up in the smoke of the
fires, which hardens it, blackening the outside quickly; but when the
lumps are taken out of the smoke, in a short time cracks occur in them,
and the interior part proceeds to go bad, and needless to say maggoty. 
If it is kept in the smoke, as it often is to keep it out of the way
of dogs and driver ants, it acquires the toothsome taste and texture
of a piece of old tarpaulin.

Now I will ask the surviving reader who has waded through this dissertation
on cookery if something should not be done to improve the degraded condition
of the Bantu cooking culture?  Not for his physical delectation
only, but because his present methods are bad for his morals, and drive
the man to drink, let alone assisting in riveting him in the practice
of polygamy, which the missionary party say is an exceedingly bad practice
for him to follow.  The inter-relationship of these two subjects
may not seem on the face of it very clear, but inter-relationships of
customs very rarely are; I well remember M. Jacot coming home one day
at Kangwe from an evangelising visit to some adjacent Fan towns, and
saying he had had given to him that afternoon a new reason for polygamy,
which was that it enabled a man to get enough to eat.  This sounds
sinister from a notoriously cannibal tribe; but the explanation is that
the Fans are an exceedingly hungry tribe, and require a great deal of
providing for.  It is their custom to eat about ten times a day
when in village, and the men spend most of their time in the palaver-houses
at each end of the street, the women bringing them bowls of food of
one kind or another all day long.  When the men are away in the
forest rubber or elephant-hunting, and have to cook their own food,
they cannot get quite so much; but when I have come across them on these
expeditions, they halted pretty regularly every two hours and had a
substantial snack, and the gorge they all go in for after a successful
elephant hunt is a thing to see – once.

There are other reasons which lead to the prevalence of this custom,
beside the cooking.  One is that it is totally impossible for one
woman to do the whole work of a house – look after the children, prepare
and cook the food, prepare the rubber, carry the same to the markets,
fetch the daily supply of water from the stream, cultivate the plantation,
etc., etc.  Perhaps I should say it is impossible for the dilatory
African woman, for I once had an Irish charwoman, who drank, who would
have done the whole week’s work of an African village in an afternoon,
and then been quite fresh enough to knock some of the nonsense out of
her husband’s head with that of the broom, and throw a kettle
of boiling water or a paraffin lamp at him, if she suspected him of
flirting with other ladies.  That woman, who deserves fame in the
annals of her country, was named Harragan.  She has attained immortality
some years since, by falling down stairs one Saturday night from excitement
arising from “the Image’s” (Mr. Harragan) conduct;
but we have no Mrs. Harragan in Africa.  The African lady does
not care a travelling whitesmith’s execration if her husband does
flirt, so long as he does not go and give to other women the cloth,
etc., that she should have.  The more wives the less work, says
the African lady; and I have known men who would rather have had one
wife and spent the rest of the money on themselves, in a civilised way,
driven into polygamy by the women; and of course this state of affairs
is most common in nonslave-holding tribes like the Fan.

Mission work was first opened upon the Ogowé by Dr. Nassau,
the great pioneer and explorer of these regions.  He was acting
for the American Presbyterian Society; but when the French Government
demanded education in French in the schools, the stations on the Ogowé,
Lembarene (Kangwe), and Talagouga were handed over to the Mission Évangélique
of Paris, and have been carried on by its representatives with great
devotion and energy.  I am unsympathetic, in some particulars,
for reasons of my own, with Christian missions, so my admiration for
this one does not arise from the usual ground of admiration for missions,
namely, that however they may be carried on, they are engaged in a great
and holy work; but I regard the Mission Évangélique, judging
from the results I have seen, as the perfection of what one may call
a purely spiritual mission.

Lembarene is strictly speaking a district which includes Adânlinan
lângâ and the Island, but the name is locally used to denote
the great island in the Ogowé, whose native name is Nenge Ezangy;
but for the sake of the general reader I will keep to the everyday term
of Lembarene Island.

Lembarene Island is the largest of the islands on the Ogowé. 
It is some fifteen miles long, east and west, and a mile to a mile and
a half wide.  It is hilly and rocky, uniformly clad with forest,
and several little permanent streams run from it on both sides into
the Ogowé.  It is situated 130 miles from the sea, at the
point, just below the entrance of the N’guni, where the Ogowé
commences to divide up into that network of channels by which, like
all great West African rivers save the Congo, it chooses to enter the
Ocean.  The island, as we mainlanders at Kangwe used to call it,
was a great haunt of mine, particularly after I came down from Talagouga
and saw fit to regard myself as competent to control a canoe.

From Andande, the beach of Kangwe, the breadth of the arm of the
Ogowé to the nearest village on the island, was about that of
the Thames at Blackwall.  One half of the way was slack water,
the other half was broadside on to a stiff current.  Now my pet
canoe at Andande was about six feet long, pointed at both ends, flat
bottomed, so that it floated on the top of the water; its freeboard
was, when nothing was in it, some three inches, and the poor thing had
seen trouble in its time, for it had a hole you could put your hand
in at one end; so in order to navigate it successfully, you had to squat
in the other, which immersed that to the water level but safely elevated
the damaged end in the air.  Of course you had to stop in your
end firmly, because if you went forward the hole went down into the
water, and the water went into the hole, and forthwith you foundered
with all hands – i.e., you and the paddle and the calabash baler. 
This craft also had a strong weather helm, owing to a warp in the tree
of which it had been made.  I learnt all these things one afternoon,
paddling round the sandbank; and the next afternoon, feeling confident
in the merits of my vessel, I started for the island, and I actually
got there, and associated with the natives, but feeling my arms were
permanently worn out by paddling against the current, I availed myself
of the offer of a gentleman to paddle me back in his canoe.  He
introduced himself as Samuel, and volunteered the statement that he
was “a very good man.”  We duly settled ourselves in
the canoe, he occupying the bow, I sitting in the middle, and a Mrs.
Samuel sitting in the stern.  Mrs. Samuel was a powerful, pretty
lady, and a conscientious and continuous paddler.  Mr. S. was none
of these things, but an ex-Bible reader, with an amazing knowledge of
English, which he spoke in a quaint, falsetto, far-away sort of voice,
and that man’s besetting sin was curiosity.  “You be
Christian, ma?” said he.  I asked him if he had ever met
a white man who was not.  “Yes, ma,” says Samuel. 
I said “You must have been associating with people whom you ought
not to know.”  Samuel fortunately not having a repartee for
this, paddled on with his long paddle for a few seconds.  “Where
be your husband, ma?” was the next conversational bomb he hurled
at me.  “I no got one,” I answer.  “No got,”
says Samuel, paralysed with astonishment; and as Mrs. S., who did not
know English, gave one of her vigorous drives with her paddle at this
moment, Samuel as near as possible got jerked head first into the Ogowé,
and we took on board about two bucketfuls of water.  He recovered
himself, however and returned to his charge.  “No got one,
ma?”  “No,” say I furiously.  “Do
you get much rubber round here?”  “I no be trade man,”
says Samuel, refusing to fall into my trap for changing conversation. 
“Why you no got one?”  The remainder of the conversation
is unreportable, but he landed me at Andande all right, and got his
dollar.

The next voyage I made, which was on the next day, I decided to go
by myself to the factory, which is on the other side of the island,
and did so.  I got some goods to buy fish with, and heard from
Mr. Cockshut that the poor boy-agent at Osoamokita, had committed suicide. 
It was a grievous thing.  He was, as I have said, a bright, intelligent
young Frenchman; but living in the isolation, surrounded by savage,
tiresome tribes, the strain of his responsibility had been too much
for him.  He had had a good deal of fever, and the very kindly
head agent for Woermann’s had sent Dr. Pélessier to see
if he had not better be invalided home; but he told the Doctor he was
much better, and as he had no one at home to go to he begged him not
to send him, and the Doctor, to his subsequent regret, gave in. 
No one knows, who has not been to West Africa, how terrible is the life
of a white man in one of these out-of-the-way factories, with no white
society, and with nothing to look at, day out and day in, but the one
set of objects – the forest, the river, and the beach, which in a place
like Osoamokita you cannot leave for months at a time, and of which
you soon know every plank and stone.  I felt utterly wretched as
I started home again to come up to the end of the island, and go round
it and down to Andande; and paddled on for some little time, before
I noticed that I was making absolutely no progress.  I redoubled
my exertions, and crept slowly up to some rocks projecting above the
water; but pass them I could not, as the main current of the Ogowé
flew in hollow swirls round them against my canoe.  Several passing
canoefuls of natives gave me good advice in Igalwa; but facts were facts,
and the Ogowé was too strong for me.  After about twenty
minutes an old Fan gentleman came down river in a canoe and gave me
good advice in Fan, and I got him to take me in tow – that is to say,
he got into my canoe and I held on to his and we went back down river. 
I then saw his intention was to take me across to that disreputable
village, half Fan, half Bakele, which is situated on the main bank of
the river opposite the island; this I disapproved of, because I had
heard that some Senegal soldiers who had gone over there, had been stripped
of every rag they had on, and maltreated; besides, it was growing very
late, and I wanted to get home to dinner.  I communicated my feelings
to my pilot, who did not seem to understand at first, so I feared I
should have to knock them into him with the paddle; but at last he understood
I wanted to be landed on the island and duly landed me, when he seemed
much surprised at the reward I gave him in pocket-handkerchiefs. 
Then I got a powerful young Igalwa dandy to paddle me home.

I did not go to the island next day, but down below Fula, watching
the fish playing in the clear water, and the lizards and birds on the
rocky high banks; but on my next journey round to the factories I got
into another and a worse disaster.  I went off there early one
morning; and thinking the only trouble lay in getting back up the Ogowé,
and having developed a theory that this might be minimised by keeping
very close to the island bank, I never gave a thought to dangers attributive
to going down river; so, having by now acquired pace, my canoe shot
out beyond the end rocks of the island into the main stream.  It
took me a second to realise what had happened, and another to find out
I could not get the canoe out of the current without upsetting it, and
that I could not force her back up the current, so there was nothing
for it but to keep her head straight now she had bolted.  A group
of native ladies, who had followed my proceedings with much interest,
shouted observations which I believe to have been “Come back,
come back; you’ll be drowned.”  “Good-bye, Susannah,
don’t you weep for me,” I courteously retorted; and flew
past them and the factory beaches and things in general, keenly watching
for my chance to run my canoe up a siding, as it were, off the current
main line.  I got it at last – a projecting spit of land from the
island with rocks projecting out of the water in front of it bothered
the current, and after a wild turn round or so, and a near call from
my terrified canoe trying to climb up a rock, I got into slack water
and took a pause in life’s pleasures for a few minutes. 
Knowing I must be near the end of the island, I went on pretty close
to the bank, finally got round into the Kangwe branch of the Ogowé
by a connecting creek, and after an hour’s steady paddling I fell
in with three big canoes going up river; they took me home as far as
Fula, whence a short paddle landed me at Andande only slightly late
for supper, convinced that it was almost as safe and far more amusing
to be born lucky than wise.

Now I have described my circumnavigation of the island, I will proceed
to describe its inhabitants.  The up-river end of Lembarene Island
is the most inhabited.  A path round the upper part of the island
passes through a succession of Igalwa villages and by the Roman Catholic
missionary station.  The slave villages belonging to these Igalwas
are away down the north face of the island, opposite the Fan town of
Fula, which I have mentioned.  It strikes me as remarkable that
the Igalwa, like the Dualla of Cameroons, have their slaves in separate
villages; but this is the case, though I do not know the reason of it. 
These Igalwa slaves cultivate the plantations, and bring up the vegetables
and fruit to their owners’ villages and do the housework daily.

The interior of the island is composed of high, rocky, heavily forested
hills, with here and there a stream, and here and there a swamp; the
higher land is towards the up-river end; down river there is a lower
strip of land with hillocks.  This is, I fancy, formed by deposits
of sand, etc., catching in among the rocks, and connecting what were
at one time several isolated islands.  There are no big game or
gorillas on the island, but it has a peculiar and awful house ant, much
smaller than the driver ant, but with a venomous, bad bite; its only
good point is that its chief food is the white ants, which are therefore
kept in abeyance on Lembarene Island, although flourishing destructively
on the mainland banks of the river in this locality.  I was never
tired of going and watching those Igalwa villagers, nor were, I think,
the Igalwa villagers ever tired of observing me.  Although the
physical conditions of life were practically identical with those of
the mainland, the way in which the Igalwas dealt with them, i.e.
the culture, was distinct from the culture of the mainland Fans.

The Igalwas are a tribe very nearly akin, if not ethnically identical
with, the M’pongwe, and the culture of these two tribes is on
a level with the highest native African culture.  African culture,
I may remark, varies just the same as European in this, that there is
as much difference in the manners of life between, say, an Igalwa and
a Bubi of Fernando Po, as there is between a Londoner and a Laplander.

The Igalwa builds his house like that of the M’pongwe, of bamboo,
and he surrounds himself with European-made articles.  The neat
houses, fitted with windows, with wooden shutters to close at night,
and with a deal door – a carpenter-made door – are in sharp contrast
with the ragged ant-hill looking performances of the Akkas, or the bark
huts of the Fan, with no windows, and just an extra broad bit of bark
to slip across the hole that serves as a door.  On going into an
Igalwa house you will see a four-legged table, often covered with a
bright-coloured tablecloth, on which stands a water bottle, with two
clean glasses, and round about you will see chairs – Windsor chairs. 
These houses have usually three, sometimes more rooms, and a separate
closed-in little kitchen, built apart, wherein you may observe European-made
saucepans, in addition to the ubiquitous skillet.  Outside, all
along the clean sandy streets, the inhabitants are seated.  The
Igalwa is truly great at sitting, the men pursuing a policy of masterly
inactivity, broken occasionally by leisurely netting a fishing net,
the end of the netting hitched up on to the roof thatch, and not held
by a stirrup.  The ladies are employed in the manufacture of articles
pertaining to a higher culture – I allude, as Mr. Micawber would say,
to bed-quilts and pillow-cases – the most gorgeous bed-quilts and pillow-cases
– made of patchwork, and now and again you will see a mosquito-bar in
course of construction, of course not made of net or muslin because
of the awesome strength and ferocity of the Lembarene strain of mosquitoes,
but of stout, fair-flowered and besprigged chintzes; and you will observe
these things are often being sewn with a sewing machine.

The women who may not be busy sewing are busy doing each other’s
hair.  Hair-dressing is quite an art among the Igalwa and M’pongwe
women, and their hair is very beautiful; very crinkly, but fine. 
It is plaited up, close to the head, partings between the plaits making
elaborate parterres.  Into the beds of plaited hair are stuck long
pins of river ivory (hippo), decorated with black tracery and openwork,
and made by their good men.  A lady will stick as many of these
into her hair as she can get, but the prevailing mode is to have one
stuck in behind each ear, showing their broad, long heads above like
two horns; they are exceedingly becoming to these black but comely ladies,
verily, I think, the comeliest ladies I have ever seen on the Coast. 
Very black they are, blacker than many of their neighbours, always blacker
than the Fans, and although their skin lacks that velvety pile of the
true negro, it is not too shiny, but it is fine and usually unblemished,
and their figures are charmingly rounded, their hands and feet small,
almost as small as a high-class Calabar woman’s, and their eyes
large, lustrous, soft and brown, and their teeth as white as the sea
surf and undisfigured by filing.

The native dress for men and women alike is the cloth or paun. 
The men wear it by rolling the upper line round the waist, and in addition
they frequently wear a singlet or a flannel shirt worn more Africano,
flowing free.  Rich men will mount a European coat and hat, and
men connected with the mission or trading stations occasionally wear
trousers.  The personal appearance of the men does not amount to
much when all’s done, so we will return to the ladies.  They
wrap the upper hem of these cloths round under the armpits, a graceful
form of drapery, but one which requires continual readjustment. 
The cloth is about four yards long and two deep, and there is always
round the hem a border, or false hem, of turkey red twill, or some other
coloured cotton cloth to the main body of the paun.  In addition
to the cloth there is worn, when possible, a European shawl, either
one of those thick cotton cloth ones printed with Chinese-looking patterns
in dull red on a dark ground, this sort is wrapped round the upper part
of the body: or what is more highly esteemed is a bright, light-coloured,
fancy wool shawl, pink or pale blue preferred, which being carefully
folded into a roll is placed over one shoulder, and is entirely for
dandy.  I am thankful to say they do not go in for hats; when they
wear anything on their heads it is a handkerchief folded shawl-wise;
the base of the triangle is bound round the forehead just above the
eyebrows, the ends carried round over the ears and tied behind over
the apex of the triangle of the handkerchief, the three ends being then
arranged fan-wise at the back.  Add to this costume a sober-coloured
silk parasol, not one of your green or red young tent-like, brutally
masculine, knobby-sticked umbrellas, but a fair, lady-like parasol,
which, being carefully rolled up, is carried handle foremost right in
the middle of the head, also for dandy.  Then a few strings of
turquoise-blue beads, or imitation gold ones, worn round the shapely
throat; and I will back my Igalwa or M’pongwe belle against any
of those South Sea Island young ladies we nowadays hear so much about,
thanks to Mr. Stevenson, yea, even though these may be wreathed with
fragrant flowers, and the African lady very rarely goes in for flowers. 
The only time I have seen the African ladies wearing them for ornament
has been among these Igalwas, who now and again stud their night-black
hair with pretty little round vividly red blossoms in a most fetching
way.  I wonder the Africans do not wear flowers more frequently,
for they are devoted to scent, both men and women.

The Igalwas are a proud race, one of the noble tribes, like the M’pongwe
and the Ajumba.  The women do not intermarry with lower-class tribes,
and in their own tribe they are much restricted, owing to all relations
on the mother’s side being forbidden to intermarry.  This
well-known form of accounting relationships only through the mother
(Mutterrecht) is in a more perfected and elaborated form among
the Igalwa than among any other tribe I am personally acquainted with;
brothers and cousins on the mother’s side being in one class of
relationship.

The father’s responsibility, as regards authority over his
own children, is very slight.  The really responsible male relative
is the mother’s elder brother.  From him must leave to marry
be obtained for either girl, or boy; to him and the mother must the
present be taken which is exacted on the marriage of a girl; and should
the mother die, on him and not on the father, lies the responsibility
of rearing the children; they go to his house, and he treats and regards
them as nearer and dearer to himself than his own children, and at his
death, after his own brothers by the same mother, they become his heirs.

Marriage among the Igalwa and M’pongwe is not direct marriage
by purchase, but a certain fixed price present is made to the mother
and uncle of the girl.  Other propitiatory presents (Kueliki) are
made, but do not count legally, and have not necessarily to be returned
in case of post-nuptial differences arising leading to a divorce – a
very frequent catastrophe in the social circle; for the Igalwa ladies
are spirited, and devoted to personal adornment, and they are naggers
at their husbands.  Many times when walking on Lembarene Island,
have I seen a lady stand in the street and let her husband, who had
taken shelter inside the house, know what she thought of him, in a way
that reminded me of some London slum scenes.  When the husband
loses his temper, as he surely does sooner or later, being a man, he
whacks his wife – or wives, if they have been at him in a body. 
He may whack with impunity so long as he does not draw blood; if he
does, be it never so little, his wife is off to her relations, the present
he has given for her is returned, the marriage is annulled, and she
can re-marry as soon as she is able.

Her relations are only too glad to get her, because, although the
present has to be returned, yet the propitiatory offerings remain theirs,
and they know more propitiatory offerings as well as another present
will accrue with the next set of suitors.  This of course is only
the case with the younger women; the older women for one thing do not
nag so much, and moreover they have usually children willing and able
to support them.  If they have not, their state is, like that of
all old childless women in Africa, a very desolate one.

Infant marriage is now in vogue among the Igalwa, and to my surprise
I find it is of quite recent introduction and adoption.  Their
own account of this retrograde movement in culture is that in the last
generation – some of the old people indeed claim to have known him –
there was an exceedingly ugly and deformed man who could not get a wife,
the women being then, as the men are now, great admirers of physical
beauty.  So this man, being very cunning, hit on the idea of becoming
betrothed to one before she could exercise her own choice in the matter;
and knowing a family in which an interesting event was likely to occur,
he made heavy presents in the proper quarters and bespoke the coming
infant if it should be a girl.  A girl it was, and thus, say the
Igalwa, arose the custom; and nowadays, although they do not engage
their wives so early as did the founder of the custom, they adopt infant
marriage as an institution.

I inquired carefully, in the interests of ethnology, as to what methods
of courting were in vogue previously.  They said people married
each other because they loved each other.  I hope other ethnologists
will follow this inquiry up, for we may here find a real golden age,
which in other races of humanity lies away in the mists of the ages
behind the kitchen middens and the Cambrian rocks.  My own opinion
in this matter is that the earlier courting methods of the Igalwa involved
a certain amount of effort on the man’s part, a thing abhorrent
to an Igalwa.  It necessitated his dressing himself up, and likely
enough fighting that impudent scoundrel who was engaged in courting
her too; and above all serenading her at night on the native harp, with
its strings made from the tendrils of a certain orchid, or on the marimba,
amongst crowds of mosquitoes.  Any institution that involved being
out at night amongst crowds of those Lembarene mosquitoes would have
to disappear, let that institution be what it might.

The Igalwa are one of the dying-out coast tribes.  As well as
on Lembarene Island, their villages are scattered along the banks of
the Lower Ogowé, and on the shores and islands of Elivã
Z’Onlange.  On the island they are, so far, undisturbed by
the Fan invasion, and laze their lives away like lotus-eaters. 
Their slaves work their large plantations, and bring up to them magnificent
yams, ready prepared ogooma, sweet-potatoes, papaw, etc., not forgetting
that delicacy Odeaka cheese; this is not an exclusive inspiration of
theirs, for the M’pongwe and the Benga use it as well.  It
is made from the kernel of the wild mango, a singularly beautiful tree
of great size and stately spread of foliage.  I can compare it
only in appearance and habit of growth to our Irish, or evergreen, oak,
but it is an idealisation of that fine tree.  Its leaves are a
softer, brighter, deeper green, and in due season (August) it is covered
– not ostentatiously like the real mango, with great spikes of bloom,
looking each like a gigantic head of mignonette – but with small yellow-green
flowers tucked away under the leaves, filling the air with a soft sweet
perfume, and then falling on to the bare shaded ground beneath to make
a deep-piled carpet.  I do not know whether it is a mango tree
at all, for I am no botanist: but anyhow the fruit is rather like that
of the mango in external appearance, and in internal still more so,
for it has a disproportionately large stone.  These stones are
cracked, and the kernel taken out.  The kernels are spread a short
time in the shade to dry; then they are beaten up into a pulp with a
wooden pestle, and the pulp put into a basket lined carefully with plantain
leaves and placed in the sun, which melts it up into a stiff mass. 
The basket is then removed from the sun and stood aside to cool. 
When cool, the cheese can be turned out in shape, and can be kept a
long time if it is wrapped round with leaves and a cloth, and hung up
inside the house.  Its appearance is that of almond rock, and it
is cut easily with a knife; but at any period of its existence, if it
is left in the sun it melts again rapidly into an oily mass.

The natives use it as a seasoning in their cookery, stuffing fish
and plantains with it and so on, using it also in the preparation of
a sort of sea-pie they make with meat and fish.  To make this,
a thing well worth doing, particularly with hippo or other coarse meat,
reduce the wood fire to embers, and make plantain leaves into a sort
of bag, or cup; small pieces of the meat should then be packed in layers
with red pepper and odeaka in between.  The tops of the leaves
are then tied together with fine tie-tie, and the bundle, without any
saucepan of any kind, stood on the glowing embers, the cook taking care
there is no flame.  The meat is done, and a superb gravy formed,
before the containing plantain leaves are burnt through – plantain leaves
will stand an amazing lot in the way of fire.  This dish is really
excellent, even when made with python, hippo, or crocodile.  It
makes the former most palatable; but of course it does not remove the
musky taste from crocodile; nothing I know of will.

The great and important difference between the M’pongwe, {167}
Igalwa, and Ajumba fetish, and the Fetish of those tribes round them,
consists in their conception of a certain spirit called O Mbuiri. 
They have, as is constant among the Bantu races of South-West Africa,
a great god – the creator, a god who has made all things, and who now
no longer takes any interest in the things he has created.  Their
name for this god is Anyambie, which when pronounced sounds to my ears
like anlynlae – the l’s being very weak, – the derivation of this
name, however, is from Anyima a spirit, and Mbia, good.  This god,
unlike other forms of the creating god in Fetish, has a viceroy or minister
who is a god he has created, and to whom he leaves the government of
affairs.  This god is O Mbuiri or O Mbwiri, and this O Mbwiri is
of very high interest to the student of comparative fetish.  He
has never been, nor can he ever become, a man, i.e. be born as
a man, but he can transfuse with his own personality that of human beings,
and also the souls of all those things we white men regard as inanimate,
such as rocks, trees, etc., in a similar manner.

The M’pongwe know that his residence is in the sea, and some
of them have seen him as an old white man, not flesh-colour white, but
chalk white.  There is another important point here, but it wants
a volume to itself, so I must pass it.  O Mbuiri’s appearance
in a corporeal form denotes ill luck, not death to the seer, but misfortune
of a severe and diffused character.  The ruin of a trading enterprise,
the destruction of a village or a family, are put down to O Mbuiri’s
action.  Yet he is not regarded as a malevolent god, a devil, but
as an avenger, or punisher of sin; and the M’pongwe look on him
as the Being to whom they primarily owe the good things and fortunes
of this life, and as the Being who alone has power to govern the host
of truly malevolent spirits that exist in nature.

The different instruments with which he works in the shaping of human
destiny bear his name when in his employ.  When acting by means
of water, he is O Mbuiri Aningo; when in the weather, O Mbuiri Ngali;
when in the forests, O Mbuiri Ibaka; when in the form of a dwarf, O
Mbuiri Akoa, and so on.

The great difference between O Mbuiri and the lesser spirits is this:
– the lesser spirits cannot incarnate themselves except through extraneous
things; O Mbuiri can, he can become visible without anything beyond
his own will to do so.  The other spirits must be in something
to become visible.  This is an extremely delicate piece of Fetish
which it took me weeks to work out.  I think I may say another
thing about O Mbuiri, though I say it carefully, and that is, that among
the M’pongwe and the tribe who are the parent tribe of the M’pongwe
– the now rapidly dying out Ajumba, and their allied tribe the Igalwa
– O Mbuiri is a distinct entity, while among the neighbouring tribes
he is a class, i.e. there are hundreds of O Mbuiri or Ibwiri,
one for every remarkable place or thing, such as rock, tree, or forest
thicket, and for every dangerous place in a river.  Had I not observed
a similar state of affairs regarding Sasabonsum, a totally different
kind of spirit on the Windward coast, I should have had even greater
trouble than I had, in finding a key to what seemed at first a mass
of conflicting details regarding this important spirit O Mbuiri.

There is one other very important point in M’pongwe Fetish;
and that is that the souls of men exist before birth as well as after
death.  This is indeed, as far as I have been able to find out,
a doctrine universally held by the West African tribes, but among the
M’pongwe there is this modification in it, which agrees strangely
well with the idea I found regarding reincarnated diseases, existent
among the Okÿon tribes (pure negroes).  The malevolent minor
spirits are capable of being born with, what we will call, a man’s
soul, as well as going in with the man’s soul during sleep. 
For example, an Olâgâ may be born with a man and that man
will thereby be born mad; he may at any period of his life, given certain
conditions, become possessed by an evil spirit, Onlogho Abambo, Injembe,
Nkandada, and become mad, or ill; but if he is born mad, or sickly,
one of the evil spirits such as an Olâgâ or an Obambo, the
soul of a man that has not been buried properly, has been born with
him.

The rest of the M’pongwe Fetish is on broad lines common to
other tribes, so I relegate it to the general collection of notes on
Fetish.  M’pongwe jurisprudence is founded on the same ideas
as those on which West African jurisprudence at large is founded, but
it is so elaborated that it would be desecration to sketch it. 
It requires a massive monograph.

CHAPTER VII. ON THE WAY FROM KANGWE TO LAKE NCOVI.

In which the voyager goes for bush again and wanders into a new
lake and a new river.

July 22nd, 1895. – Left Kangwe.  The four Ajumba {170}
did not turn up early in the morning as had been arranged, but arrived
about eight, in pouring rain, so decided to wait until two o’clock,
which will give us time to reach their town of Arevooma before nightfall,
and may perhaps give us a chance of arriving there dry.  At two
we start.  We go down river on the Kangwe side of Lembarene Island,
make a pause in front of the Igalwa slave town, which is on the Island
and nearly opposite the Fan town of Fula on the mainland bank, our motive
being to get stores of yam and plantain – and magnificent specimens
of both we get – and then, when our canoe is laden with them to an extent
that would get us into trouble under the Act if it ran here, off we
go again.  Every canoe we meet shouts us a greeting, and asks where
we are going, and we say “Rembwé” – and they say
“What!  Rembwé!” – and we say “Yes, Rembwé,”
and paddle on.  I lay among the luggage for about an hour, not
taking much interest in the Rembwé or anything else, save my
own headache; but this soon lifted, and I was able to take notice, just
before we reached the Ajumba’s town, called Arevooma.  The
sandbanks stretch across the river here nearly awash, so all our cargo
of yams has to be thrown overboard on to the sand, from which they can
be collected by being waded out to.  The canoe, thus lightened,
is able to go on a little further, but we are soon hard and fast again,
and the crew have to jump out and shove her off about once every five
minutes, and then to look lively about jumping back into her again,
as she shoots over the cliffs of the sandbanks.

When we reach Arevooma, I find it is a very prettily situated town,
on the left-hand bank of the river – clean and well kept, and composed
of houses built on the Igalwa and M’pongwe plan with walls of
split bamboo and a palm thatch roof.  I own I did not much care
for these Ajumbas on starting, but they are evidently going to be kind
and pleasant companions.  One of them is a gentlemanly-looking
man, who wears a gray shirt; another looks like a genial Irishman who
has accidentally got black, very black; he is distinguished by wearing
a singlet; another is a thin, elderly man, notably silent; and the remaining
one is a strapping, big fellow, as black as a wolf’s mouth, of
gigantic muscular development, and wearing quantities of fetish charms
hung about him.  The two first mentioned are Christians; the other
two pagans, and I will refer to them by their characteristic points,
for their honourable names are awfully alike when you do hear them,
and, as is usual with Africans, rarely used in conversation.

Gray Shirt places his house at my disposal, and both he and his exceedingly
pretty wife do their utmost to make me comfortable.  The house
lies at the west end of the town.  It is one room inside, but has,
I believe, a separate cooking shed.  In the verandah in front is
placed a table, an ivory bundle chair and a gourd of water, and I am
also treated to a calico tablecloth, and most thoughtfully screened
off from the public gaze with more calico so that I can have my tea
in privacy.  After this meal, to my surprise Ndaka turns up. 
Certainly he is one of the very ugliest men – black or white – I have
ever seen, and I fancy one of the best.  He is now on a holiday
from Kangwe, seeing to the settlement of his dead brother’s affairs. 
The dead brother was a great man in Arevooma and a pagan, but Ndaka,
the Christian Bible-reader, seems to get on perfectly with the family
and is holding tonight a meeting outside his brother’s house and
comes with a lantern to fetch me to attend it.  Of course I have
to go, headache or no headache.

Most of the town was there, mainly as spectators.  Ndaka and
my two Christian boatmen manage the service between them, and what with
the hymns and the mosquitoes the experience is slightly awful. 
We sit in a line in front of the house, which is brilliantly lit up
– our own lantern on the ground before us acting as a rival entertainment
to the house lamps inside for some of the best insect society in Africa,
who after the manner of the insect world, insist on regarding us as
responsible for their own idiocy in getting singed; and sting us in
revenge, while we slap hard, as we howl hymns in the fearful Igalwa
and M’pongwe way.  Next to an English picnic, the most uncomfortable
thing I know is an open-air service in this part of Africa.  Service
being over, Ndaka takes me over the house to show its splendours. 
The great brilliancy of its illumination arises from its being lit by
two hanging lamps burning paraffin oil.  The most remarkable point
about the house is the floor, which is made of split, plaited bamboo. 
It gives under your feet in an alarming way, being raised some three
or four feet above the ground, and I am haunted by the fear that I shall
go through it and give pain to myself, and great trouble to others before
I could be got out.  It is a beautiful piece of workmanship, and
Arevooma has every reason to be proud of it.  Having admired these
things, I go, dead tired and still headachy, down the road with my host
who carries the lantern, through an atmosphere that has 45 per cent.
of solid matter in the shape of mosquitoes; then wishing him good-night,
I shut myself in, and illuminate, humbly, with a candle.  The furniture
of the house consists mainly of boxes, containing the wealth of Gray
Shirt, in clothes, mirrors, etc.  One corner of the room is taken
up by great calabashes full of some sort of liquor, and there is an
ivory bundle chair, a hanging mirror, several rusty guns, and a considerable
collection of china basins and jugs.  Evidently Gray Shirt is rich. 
The most interesting article to me, however, just now is the bed hung
over with a clean, substantial, chintz mosquito bar, and spread with
clean calico and adorned with patchwork-covered pillows.  So I
take off my boots and put on my slippers; for it never does in this
country to leave off boots altogether at anytime and risk getting bitten
by mosquitoes on the feet, when you are on the march; because the rub
of your boot on the bite always produces a sore, and a sore when it
comes in the Gorilla country, comes to stay.

No sooner have I carefully swished all the mosquitoes from under
the bar and turned in, than a cat scratches and mews at the door – turn
out and let her in.  She is evidently a pet, so I take her on to
the bed with me.  She is a very nice cat – sandy and fat – and
if I held the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl, I should have
no hesitation in saying she had in her the soul of Dame Juliana Berners,
such a whole-souled devotion to sport does she display, dashing out
through the flaps of the mosquito bar after rats which, amid squeals
from the rats and curses from her, she kills amongst the china collection. 
Then she comes to me, triumphant, expecting congratulations, and accompanied
by mosquitoes, and purrs and kneads upon my chest until she hears another
rat.

Tuesday, July 23rd. – Am aroused by violent knocking at the
door in the early gray dawn – so violent that two large centipedes and
a scorpion drop on to the bed.  They have evidently been tucked
away among the folds of the bar all night.  Well “when ignorance
is bliss ’tis folly to be wise,” particularly along here. 
I get up without delay, and find myself quite well.  The cat has
thrown a basin of water neatly over into my bag during her nocturnal
hunts; and when my tea comes I am informed a man “done die”
in the night, which explains the firing of guns I heard.  I inquire
what he has died of, and am told “He just truck luck, and then
he die.”  His widows are having their faces painted white
by sympathetic lady friends, and are attired in their oldest, dirtiest
clothes, and but very few of them; still, they seem to be taking things
in a resigned spirit.  These Ajumba seem pleasant folk.  They
play with their pretty brown children in a taking way.  Last night
I noticed some men and women playing a game new to me, which consisted
in throwing a hoop at each other.  The point was to get the hoop
to fall over your adversary’s head.  It is a cheerful game. 
Quantities of the common house-fly about – and, during the early part
of the morning, it rains in a gentle kind of way; but soon after we
are afloat in our canoe it turns into a soft white mist.

We paddle still westwards down the broad quiet waters of the O’Rembo
Vongo.  I notice great quantities of birds about here – great hornbills,
vividly coloured kingfishers, and for the first time the great vulture
I have often heard of, and the skin of which I will take home before
I mention even its approximate spread of wing.  There are also
noble white cranes, and flocks of small black and white birds, new to
me, with heavy razor-shaped bills, reminding one of the Devonian puffin. 
The hornbill is perhaps the most striking in appearance.  It is
the size of a small, or say a good-sized hen turkey.  Gray Shirt
says the flocks, which are of eight or ten, always have the same quantity
of cocks and hens, and that they live together “white man fashion,”
i.e. each couple keeping together.  They certainly do a
great deal of courting, the cock filling out his wattles on his neck
like a turkey, and spreading out his tail with great pomp and ceremony,
but very awkwardly.  To see hornbills on a bare sandbank is a solemn
sight, but when they are dodging about in the hippo grass they sink
ceremony, and roll and waddle, looking – my man said – for snakes and
the little sand-fish, which are close in under the bank; and their killing
way of dropping their jaws – I should say opening their bills – when
they are alarmed is comic.  I think this has something to do with
their hearing, for I often saw two or three of them in a line on a long
branch, standing, stretched up to their full height, their great eyes
opened wide, and all with their great beaks open, evidently listening
for something.  Their cry is most peculiar and can only be mistaken
for a native horn; and although there seems little variety in it to
my ear, there must be more to theirs, for they will carry on long confabulations
with each other across a river, and, I believe, sit up half the night
and talk scandal.

There were plenty of plantain-eaters here, but, although their screech
was as appalling as I have heard in Angola, they were not regarded,
by the Ajumba at any rate, as being birds of evil omen, as they are
in Angola.  Still, by no means all the birds here only screech
and squark.  Several of them have very lovely notes.  There
is one who always gives a series of infinitely beautiful, soft, rich-toned
whistles just before the first light of the dawn shows in the sky, and
one at least who has a prolonged and very lovely song.  This bird,
I was told in Gaboon, is called Telephonus erythropterus. 
I expect an ornithologist would enjoy himself here, but I cannot – and
will not – collect birds.  I hate to have them killed any how,
and particularly in the barbarous way in which these natives kill them.

The broad stretch of water looks like a long lake.  In all directions
sandbanks are showing their broad yellow backs, and there will be more
showing soon, for it is not yet the height of the dry.  We are
perpetually grounding on those which by next month will be above water. 
These canoes are built, I believe, more with a view to taking sandbanks
comfortably than anything else; but they are by no means yet sufficiently
specialised for getting off them.  Their flat bottoms enable them
to glide on to the banks, and sit there, without either upsetting or
cutting into the sand, as a canoe with a keel would; but the trouble
comes in when you are getting off the steep edge of the bank, and the
usual form it takes is upsetting.  So far my Ajumba friends have
only tried to meet this difficulty by tying the cargo in.

I try to get up the geography of this region conscientiously. 
Fortunately I find Gray Shirt, Singlet, and Pagan can speak trade English. 
None of them, however, seem to recognise a single blessed name on the
chart, which is saying nothing against the chart and its makers, who
probably got their names up from M’pongwes and Igalwas instead
of Ajumba, as I am trying to.  Geographical research in this region
is fraught with difficulty, I find, owing to different tribes calling
one and the same place by different names; and I am sure the Royal Geographical
Society ought to insert among their “Hints” that every traveller
in this region should carefully learn every separate native word, or
set of words, signifying “I don’t know,” – four villages
and two rivers I have come across out here solemnly set down with various
forms of this statement, for their native name.  Really I think
the old Portuguese way of naming places after Saints, etc., was wiser
in the long run, and it was certainly pleasanter to the ear.  My
Ajumba, however, know about my Ngambi and the Vinue all right and Elivã
z’Ayzingo, so I must try and get cross bearings from these.

We have an addition to our crew this morning – a man who wants to
go and get work at John Holt’s sub-factory away on the Rembwé. 
He has been waiting a long while at Arevooma, unable to get across,
I am told, because the road is now stopped between Ayzingo and the Rembwé
by “those fearful Fans.”  “How are we going to
get through that way?” says I, with natural feminine alarm. 
“We are not, sir,” says Gray Shirt.  This is what Lady
MacDonald would term a chatty little incident; and my hair begins to
rise as I remember what I have been told about those Fans and the indications
I have already seen of its being true when on the Upper Ogowé. 
Now here we are going to try to get through the heart of their country,
far from a French station, and without the French flag.  Why did
I not obey Mr. Hudson’s orders not to go wandering about in a
reckless way!  Anyhow I am in for it, and Fortune favours the brave. 
The only question is: Do I individually come under this class? 
I go into details.  It seems Pagan thinks he can depend on the
friendship of two Fans he once met and did business with, and who now
live on an island in Lake Ncovi – Ncovi is not down on my map and I
have never heard of it before – anyhow thither we are bound now.

Each man has brought with him his best gun, loaded to the muzzle,
and tied on to the baggage against which I am leaning – the muzzles
sticking out each side of my head: the flint locks covered with cases,
or sheaths, made of the black-haired skins of gorillas, leopard skin,
and a beautiful bright bay skin, which I do not know, which they say
is bush cow – but they call half a dozen things bush cow.  These
guns are not the “gas-pipes” I have seen up north; but decent
rifles which have had the rifling filed out and the locks replaced by
flint locks and converted into muzzle loaders, and many of them have
beautiful barrels.  I find the Ajumba name for the beautiful shrub
that has long bunches of red, yellow and cream-coloured young leaves
at the end of its branches is “obaa.”  I also learn
that in their language ebony and a monkey have one name.  The forest
on either bank is very lovely.  Some enormously high columns of
green are formed by a sort of climbing plant having taken possession
of lightning-struck trees, and in one place it really looks exactly
as if some one had spread a great green coverlet over the forest, so
as to keep it dry.  No high land showing in any direction. 
Pagan tells me the extinguisher-shaped juju filled with medicine and
made of iron is against drowning – the red juju is “for keep foot
in path.”  Beautiful effect of a gleam of sunshine lighting
up a red sandbank till it glows like the Nibelungen gold.  Indeed
the effects are Turneresque to-day owing to the mist, and the sun playing
in and out among it.

The sandbanks now have their cliffs to the N.N.W. and N.W. 
At 9.30, the broad river in front of us is apparently closed by sandbanks
which run out from the banks thus: –

Current running strong along south bank.  This bank bears testimony
of this also being the case in the wet season, for a fringe of torn-down
trees hangs from it into the river.  Pass Seke, a town on north
bank, interchanging the usual observations regarding our destination. 
The river seems absolutely barred with sand again; but as we paddle
down it, the obstructions resolve themselves into spits of sand from
the north bank and the largest island in mid-stream, which also has
a long tail, or train, of sandbank down river.  Here we meet a
picturesque series of canoes, fruit and trade laden, being poled up
stream, one man with his pole over one side, the other with his pole
over the other, making a St. Andrew’s cross as you meet them end
on.

Most luxurious, charming, and pleasant trip this.  The men are
standing up swinging in rhythmic motion their long, rich red wood paddles
in perfect time to their elaborate melancholy, minor key boat song. 
Nearly lost with all hands.  Sandbank palaver – only when we were
going over the end of it, the canoe slips sideways over its edge. 
River deep, bottom sand and mud.  This information may be interesting
to the geologist, but I hope I shall not be converted by circumstances
into a human sounding apparatus again to-day.  Next time she strikes
I shall get out and shove behind.

We are now skirting the real north bank, and not the bank of an island
or islands as we have been for some time heretofore.  Lovely stream
falls into this river over cascades.  The water is now rough in
a small way and the width of the river great, but it soon is crowded
again with wooded islands.  There are patches and wreaths of a
lovely, vermilion-flowering bush rope decorating the forest, and now
and again clumps of a plant that shows a yellow and crimson spike of
bloom, very strikingly beautiful.  We pass a long tunnel in the
bush, quite dark as you look down it – evidently the path to some native
town.  The south bank is covered, where the falling waters have
exposed it, with hippo grass.  Terrible lot of mangrove flies about,
although we are more than one hundred miles above the mangrove belt. 
River broad again – tending W.S.W., with a broad flattened island with
attributive sandbanks in the middle.  The fair way is along the
south bank of the river.  Gray Shirt tells me this river is called
the O’Rembo Vongo, or small River, so as to distinguish it from
the main stream of the Ogowé which goes down past the south side
of Lembarene Island, as well I know after that canoe affair of mine. 
Ayzingo now bears due north – and native mahogany is called “Okooma.” 
Pass village called Welli on north bank.  It looks like some gipsy
caravans stuck on poles.  I expect that village has known what
it means to be swamped by the rising river; it looks as if it had, very
hastily in the middle of some night, taken to stilts, which I am sure,
from their present rickety condition, will not last through the next
wet season, and then some unfortunate spirit will get the blame of the
collapse.  I also learn that it is the natal spot of my friend
Kabinda, the carpenter at Andande.  Now if some of these good people
I know would only go and distinguish themselves, I might write a sort
of county family history of these parts; but they don’t, and I
fancy won’t.  For example, the entrance – or should I say
the exit? – of a broadish little river is just away on the south bank. 
If you go up this river – it runs S.E. – you get to a good-sized lake;
in this lake there is an island called Adole; then out of the other
side of the lake there is another river which falls into the Ogowé
main stream – but that is not the point of the story, which is that
on that island of Adole, Ngouta, the interpreter, first saw the light. 
Why he ever did – there or anywhere – Heaven only knows!  I know
I shall never want to write his biography.

On the western bank end of that river going to Adole, there is an
Igalwa town, notable for a large quantity of fine white ducks and a
clump of Indian bamboo.  My informants say, “No white man
ever live for this place,” so I suppose the ducks and bamboo have
been imported by some black trader whose natal spot this is.  The
name of this village is Wanderegwoma.  Stuck on sandbank – I flew
out and shoved behind, leaving Ngouta to do the balancing performances
in the stern.  This O’Rembo Vongo divides up just below here,
I am told, when we have re-embarked, into three streams.  One goes
into the main Ogowé opposite Ayshouka in Nkami country – Nkami
country commences at Ayshouka and goes to the sea – one into the Ngumbi,
and one into the Nunghi – all in the Ouroungou country.  Ayzingo
now lies N.E. according to Gray Shirt’s arm.  On our river
there is here another broad low island with its gold-coloured banks
shining out, seemingly barring the entire channel, but there is really
a canoe channel along by both banks.

We turn at this point into a river on the north bank that runs north
and south – the current is running very swift to the north.  We
run down into it, and then, it being more than time enough for chop,
we push the canoe on to a sandbank in our new river, which I am told
is the Karkola.  I, after having had my tea, wander off, and find
behind our high sandbank, which like all the other sandbanks above water
now, is getting grown over with hippo grass – a fine light green grass,
the beloved food of both hippo and manatee – a forest, and entering
this I notice a succession of strange mounds or heaps, made up of branches,
twigs, and leaves, and dead flowers.  Many of these heaps are recent,
while others have fallen into decay.  Investigation shows they
are burial places.  Among the débris of an old one
there are human bones, and out from one of the new ones comes a stench
and a hurrying, exceedingly busy line of ants, demonstrating what is
going on.  I own I thought these mounds were some kind of bird’s
or animal’s nest.  They look entirely unhuman in this desolate
reach of forest.  Leaving these, I go down to the water edge of
the sand, and find in it a quantity of pools of varying breadth and
expanse, but each surrounded by a rim of dark red-brown deposit, which
you can lift off the sand in a skin.  On the top of the water is
a film of exquisite iridescent colours like those on a soap bubble,
only darker and brighter.  In the river alongside the sand, there
are thousands of those beautiful little fish with a black line each
side of their tails.  They are perfectly tame, and I feed them
with crumbs in my hand.  After making every effort to terrify the
unknown object containing the food – gallant bulls, quite two inches
long, sidling up and snapping at my fingers – they come and feed right
in the palm, so that I could have caught them by the handful had I wished. 
There are also a lot of those weird, semi-transparent, yellow, spotted
little sandfish with cup-shaped pectoral fins, which I see they use
to enable them to make their astoundingly long leaps.  These fish
are of a more nervous and distrustful disposition, and hover round my
hand but will not come into it.  Indeed I do not believe the other
cheeky little fellows would allow them to.

The men, having had their rest and their pipes, shout for me, and
off we go again.  The Karkola {181}
soon widens to about 100 feet; it is evidently very deep here; the right
bank (the east) is forested, the left, low and shrubbed, one patch looking
as if it were being cleared for a plantation, but no village showing. 
A big rock shows up on the right bank, which is a change from the clay
and sand, and soon the whole character of the landscape changes. 
We come to a sharp turn in the river, from north and south to east and
west – the current very swift.  The river channel dodges round
against a big bank of sword grass, and then widens out to the breadth
of the Thames at Putney.  I am told that a river runs out of it
here to the west to Ouroungou country, and so I imagine this Karkola
falls ultimately into the Nazareth.  We skirt the eastern banks,
which are covered with low grass with a scanty lot of trees along the
top.  High land shows in the distance to the S.S.W. and S.W., and
then we suddenly turn up into a broad river or straith, shaping our
course N.N.E.  On the opposite bank, on a high dwarf cliff, is
a Fan town.  “All Fan now,” says Singlet in anything
but a gratified tone of voice.

It is a strange, wild, lonely bit of the world we are now in, apparently
a lake or broad – full of sandbanks, some bare and some in the course
of developing into permanent islands by the growth on them of that floating
coarse grass, any joint of which being torn off either by the current,
a passing canoe, or hippos, floats down and grows wherever it settles. 
Like most things that float in these parts, it usually settles on a
sandbank, and then grows in much the same way as our couch grass grows
on land in England, so as to form a network, which catches for its adopted
sandbank all sorts of floating débris; so the sandbank
comes up in the world.  The waters of the wet season when they
rise drown off the grass; but when they fall, up it comes again from
the root, and so gradually the sandbank becomes an island and persuades
real trees and shrubs to come and grow on it, and its future is then
secured.

We skirt alongside a great young island of this class; the sword
grass some ten or fifteen feet high.  It has not got any trees
on it yet, but by next season or so it doubtless will have.  The
grass is stabbled down into paths by hippos, and just as I have realised
who are the road-makers, they appear in person.  One immense fellow,
hearing us, stands up and shows himself about six feet from us in the
grass, gazes calmly, and then yawns a yawn a yard wide and grunts his
news to his companions, some of whom – there is evidently a large herd
– get up and stroll towards us with all the flowing grace of Pantechnicon
vans in motion.  We put our helm paddles hard a starboard and leave
that bank.

Our hasty trip across to the bank of the island on the other side
being accomplished, we, in search of seclusion and in the hope that
out of sight would mean out of mind to hippos, shot down a narrow channel
between semi-island sandbanks, and those sandbanks, if you please, are
covered with specimens – as fine a set of specimens as you could wish
for – of the West African crocodile.  These interesting animals
are also having their siestas, lying sprawling in all directions on
the sand, with their mouths wide open.  One immense old lady has
a family of lively young crocodiles running over her, evidently playing
like a lot of kittens.  The heavy musky smell they give off is
most repulsive, but we do not rise up and make a row about this, because
we feel hopelessly in the wrong in intruding into these family scenes
uninvited, and so apologetically pole ourselves along rapidly, not even
singing.  The pace the canoe goes down that channel would be a
wonder to Henley Regatta.  When out of ear-shot I ask Pagan whether
there are many gorillas, elephants, or bush cows round here.  “Plenty
too much,” says he; and it occurs to me that the corn-fields are
growing golden green away in England; and soon there rises up in my
mental vision a picture that fascinated my youth in the Fliegende
Blätter, representing “Friedrich Gerstaeker auf der Reise.” 
That gallant man is depicted tramping on a serpent, new to M. Boulenger,
while he attempts to club, with the butt end of his gun, a most lively
savage who, accompanied by a bison, is attacking him in front. 
A terrific and obviously enthusiastic crocodile is grabbing the tail
of the explorer’s coat, and the explorer says “Hurrah! das
gibt wieder einen prächtigen Artikel für Die Allgemeine
Zeitung.”  I do not know where in the world Gerstaeker
was at the time, but I should fancy hereabouts.  My vigorous and
lively conscience also reminds me that the last words a most distinguished
and valued scientific friend had said to me before I left home was,
“Always take measurements, Miss Kingsley, and always take them
from the adult male.”  I know I have neglected opportunities
of carrying this commission out on both those banks, but I do not feel
like going back.  Besides, the men would not like it, and I have
mislaid my yard measure.

The extent of water, dotted with sandbanks and islands in all directions,
here is great, and seems to be fringed uniformly by low swampy land,
beyond which, to the north, rounded lumps of hills show blue. 
On one of the islands is a little white house which I am told was once
occupied by a black trader for John Holt.  It looks a desolate
place for any man to live in, and the way the crocodiles and hippo must
have come up on the garden ground in the evening time could not have
enhanced its charms to the average cautious man.  My men say, “No
man live for that place now.”  The factory, I believe, has
been, for some trade reason, abandoned.  Behind it is a great clump
of dark-coloured trees.  The rest of the island is now covered
with hippo grass looking like a beautifully kept lawn.  We lie
up for a short rest at another island, also a weird spot in its way,
for it is covered with a grove of only one kind of tree, which has a
twisted, contorted, gray-white trunk and dull, lifeless-looking, green,
hard foliage.

I learn that these good people, to make topographical confusion worse
confounded, call a river by one name when you are going up it, and by
another when you are coming down; just as if you called the Thames the
London when you were going up, and the Greenwich when you were coming
down.  The banks all round this lake or broad, seem all light-coloured
sand and clay.  We pass out of it into a channel.  Current
flowing north.  As we are entering the channel between banks of
grass-overgrown sand, a superb white crane is seen standing on the sand
edge to the left.  Gray Shirt attempts to get a shot at it, but
it – alarmed at our unusual appearance – raises itself up with one of
those graceful preliminary curtseys, and after one or two preliminary
flaps spreads its broad wings and sweeps away, with its long legs trailing
behind it like a thing on a Japanese screen.

The river into which we ran zigzags about, and then takes a course
S.S.E.  It is studded with islands slightly higher than those we
have passed, and thinly clad with forest.  The place seems alive
with birds; flocks of pelican and crane rise up before us out of the
grass, and every now and then a crocodile slides off the bank into the
water.  Wonderfully like old logs they look, particularly when
you see one letting himself roll and float down on the current. 
In spite of these interests I began to wonder where in this lonely land
we were to sleep to-night.  In front of us were miles of distant
mountains, but in no direction the slightest sign of human habitation. 
Soon we passed out of our channel into a lovely, strangely melancholy,
lonely-looking lake – Lake Ncovi, my friends tell me.  It is exceedingly
beautiful.  The rich golden sunlight of the late afternoon soon
followed by the short-lived, glorious flushes of colour of the sunset
and the after-glow, play over the scene as we paddle across the lake
to the N.N.E. – our canoe leaving a long trail of frosted silver behind
her as she glides over the mirror-like water, and each stroke of the
paddle sending down air with it to come up again in luminous silver
bubbles – not as before in swirls of sand and mud.  The lake shore
is, in all directions, wreathed with nobly forested hills, indigo and
purple in the dying daylight.  On the N.N.E. and N.E. these come
directly down into the lake; on N.W., N., S.W., and S.E. there is a
band of well-forested ground, behind which they rise.  In the north
and north-eastern part of the lake several exceedingly beautiful wooded
islands show, with gray rocky beaches and dwarf cliffs.

Sign of human habitation at first there was none; and in spite of
its beauty, there was something which I was almost going to say was
repulsive.  The men evidently felt the same as I did.  Had
any one told me that the air that lay on the lake was poison, or that
in among its forests lay some path to regions of utter death, I should
have said – “It looks like that”; but no one said anything,
and we only looked round uneasily, until the comfortable-souled Singlet
made the unfortunate observation that he “smelt blood.”
{185}  We
all called him an utter fool to relieve our minds, and made our way
towards the second island.  When we got near enough to it to see
details, a large village showed among the trees on its summit, and a
steep dwarf cliff, overgrown with trees and creeping plants came down
to a small beach covered with large water-washed gray stones. 
There was evidently some kind of a row going on in that village, that
took a lot of shouting too.  We made straight for the beach, and
drove our canoe among its outlying rocks, and then each of my men stowed
his paddle quickly, slung on his ammunition bag, and picked up his ready
loaded gun, sliding the skin sheath off the lock.  Pagan got out
on to the stones alongside the canoe just as the inhabitants became
aware of our arrival, and, abandoning what I hope was a mass meeting
to remonstrate with the local authorities on the insanitary state of
the town, came – a brown mass of naked humanity – down the steep cliff
path to attend to us, whom they evidently regarded as an Imperial interest. 
Things did not look restful, nor these Fans personally pleasant. 
Every man among them – no women showed – was armed with a gun, and they
loosened their shovel-shaped knives in their sheaths as they came, evidently
regarding a fight quite as imminent as we did.  They drew up about
twenty paces from us in silence.  Pagan and Gray Shirt, who had
joined him, held out their unembarrassed hands, and shouted out the
name of the Fan man they had said they were friendly with: “Kiva-Kiva.” 
The Fans stood still and talked angrily among themselves for some minutes,
and then, Silence said to me, “It would be bad palaver if Kiva
no live for this place,” in a tone that conveyed to me the idea
he thought this unpleasant contingency almost a certainty.  The
Passenger exhibited unmistakable symptoms of wishing he had come by
another boat.  I got up from my seat in the bottom of the canoe
and leisurely strolled ashore, saying to the line of angry faces “M’boloani”
in an unconcerned way, although I well knew it was etiquette for them
to salute first.  They grunted, but did not commit themselves further. 
A minute after they parted to allow a fine-looking, middle-aged man,
naked save for a twist of dirty cloth round his loins and a bunch of
leopard and wild cat tails hung from his shoulder by a strip of leopard
skin, to come forward.  Pagan went for him with a rush, as if he
were going to clasp him to his ample bosom, but holding his hands just
off from touching the Fan’s shoulder in the usual way, while he
said in Fan, “Don’t you know me, my beloved Kiva? 
Surely you have not forgotten your old friend?”  Kiva grunted
feelingly, and raised up his hands and held them just off touching Pagan,
and we breathed again.  Then Gray Shirt made a rush at the crowd
and went through great demonstrations of affection with another gentleman
whom he recognised as being a Fan friend of his own, and whom he had
not expected to meet here.  I looked round to see if there was
not any Fan from the Upper Ogowé whom I knew to go for, but could
not see one that I could on the strength of a previous acquaintance,
and on their individual merits I did not feel inclined to do even this
fashionable imitation embrace.  Indeed I must say that never –
even in a picture book – have I seen such a set of wild wicked-looking
savages as those we faced this night, and with whom it was touch-and-go
for twenty of the longest minutes I have ever lived, whether we fought
– for our lives, I was going to say, but it would not have been even
for that, but merely for the price of them.

Peace having been proclaimed, conversation became general. 
Gray Shirt brought his friend up and introduced him to me, and we shook
hands and smiled at each other in the conventional way.  Pagan’s
friend, who was next introduced, was more alarming, for he held his
hands for half a minute just above my elbows without quite touching
me, but he meant well; and then we all disappeared into a brown mass
of humanity and a fog of noise.  You would have thought, from the
violence and vehemence of the shouting and gesticulation, that we were
going to be forthwith torn to shreds; but not a single hand really touched
me, and as I, Pagan, and Gray Shirt went up to the town in the midst
of the throng, the crowd opened in front and closed in behind, evidently
half frightened at my appearance.  The row when we reached the
town redoubled in volume from the fact that the ladies, the children,
and the dogs joined in.  Every child in the place as soon as it
saw my white face let a howl out of it as if it had seen his Satanic
Majesty, horns, hoofs, tail and all, and fled into the nearest hut,
headlong, and I fear, from the continuance of the screams, had fits. 
The town was exceedingly filthy – the remains of the crocodile they
had been eating the week before last, and piles of fish offal, and remains
of an elephant, hippo or manatee – I really can’t say which, decomposition
was too far advanced – united to form a most impressive stench. 
The bark huts are, as usual in a Fan town, in unbroken rows; but there
are three or four streets here, not one only, as in most cases. 
The palaver house is in the innermost street, and there we went, and
noticed that the village view was not in the direction in which we had
come, but across towards the other side of the lake.  I told the
Ajumba to explain we wanted hospitality for the night, and wished to
hire three carriers for to-morrow to go with us to the Rembwé.

For an hour and three-quarters by my watch I stood in the suffocating,
smoky, hot atmosphere listening to, but only faintly understanding,
the war of words and gesture that raged round us.  At last the
fact that we were to be received being settled, Gray Shirt’s friend
led us out of the guard house – the crowd flinching back as I came through
it – to his own house on the right-hand side of the street of huts. 
It was a very different dwelling to Gray Shirt’s residence at
Arevooma.  I was as high as its roof ridge and had to stoop low
to get through the door-hole.  Inside, the hut was fourteen or
fifteen feet square, unlit by any window.  The door-hole could
be closed by pushing a broad piece of bark across it under two horizontally
fixed bits of stick.  The floor was sand like the street outside,
but dirtier.  On it in one place was a fire, whose smoke found
its way out through the roof.  In one corner of the room was a
rough bench of wood, which from the few filthy cloths on it and a wood
pillow I saw was the bed.  There was no other furniture in the
hut save some boxes, which I presume held my host’s earthly possessions. 
From the bamboo roof hung a long stick with hooks on it, the hooks made
by cutting off branching twigs.  This was evidently the hanging
wardrobe, and on it hung some few fetish charms, and a beautiful ornament
of wild cat and leopard tails, tied on to a square piece of leopard
skin, in the centre of which was a little mirror, and round the mirror
were sewn dozens of common shirt buttons.  In among the tails hung
three little brass bells and a brass rattle; these bells and rattles
are not only “for dandy,” but serve to scare away snakes
when the ornament is worn in the forest.  A fine strip of silky-haired,
young gorilla skin made the band to sling the ornament from the shoulder
when worn.  Gorillas seem well enough known round here.  One
old lady in the crowd outside, I saw, had a necklace made of sixteen
gorilla canine teeth slung on a pine-apple fibre string.  Gray
Shirt explained to me that this is the best house in the village, and
my host the most renowned elephant hunter in the district.

We then returned to the canoe, whose occupants had been getting uneasy
about the way affairs were going “on top,” on account of
the uproar they heard and the time we had been away.  We got into
the canoe and took her round the little promontory at the end of the
island to the other beach, which is the main beach.  By arriving
at the beach when we did, we took our Fan friends in the rear, and they
did not see us coming in the gloaming.  This was all for the best,
it seems, as they said they should have fired on us before they had
had time to see we were rank outsiders, on the apprehension that we
were coming from one of the Fan towns we had passed, and with whom they
were on bad terms regarding a lady who bolted there from her lawful
lord, taking with her – cautious soul! – a quantity of rubber. 
The only white man who had been here before in the memory of man, was
a French officer who paid Kiva six dollars to take him somewhere, I
was told – but I could not find out when, or what happened to that Frenchman.
{189}  It
was a long time ago, Kiva said, but these folks have no definite way
of expressing duration of time nor, do I believe, any great mental idea
of it; although their ideas are, as usual with West Africans, far ahead
of their language.

All the goods were brought up to my hut, and while Ngouta gets my
tea we started talking the carrier palaver again.  The Fans received
my offer, starting at two dollars ahead of what M. Jacot said would
be enough, with utter scorn, and every dramatic gesture of dissent;
one man, pretending to catch Gray Shirt’s words in his hands,
flings them to the ground and stamps them under his feet.  I affected
an easy take-it-or-leave-it-manner, and looked on.  A woman came
out of the crowd to me, and held out a mass of slimy gray abomination
on a bit of plantain leaf – smashed snail.  I accepted it and gave
her fish hooks.  She was delighted and her companions excited,
so she put the hooks into her mouth for safe keeping.  I hurriedly
explained in my best Fan that I do not require any more snail; so another
lady tried the effect of a pine-apple.  There might be no end to
this, so I retired into trade and asked what she would sell it for. 
She did not want to sell it – she wanted to give it me; so I gave her
fish hooks.  Silence and Singlet interposed, saying the price for
pine-apples is one leaf of tobacco, but I explained I was not buying. 
Ngouta turned up with my tea, so I went inside, and had it on the bed. 
The door-hole was entirely filled with a mosaic of faces, but no one
attempted to come in.  All the time the carrier palaver went on
without cessation, and I went out and offered to take Gray Shirt’s
and Pagan’s place, knowing they must want their chop, but they
refused relief, and also said I must not raise the price; I was offering
too big a price now, and if I once rise the Fan will only think I will
keep on rising, and so make the palaver longer to talk.  “How
long does a palaver usually take to talk round here?” I ask. 
“The last one I talked,” says Pagan, “took three weeks,
and that was only a small price palaver.”  “Well,”
say I, “my price is for a start to-morrow – after then I have
no price – after that I go away.”  Another hour however sees
the jam made, and to my surprise I find the three richest men in this
town of M’fetta have personally taken up the contract – Kiva my
host, Fika a fine young fellow, and Wiki, another noted elephant hunter. 
These three Fans, the four Ajumba and the Igalwa, Ngouta, I think will
be enough.  Moreover I fancy it safer not to have an overpowering
percentage of Fans in the party, as I know we shall have considerable
stretches of uninhabited forest to traverse; and the Ajumba say that
the Fans will kill people, i.e. the black traders who venture
into their country, and cut them up into neat pieces, eat what they
want at the time, and smoke the rest of the bodies for future use. 
Now I do not want to arrive at the Rembwé in a smoked condition,
even should my fragments be neat, and I am going in a different direction
to what I said I was when leaving Kangwe, and there are so many ways
of accounting for death about here – leopard, canoe capsize, elephants,
etc. – that even if I were traced – well, nothing could be done then,
anyhow – so will only take three Fans.  One must diminish dead
certainties to the level of sporting chances along here, or one can
never get on.

No one, either Ajumba or Fan, knew the exact course we were to take. 
The Ajumba had never been this way before – the way for black traders
across being viâ Lake Ayzingo, the way Mr. Goode of the
American Mission once went, and the Fans said they only knew the way
to a big Fan town called Efoua, where no white man or black trader had
yet been.  There is a path from there to the Rembwé they
knew, because the Efoua people take their trade all to the Rembwé. 
They would, they said, come with me all the way if I would guarantee
them safety if they “found war” on the road.  This
I agreed to do, and arranged to pay off at Hatton and Cookson’s
subfactory on the Rembwé, and they have “Look my mouth
and it be sweet, so palaver done set.”  Every load then,
by the light of the bush lights held by the women, we arranged. 
I had to unpack my bottles of fishes so as to equalise the weight of
the loads.  Every load is then made into a sort of cocoon with
bush rope.

I was left in peace at about 11.30 P.M., and clearing off the clothes
from the bench threw myself down and tried to get some sleep, for we
were to start, the Fans said, before dawn.  Sleep impossible –
mosquitoes! lice!! – so at 12.40 I got up and slid aside my bark door. 
I found Pagan asleep under his mosquito bar outside, across the doorway,
but managed to get past him without rousing him from his dreams of palaver
which he was still talking aloud, and reconnoitred the town.  The
inhabitants seemed to have talked themselves quite out and were sleeping
heavily.  I went down then to our canoe and found it safe, high
up among the Fan canoes on the stones, and then I slid a small Fan canoe
off, and taking a paddle from a cluster stuck in the sand, paddled out
on to the dark lake.

It was a wonderfully lovely quiet night with no light save that from
the stars.  One immense planet shone pre-eminent in the purple
sky, throwing a golden path down on to the still waters.  Quantities
of big fish sprung out of the water, their glistening silver-white scales
flashing so that they look like slashing swords.  Some bird was
making a long, low boom-booming sound away on the forest shore. 
I paddled leisurely across the lake to the shore on the right, and seeing
crawling on the ground some large glow-worms, drove the canoe on to
the bank among some hippo grass, and got out to get them.

While engaged on this hunt I felt the earth quiver under my feet,
and heard a soft big soughing sound, and looking round saw I had dropped
in on a hippo banquet.  I made out five of the immense brutes round
me, so I softly returned to the canoe and shoved off, stealing along
the bank, paddling under water, until I deemed it safe to run out across
the lake for my island.  I reached the other end of it to that
on which the village is situated; and finding a miniature rocky bay
with a soft patch of sand and no hippo grass, the incidents of the Fan
hut suggested the advisability of a bath.  Moreover, there was
no china collection in that hut, and it would be a long time before
I got another chance, so I go ashore again, and, carefully investigating
the neighbourhood to make certain there was no human habitation near,
I then indulged in a wash in peace.  Drying one’s self on
one’s cummerbund is not pure joy, but it can be done when you
put your mind to it.  While I was finishing my toilet I saw a strange
thing happen.  Down through the forest on the lake bank opposite
came a violet ball the size of a small orange.  When it reached
the sand beach it hovered along it to and fro close to the ground. 
In a few minutes another ball of similarly coloured light came towards
it from behind one of the islets, and the two waver to and fro over
the beach, sometimes circling round each other.  I made off towards
them in the canoe, thinking – as I still do – they were some brand new
kind of luminous insect.  When I got on to their beach one of them
went off into the bushes and the other away over the water.  I
followed in the canoe, for the water here is very deep, and, when I
almost thought I had got it, it went down into the water and I could
see it glowing as it sunk until it vanished in the depths.  I made
my way back hastily, fearing my absence with the canoe might give rise,
if discovered, to trouble, and by 3.30 I was back in the hut safe, but
not so comfortable as I had been on the lake.  A little before
five my men are stirring and I get my tea.  I do not state my escapade
to them, but ask what those lights were.  “Akom,” said
the Fan, and pointing to the shore of the lake where I had been during
the night they said, “they came there, it was an ‘Aku’”
– or devil bush.  More than ever did I regret not having secured
one of those sort of two phenomena.  What a joy a real devil, appropriately
put up in raw alcohol, would have been to my scientific friends!

Wednesday, July 24th. – We get away about 5.30, the Fans coming
in a separate canoe.  We call at the next island to M’fetta
to buy some more aguma.  The inhabitants are very much interested
in my appearance, running along the stony beach as we paddle away, and
standing at the end of it until we are out of sight among the many islands
at the N.E. end of Lake Ncovi.  The scenery is savage; there are
no terrific cliffs nor towering mountains to make it what one usually
calls wild or romantic, but there is a distinction about it which is
all its own.  This N.E. end has beautiful sand beaches on the southern
side, in front of the forested bank, lying in smooth ribbons along the
level shore, and in scollops round the promontories where the hills
come down into the lake.  The forest on these hills, or mountains
– for they are part of the Sierra del Cristal – is very dark in colour,
and the undergrowth seems scant.  We presently come to a narrow
but deep channel into the lake coming from the eastward, which we go
up, winding our course with it into a valley between the hills. 
After going up it a little way we find it completely fenced across with
stout stakes, a space being left open in the middle, broader than the
spaces between the other stakes; and over this is poised a spear with
a bush rope attached, and weighted at the top of the haft with a great
lump of rock.  The whole affair is kept in position by a bush rope
so arranged just under the level of the water that anything passing
through the opening would bring the spear down.  This was a trap
for hippo or manatee (Ngany ’imanga), and similar in structure
to those one sees set in the hippo grass near villages and plantations,
which serve the double purpose of defending the vegetable supply, and
adding to the meat supply of the inhabitants.  We squeeze through
between the stakes so as not to let the trap off, and find our little
river leads us into another lake, much smaller than Ncovi.  It
is studded with islands of fantastic shapes, all wooded with high trees
of an equal level, and with little or no undergrowth among them, so
their pale gray stems look like clusters of columns supporting a dark
green ceiling.  The forest comes down steep hill sides to the water
edge in all directions; and a dark gloomy-looking herb grows up out
of black slime and water, in a bank or ribbon in front of it. 
There is another channel out of this lake, still to the N.E.  The
Fans say they think it goes into the big lake far far away, i.e.,
Lake Ayzingo.  From the look of the land, I think this river connecting
Ayzingo and Lake Ncovi wanders down this valley between the mountain
spurs of the Sierra del Cristal, expanding into one gloomy lake after
another.  We run our canoe into a bank of the dank dark-coloured
water herb to the right, and disembark into a fitting introduction to
the sort of country we shall have to deal with before we see the Rembwé
– namely, up to our knees in black slime.

CHAPTER VIII. FROM NCOVI TO ESOON.

Concerning the way in which the voyager goes from the island of
M’fetta to no one knows exactly where, in doubtful and bad company,
and of what this led to and giving also some accounts of the Great Forest
and of those people that live therein.

I will not bore you with my diary in detail regarding our land journey,
because the water-washed little volume attributive to this period is
mainly full of reports of law cases, for reasons hereinafter to be stated;
and at night, when passing through this bit of country, I was usually
too tired to do anything more than make an entry such as: “5 S.,
4 R. A., N.E Ebony. T. 1-50, etc., etc.” – entries that require
amplification to explain their significance, and I will proceed to explain.

Our first day’s march was a very long one.  Path in the
ordinary acceptance of the term there was none.  Hour after hour,
mile after mile, we passed on, in the under-gloom of the great forest. 
The pace made by the Fans, who are infinitely the most rapid Africans
I have ever come across, severely tired the Ajumba, who are canoe men,
and who had been as fresh as paint, after their exceedingly long day’s
paddling from Arevooma to M’fetta.  Ngouta, the Igalwa interpreter,
felt pumped, and said as much, very early in the day.  I regretted
very much having brought him; for, from a mixture of nervous exhaustion
arising from our M’fetta experiences, and a touch of chill he
had almost entirely lost his voice, and I feared would fall sick. 
The Fans were evidently quite at home in the forest, and strode on over
fallen trees and rocks with an easy, graceful stride.  What saved
us weaklings was the Fans’ appetites; every two hours they sat
down, and had a snack of a pound or so of meat and aguma apiece, followed
by a pipe of tobacco.  We used to come up with them at these halts. 
Ngouta and the Ajumba used to sit down, and rest with them, and I also,
for a few minutes, for a rest and chat, and then I would go on alone,
thus getting a good start.  I got a good start, in the other meaning
of the word, on the afternoon of the first day when descending into
a ravine.

I saw in the bottom, wading and rolling in the mud, a herd of five
elephants.  I remembered, hastily, that your one chance when charged
by several elephants is to dodge them round trees, working down wind
all the time, until they lose smell and sight of you, then to lie quiet
for a time, and go home.  It was evident from the utter unconcern
of these monsters that I was down wind now, so I had only to attend
to dodging, and I promptly dodged round a tree, and lay down. 
Seeing they still displayed no emotion on my account, and fascinated
by the novelty of the scene, I crept forward from one tree to another,
until I was close enough to have hit the nearest one with a stone, and
spats of mud, which they sent flying with their stamping and wallowing
came flap, flap among the bushes covering me.

One big fellow had a nice pair of 40 lb. or so tusks on him, singularly
straight, and another had one big curved tusk and one broken one. 
Some of them lay right down like pigs in the deeper part of the swamp,
some drew up trunkfuls of water and syringed themselves and each other,
and every one of them indulged in a good rub against a tree.  Presently
when they had had enough of it they all strolled off up wind, through
the bush in Indian file, now and then breaking off a branch, but leaving
singularly little dead water for their tonnage and breadth of beam. 
When they had gone I rose up, turned round to find the men, and trod
on Kiva’s back then and there, full and fair, and fell sideways
down the steep hillside until I fetched up among some roots.

It seems Kiva had come on, after his meal, before the others, and
seeing the elephants, and being a born hunter, had crawled like me down
to look at them.  He had not expected to find me there, he said. 
I do not believe he gave a thought of any sort to me in the presence
of these fascinating creatures, and so he got himself trodden on. 
I suggested to him we should pile the baggage, and go and have an elephant
hunt.  He shook his head reluctantly, saying “Kor, kor,”
like a depressed rook, and explained we were not strong enough; there
were only three Fans – the Ajumba, and Ngouta did not count – and moreover
that we had not brought sufficient ammunition owing to the baggage having
to be carried, and the ammunition that we had must be saved for other
game than elephant, for we might meet war before we met the Rembwé
River.

We had by now joined the rest of the party, and were all soon squattering
about on our own account in the elephant bath.  It was shocking
bad going – like a ploughed field exaggerated by a terrific nightmare. 
It pretty nearly pulled all the legs off me, and to this hour I cannot
tell you if it is best to put your foot into a footmark – a young pond,
I mean – about the size of the bottom of a Madeira work arm-chair, or
whether you should poise yourself on the rim of the same, and stride
forward to its other bank boldly and hopefully.  The footmarks
and the places where the elephants had been rolling were by now filled
with water, and the mud underneath was in places hard and slippery. 
In spite of my determination to preserve an awesome and unmoved calm
while among these dangerous savages, I had to give way and laugh explosively;
to see the portly, powerful Pagan suddenly convert himself into a quadruped,
while Gray Shirt poised himself on one heel and waved his other leg
in the air to advertise to the assembled nations that he was about to
sit down, was irresistible.  No one made such palaver about taking
a seat as Gray Shirt; I did it repeatedly without any fuss to speak
of.  That lordly elephant-hunter, the Great Wiki, would, I fancy,
have strode over safely and with dignity, but the man who was in front
of him spun round on his own axis and flung his arms round the Fan,
and they went to earth together; the heavy load on Wiki’s back
drove them into the mud like a pile-driver.  However we got through
in time, and after I had got up the other side of the ravine I saw the
Fan let the Ajumba go on, and were busy searching themselves for something.

I followed the Ajumba, and before I joined them felt a fearful pricking
irritation.  Investigation of the affected part showed a tick of
terrific size with its head embedded in the flesh; pursuing this interesting
subject, I found three more, and had awfully hard work to get them off
and painful too for they give one not only a feeling of irritation at
their holding-on place, but a streak of rheumatic-feeling pain up from
it.  On completing operations I went on and came upon the Ajumba
in a state more approved of by Praxiteles than by the general public
nowadays.  They had found out about elephant ticks, so I went on
and got an excellent start for the next stage.

By this time, shortly after noon on the first day, we had struck
into a mountainous and rocky country, and also struck a track – a track
you had to keep your eye on or you lost it in a minute, but still a
guide as to direction.

The forest trees here were mainly ebony and great hard wood trees,
{200} with no palms
save my old enemy the climbing palm, calamus, as usual, going
on its long excursions, up one tree and down another, bursting into
a plume of fronds, and in the middle of each plume one long spike sticking
straight up, which was an unopened frond, whenever it got a gleam of
sunshine; running along the ground over anything it meets, rock or fallen
timber, all alike, its long, dark-coloured, rope-like stem simply furred
with thorns.  Immense must be the length of some of these climbing
palms.  One tree I noticed that day that had hanging from its summit,
a good one hundred and fifty feet above us, a long straight ropelike
palm stem.

The character of the whole forest was very interesting.  Sometimes
for hours we passed among thousands upon thousands of gray-white columns
of uniform height (about 100-150 feet); at the top of these the boughs
branched out and interlaced among each other, forming a canopy or ceiling,
which dimmed the light even of the equatorial sun to such an extent
that no undergrowth could thrive in the gloom.  The statement of
the struggle for existence was published here in plain figures, but
it was not, as in our climate, a struggle against climate mainly, but
an internecine war from over population.  Now and again we passed
among vast stems of buttressed trees, sometimes enormous in girth; and
from their far-away summits hung great bush-ropes, some as straight
as plumb lines, others coiled round, and intertwined among each other,
until one could fancy one was looking on some mighty battle between
armies of gigantic serpents, that had been arrested at its height by
some magic spell.  All these bush-ropes were as bare of foliage
as a ship’s wire rigging, but a good many had thorns.  I
was very curious as to how they got up straight, and investigation showed
me that many of them were carried up with a growing tree.  The
only true climbers were the calamus and the rubber vine (Landolphia),
both of which employ hook tackle.

Some stretches of this forest were made up of thin, spindly stemmed
trees of great height, and among these stretches I always noticed the
ruins of some forest giant, whose death by lightning or by his superior
height having given the demoniac tornado wind an extra grip on him,
had allowed sunlight to penetrate the lower regions of the forest; and
then evidently the seedlings and saplings, who had for years been living
a half-starved life for light, shot up.  They seemed to know that
their one chance lay in getting with the greatest rapidity to the level
of the top of the forest.  No time to grow fat in the stem. 
No time to send out side branches, or any of those vanities.  Up,
up to the light level, and he among them who reached it first won in
this game of life or death; for when he gets there he spreads out his
crown of upper branches, and shuts off the life-giving sunshine from
his competitors, who pale off and die, or remain dragging on an attenuated
existence waiting for another chance, and waiting sometimes for centuries. 
There must be tens of thousands of seeds which perish before they get
their chance; but the way the seeds of the hard wood African trees are
packed, as it were in cases specially made durable, is very wonderful. 
Indeed the ways of Providence here are wonderful in their strange dual
intention to preserve and to destroy; but on the whole, as Peer Gynt
truly observes, “Ein guter Wirth – nein das ist er nicht.”

We saw this influence of light on a large scale as soon as we reached
the open hills and mountains of the Sierra del Cristal, and had to pass
over those fearful avalanche-like timber falls on their steep sides. 
The worst of these lay between Efoua and Egaja, where we struck a part
of the range that was exposed to the south-east.  These falls had
evidently arisen from the tornados, which from time to time have hurled
down the gigantic trees whose hold on the superficial soil over the
sheets of hard bed rock was insufficient, in spite of all the anchors
they had out in the shape of roots and buttresses, and all their rigging
in the shape of bush ropes.  Down they had come, crushing and dragging
down with them those near them or bound to them by the great tough climbers.

Getting over these falls was perilous, not to say scratchy work. 
One or another member of our party always went through; and precious
uncomfortable going it was, I found, when I tried it in one above Egaja;
ten or twelve feet of crashing creaking timber, and then flump on to
a lot of rotten, wet débris, with more snakes and centipedes
among it than you had any immediate use for, even though you were a
collector; but there you had to stay, while Wiki, who was a most critical
connoisseur, selected from the surrounding forest a bush-rope that he
regarded as the correct remedy for the case, and then up you were hauled,
through the sticks you had turned the wrong way on your down journey.

The Duke had a bad fall, going twenty feet or so before he found
the rubbish heap; while Fika, who went through with a heavy load on
his back, took us, on one occasion, half an hour to recover; and when
we had just got him to the top, and able to cling on to the upper sticks,
Wiki, who had been superintending operations, slipped backwards, and
went through on his own account.  The bush-rope we had been hauling
on was too worn with the load to use again, and we just hauled Wiki
out with the first one we could drag down and cut; and Wiki, when he
came up, said we were reckless, and knew nothing of bush ropes, which
shows how ungrateful an African can be.  It makes the perspiration
run down my nose whenever I think of it.  The sun was out that
day; we were neatly situated on the Equator, and the air was semisolid,
with the stinking exhalations from the swamps with which the mountain
chain is fringed and intersected; and we were hot enough without these
things, because of the violent exertion of getting these twelve to thirteen-stone
gentlemen up among us again, and the fine varied exercise of getting
over the fall on our own account.

When we got into the cool forest beyond it was delightful; particularly
if it happened to be one of those lovely stretches of forest, gloomy
down below, but giving hints that far away above us was a world of bloom
and scent and beauty which we saw as much of as earth-worms in a flower-bed. 
Here and there the ground was strewn with great cast blossoms, thick,
wax-like, glorious cups of orange and crimson and pure white, each one
of which was in itself a handful, and which told us that some of the
trees around us were showing a glory of colour to heaven alone. 
Sprinkled among them were bunches of pure stephanotis-like flowers,
which said that the gaunt bush-ropes were rubber vines that had burst
into flower when they had seen the sun.  These flowers we came
across in nearly every type of forest all the way, for rubber abounds
here.

I will weary you no longer now with the different kinds of forest
and only tell you I have let you off several.  The natives have
separate names for seven different kinds, and these might, I think,
be easily run up to nine.

A certain sort of friendship soon arose between the Fans and me. 
We each recognised that we belonged to that same section of the human
race with whom it is better to drink than to fight.  We knew we
would each have killed the other, if sufficient inducement were offered,
and so we took a certain amount of care that the inducement should not
arise.  Gray Shirt and Pagan also, their trade friends, the Fans
treated with an independent sort of courtesy; but Silence, Singlet,
the Passenger, and above all Ngouta, they openly did not care a row
of pins for, and I have small doubt that had it not been for us other
three they would have killed and eaten these very amiable gentlemen
with as much compunction as an English sportsman would kill as many
rabbits.  They on their part hated the Fan, and never lost an opportunity
of telling me “these Fan be bad man too much.”  I must
not forget to mention the other member of our party, a Fan gentleman
with the manners of a duke and the habits of a dustbin.  He came
with us, quite uninvited by me, and never asked for any pay; I think
he only wanted to see the fun, and drop in for a fight if there was
one going on, and to pick up the pieces generally.  He was evidently
a man of some importance from the way the others treated him; and moreover
he had a splendid gun, with a gorilla skin sheath for its lock, and
ornamented all over its stock with brass nails.  His costume consisted
of a small piece of dirty rag round his loins; and whenever we were
going through dense undergrowth, or wading a swamp, he wore that filament
tucked up scandalously short.  Whenever we were sitting down in
the forest having one of our nondescript meals, he always sat next to
me and appropriated the tin.  Then he would fill his pipe, and
turning to me with the easy grace of aristocracy, would say what may
be translated as “My dear Princess, could you favour me with a
lucifer?”

I used to say, “My dear Duke, charmed, I’m sure,”
and give him one ready lit.

I dared not trust him with the box whole, having a personal conviction
that he would have kept it.  I asked him what he would do suppose
I was not there with a box of lucifers; and he produced a bush-cow’s
horn with a neat wood lid tied on with tie tie, and from out of it he
produced a flint and steel and demonstrated.

The first day in the forest we came across a snake {205}
– a beauty with a new red-brown and yellow-patterned velvety skin, about
three feet six inches long and as thick as a man’s thigh. 
Ngouta met it, hanging from a bough, and shot backwards like a lobster,
Ngouta having among his many weaknesses a rooted horror of snakes. 
This snake the Ogowé natives all hold in great aversion. 
For the bite of other sorts of snakes they profess to have remedies,
but for this they have none.  If, however, a native is stung by
one he usually conceals the fact that it was this particular kind, and
tries to get any chance the native doctor’s medicine may give. 
The Duke stepped forward and with one blow flattened its head against
the tree with his gun butt, and then folded the snake up and got as
much of it as possible into his bag, while the rest hung dangling out. 
Ngouta, not being able to keep ahead of the Duke, his Grace’s
pace being stiff, went to the extreme rear of the party, so that other
people might be killed first if the snake returned to life, as he surmised
it would.  He fell into other dangers from this caution, but I
cannot chronicle Ngouta’s afflictions in full without running
this book into an old fashioned folio size.  We had the snake for
supper, that is to say the Fan and I; the others would not touch it,
although a good snake, properly cooked, is one of the best meats one
gets out here, far and away better than the African fowl.

The Fans also did their best to educate me in every way: they told
me their names for things, while I told them mine.  I found several
European words already slightly altered in use among them, such as “Amuck”
– a mug, “Alas” – a glass, a tumbler.  I do not know
whether their “Ami” – a person addressed, or spoken of –
is French or not.  It may come from “Anwe” – M’pongwe
for “Ye,” “You.”  They use it as a rule
in addressing a person after the phrase they always open up conversation
with, “Azuna” – Listen, or I am speaking.

They also showed me many things: how to light a fire from the pith
of a certain tree, which was useful to me in after life, but they rather
overdid this branch of instruction one way and another; for example,
Wiki had, as above indicated, a mania for bush-ropes and a marvellous
eye and knowledge of them; he would pick out from among the thousands
surrounding us now one of such peculiar suppleness that you could wind
it round anything, like a strip of cloth, and as strong withal as a
hawser; or again another which has a certain stiffness, combined with
a slight elastic spring, excellent for hauling, with the ease and accuracy
of a lady who picks out the particular twisted strand of embroidery
silk from a multi-coloured tangled ball.  He would go into the
bush after them while other people were resting, and particularly after
the sort which, when split, is bright yellow, and very supple and excellent
to tie round loads.

On one occasion, between Egaja and Esoon, he came back from one of
these quests and wanted me to come and see something, very quietly;
I went, and we crept down into a rocky ravine, on the other side of
which lay one of the outermost Egaja plantations.  When we got
to the edge of the cleared ground, we lay down, and wormed our way,
with elaborate caution, among a patch of Koko; Wiki first, I following
in his trail.

After about fifty yards of this, Wiki sank flat, and I saw before
me some thirty yards off, busily employed in pulling down plantains,
and other depredations, five gorillas: one old male, one young male,
and three females.  One of these had clinging to her a young fellow,
with beautiful wavy black hair with just a kink in it.  The big
male was crouching on his haunches, with his long arms hanging down
on either side, with the backs of his hands on the ground, the palms
upwards.  The elder lady was tearing to pieces and eating a pine-apple,
while the others were at the plantains destroying more than they ate.

They kept up a sort of a whinnying, chattering noise, quite different
from the sound I have heard gorillas give when enraged, or from the
one you can hear them giving when they are what the natives call “dancing”
at night.  I noticed that their reach of arm was immense, and that
when they went from one tree to another, they squattered across the
open ground in a most inelegant style, dragging their long arms with
the knuckles downwards.  I should think the big male and female
were over six feet each.  The others would be from four to five. 
I put out my hand and laid it on Wiki’s gun to prevent him from
firing, and he, thinking I was going to fire, gripped my wrist.

I watched the gorillas with great interest for a few seconds, until
I heard Wiki make a peculiar small sound, and looking at him saw his
face was working in an awful way as he clutched his throat with his
hand violently.

Heavens! think I, this gentleman’s going to have a fit; it’s
lost we are entirely this time.  He rolled his head to and fro,
and then buried his face into a heap of dried rubbish at the foot of
a plantain stem, clasped his hands over it, and gave an explosive sneeze. 
The gorillas let go all, raised themselves up for a second, gave a quaint
sound between a bark and a howl, and then the ladies and the young gentleman
started home.  The old male rose to his full height (it struck
me at the time this was a matter of ten feet at least, but for scientific
purposes allowance must be made for a lady’s emotions) and looked
straight towards us, or rather towards where that sound came from. 
Wiki went off into a paroxysm of falsetto sneezes the like of which
I have never heard; nor evidently had the gorilla, who doubtless thinking,
as one of his black co-relatives would have thought, that the phenomenon
favoured Duppy, went off after his family with a celerity that was amazing
the moment he touched the forest, and disappeared as they had, swinging
himself along through it from bough to bough, in a way that convinced
me that, given the necessity of getting about in tropical forests, man
has made a mistake in getting his arms shortened.  I have seen
many wild animals in their native wilds, but never have I seen anything
to equal gorillas going through bush; it is a graceful, powerful, superbly
perfect hand-trapeze performance. {208}

After this sporting adventure, we returned, as I usually return from
a sporting adventure, without measurements or the body.

Our first day’s march, though the longest, was the easiest,
though, providentially I did not know this at the time.  From my
Woermann road walks I judge it was well twenty-five miles.  It
was easiest however, from its lying for the greater part of the way
through the gloomy type of forest.  All day long we never saw the
sky once.

The earlier part of the day we were steadily going up hill, here
and there making a small descent, and then up again, until we came on
to what was apparently a long ridge, for on either side of us we could
look down into deep, dark, ravine-like valleys.  Twice or thrice
we descended into these to cross them, finding at their bottom a small
or large swamp with a river running through its midst.  Those rivers
all went to Lake Ayzingo.

We had to hurry because Kiva, who was the only one among us who had
been to Efoua, said that unless we did we should not reach Efoua that
night.  I said, “Why not stay for bush?” not having
contracted any love for a night in a Fan town by the experience of M’fetta;
moreover the Fans were not sure that after all the whole party of us
might not spend the evening at Efoua, when we did get there, simmering
in its cooking-pots.

Ngouta, I may remark, had no doubt on the subject at all, and regretted
having left Mrs. N. keenly, and the Andande store sincerely.  But
these Fans are a fine sporting tribe, and allowed they would risk it;
besides, they were almost certain they had friends at Efoua; and, in
addition, they showed me trees scratched in a way that was magnification
of the condition of my own cat’s pet table leg at home, demonstrating
leopards in the vicinity.  I kept going, as it was my only chance,
because I found I stiffened if I sat down, and they always carefully
told me the direction to go in when they sat down; with their superior
pace they soon caught me up, and then passed me, leaving me and Ngouta
and sometimes Singlet and Pagan behind, we, in our turn, overtaking
them, with this difference that they were sitting down when we did so.

About five o’clock I was off ahead and noticed a path which
I had been told I should meet with, and, when met with, I must follow. 
The path was slightly indistinct, but by keeping my eye on it I could
see it.  Presently I came to a place where it went out, but appeared
again on the other side of a clump of underbush fairly distinctly. 
I made a short cut for it and the next news was I was in a heap, on
a lot of spikes, some fifteen feet or so below ground level, at the
bottom of a bag-shaped game pit.

It is at these times you realise the blessing of a good thick skirt. 
Had I paid heed to the advice of many people in England, who ought to
have known better, and did not do it themselves, and adopted masculine
garments, I should have been spiked to the bone, and done for. 
Whereas, save for a good many bruises, here I was with the fulness of
my skirt tucked under me, sitting on nine ebony spikes some twelve inches
long, in comparative comfort, howling lustily to be hauled out. 
The Duke came along first, and looked down at me.  I said, “Get
a bush-rope, and haul me out.”  He grunted and sat down on
a log.  The Passenger came next, and he looked down.  “You
kill?” says he.  “Not much,” say I; “get
a bush-rope and haul me out.”  “No fit,” says
he, and sat down on the log.  Presently, however, Kiva and Wiki
came up, and Wiki went and selected the one and only bush-rope suitable
to haul an English lady, of my exact complexion, age, and size, out
of that one particular pit.  They seemed rare round there from
the time he took; and I was just casting about in my mind as to what
method would be best to employ in getting up the smooth, yellow, sandy-clay,
incurved walls, when he arrived with it, and I was out in a twinkling,
and very much ashamed of myself, until Silence, who was then leading,
disappeared through the path before us with a despairing yell. 
Each man then pulled the skin cover off his gun lock, carefully looked
to see if things there were all right and ready loosened his knife in
its snake-skin sheath; and then we set about hauling poor Silence out,
binding him up where necessary with cool green leaves; for he, not having
a skirt, had got a good deal frayed at the edges on those spikes. 
Then we closed up, for the Fans said these pits were symptomatic of
the immediate neighbourhood of Efoua.  We sounded our ground, as
we went into a thick plantain patch, through which we could see a great
clearing in the forest, and the low huts of a big town.  We charged
into it, going right through the guard-house gateway, at one end, in
single file, as its narrowness obliged us, and into the street-shaped
town, and formed ourselves into as imposing a looking party as possible
in the centre of the street.  The Efouerians regarded us with much
amazement, and the women and children cleared off into the huts, and
took stock of us through the door-holes.  There were but few men
in the town, the majority, we subsequently learnt, being away after
elephants.  But there were quite sufficient left to make a crowd
in a ring round us.  Fortunately Wiki and Kiva’s friends
were present, and as a result of the confabulation, one of the chiefs
had his house cleared out for me.  It consisted of two apartments
almost bare of everything save a pile of boxes, and a small fire on
the floor, some little bags hanging from the roof poles, and a general
supply of insects.  The inner room contained nothing save a hard
plank, raised on four short pegs from the earth floor.

I shook hands with and thanked the chief, and directed that all the
loads should be placed inside the huts.  I must admit my good friend
was a villainous-looking savage, but he behaved most hospitably and
kindly.  From what I had heard of the Fan, I deemed it advisable
not to make any present to him at once, but to base my claim on him
on the right of an amicable stranger to hospitality.  When I had
seen all the baggage stowed I went outside and sat at the doorway on
a rather rickety mushroom-shaped stool in the cool evening air, waiting
for my tea which I wanted bitterly.  Pagan came up as usual for
tobacco to buy chop with; and after giving it to him, I and the two
chiefs, with Gray Shirt acting as interpreter, had a long chat. 
Of course the first question was, Why was I there?

I told them I was on my way to the factory of H. and C. on the Rembwé. 
They said they had heard of “Ugumu,” i.e., Messrs
Hatton and Cookson, but they did not trade direct with them, passing
their trade into towns nearer to the Rembwé, which were swindling
bad towns, they said; and they got the idea stuck in their heads that
I was a trader, a sort of bagman for the firm, and Gray Shirt could
not get this idea out, so off one of their majesties went and returned
with twenty-five balls of rubber, which I bought to promote good feeling,
subsequently dashing them to Wiki, who passed them in at Ndorko when
we got there.  I also bought some elephant-hair necklaces from
one of the chiefs’ wives, by exchanging my red silk tie with her
for them, and one or two other things.  I saw fish-hooks would
not be of much value because Efoua was not near a big water of any sort;
so I held fish-hooks and traded handkerchiefs and knives.

One old chief was exceedingly keen to do business, and I bought a
meat spoon, a plantain spoon, and a gravy spoon off him; and then he
brought me a lot of rubbish I did not want, and I said so, and announced
I had finished trade for that night.  However the old gentleman
was not to be put off, and after an unsuccessful attempt to sell me
his cooking-pots, which were roughly made out of clay, he made energetic
signs to me that if I would wait he had got something that he would
dispose of which Gray Shirt said was “good too much.” 
Off he went across the street, and disappeared into his hut, where he
evidently had a thorough hunt for the precious article.  One box
after another was brought out to the light of a bush torch held by one
of his wives, and there was a great confabulation between him and his
family of the “I’m sure you had it last,” “You
must have moved it,” “Never touched the thing,” sort. 
At last it was found, and he brought it across the street to me most
carefully.  It was a bundle of bark cloth tied round something
most carefully with tie tie.  This being removed, disclosed a layer
of rag, which was unwound from round a central article.  Whatever
can this be? thinks I; some rare and valuable object doubtless, let’s
hope connected with Fetish worship, and I anxiously watched its unpacking;
in the end, however, it disclosed, to my disgust and rage, an old shilling
razor.  The way the old chief held it out, and the amount of dollars
he asked for it, was enough to make any one believe that I was in such
urgent need of the thing, that I was at his mercy regarding price. 
I waved it off with a haughty scorn, and then feeling smitten by the
expression of agonised bewilderment on his face, I dashed him a belt
that delighted him, and went inside and had tea to soothe my outraged
feelings.

The chiefs made furious raids on the mob of spectators who pressed
round the door, and stood with their eyes glued to every crack in the
bark of which the hut was made.  The next door neighbours on either
side might have amassed a comfortable competence for their old age,
by letting out seats for the circus.  Every hole in the side walls
had a human eye in it, and I heard new holes being bored in all directions;
so I deeply fear the chief, my host, must have found his palace sadly
draughty.  I felt perfectly safe and content, however, although
Ngouta suggested the charming idea that “P’r’aps them
M’fetta Fan done sell we.”  As soon as all my men had
come in, and established themselves in the inner room for the night,
I curled up among the boxes, with my head on the tobacco sack, and dozed.

After about half an hour I heard a row in the street, and looking
out, – for I recognised his grace’s voice taking a solo part followed
by choruses, – I found him in legal difficulties about a murder case. 
An alibi was proved for the time being; that is to say the prosecution
could not bring up witnesses because of the elephant hunt; and I went
in for another doze, and the town at last grew quiet.  Waking up
again I noticed the smell in the hut was violent, from being shut up
I suppose, and it had an unmistakably organic origin.  Knocking
the ash end off the smouldering bush-light that lay burning on the floor,
I investigated, and tracked it to those bags, so I took down the biggest
one, and carefully noted exactly how the tie-tie had been put round
its mouth; for these things are important and often mean a lot. 
I then shook its contents out in my hat, for fear of losing anything
of value.  They were a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two
ears, and other portions of the human frame.  The hand was fresh,
the others only so so, and shrivelled.

Replacing them I tied the bag up, and hung it up again.  I subsequently
learnt that although the Fans will eat their fellow friendly tribesfolk,
yet they like to keep a little something belonging to them as a memento. 
This touching trait in their character I learnt from Wiki; and, though
it’s to their credit, under the circumstances, still it’s
an unpleasant practice when they hang the remains in the bedroom you
occupy, particularly if the bereavement in your host’s family
has been recent.  I did not venture to prowl round Efoua; but slid
the bark door aside and looked out to get a breath of fresh air.

It was a perfect night, and no mosquitoes.  The town, walled
in on every side by the great cliff of high black forest, looked very
wild as it showed in the starlight, its low, savage-built bark huts,
in two hard rows, closed at either end by a guard-house.  In both
guard-houses there was a fire burning, and in their flickering glow
showed the forms of sleeping men.  Nothing was moving save the
goats, which are always brought into the special house for them in the
middle of the town, to keep them from the leopards, which roam from
dusk to dawn.

Dawn found us stirring, I getting my tea, and the rest of the party
their chop, and binding up anew the loads with Wiki’s fresh supple
bush-ropes.  Kiva amused me much; during our march his costume
was exceeding scant, but when we reached the towns he took from his
bag garments, and attired himself so resplendently that I feared the
charm of his appearance would lead me into one of those dreadful wife
palavers which experience had taught me of old to dread; and in the
morning time he always devoted some time to repacking.  I gave
a big dash to both chiefs, and they came out with us, most civilly,
to the end of their first plantations; and then we took farewell of
each other, with many expressions of hope on both sides that we should
meet again, and many warnings from them about the dissolute and depraved
character of the other towns we should pass through before we reached
the Rembwé.

Our second day’s march was infinitely worse than the first,
for it lay along a series of abruptly shaped hills with deep ravines
between them; each ravine had its swamp and each swamp its river. 
This bit of country must be absolutely impassable for any human being,
black or white, except during the dry season.  There were representatives
of the three chief forms of the West African bog.  The large deep
swamps were best to deal with, because they make a break in the forest,
and the sun can come down on their surface and bake a crust, over which
you can go, if you go quickly.  From experience in Devonian bogs,
I knew pace was our best chance, and I fancy I earned one of my nicknames
among the Fans on these.  The Fans went across all right with a
rapid striding glide, but the other men erred from excess of caution,
and while hesitating as to where was the next safe place to plant their
feet, the place that they were standing on went in with a glug. 
Moreover, they would keep together, which was more than the crust would
stand.  The portly Pagan and the Passenger gave us a fine job in
one bog, by sinking in close together.  Some of us slashed off
boughs of trees and tore off handfuls of hard canna leaves, while others
threw them round the sinking victims to form a sort of raft, and then
with the aid of bush-rope, of course, they were hauled out.

The worst sort of swamp, and the most frequent hereabouts, is the
deep narrow one that has no crust on, because it is too much shaded
by the forest.  The slopes of the ravines too are usually covered
with an undergrowth of shenja, beautiful beyond description, but right
bad to go through.  I soon learnt to dread seeing the man in front
going down hill, or to find myself doing so, for it meant that within
the next half hour we should be battling through a patch of shenja. 
I believe there are few effects that can compare with the beauty of
them, with the golden sunlight coming down through the upper forest’s
branches on to their exquisitely shaped, hard, dark green leaves, making
them look as if they were sprinkled with golden sequins.  Their
long green stalks, which support the leaves and bear little bunches
of crimson berries, take every graceful curve imaginable, and the whole
affair is free from insects; and when you have said this, you have said
all there is to say in favour of shenja, for those long green stalks
of theirs are as tough as twisted wire, and the graceful curves go to
the making of a net, which rises round you shoulder high, and the hard
green leaves when lying on the ground are fearfully slippery. 
It is not nice going down through them, particularly when Nature is
so arranged that the edge of the bank you are descending is a rock-wall
ten or twelve feet high with a swamp of unknown depth at its foot; this
arrangement was very frequent on the second and third day’s marches,
and into these swamps the shenja seemed to want to send you head first
and get you suffocated.  It is still less pleasant, however, going
up the other side of the ravine when you have got through your swamp. 
You have to fight your way upwards among rough rocks, through this hard
tough network of stems; and it took it out of all of us except the Fans.

These narrow shaded swamps gave us a world of trouble and took up
a good deal of time.  Sometimes the leader of the party would make
three or four attempts before he found a ford, going on until the black,
batterlike ooze came up round his neck, and then turning back and trying
in another place; while the rest of the party sat upon the bank until
the ford was found, feeling it was unnecessary to throw away human life,
and that the more men there were paddling about in that swamp, the more
chance there was that a hole in the bottom of it would be found; and
when a hole is found, the discoverer is liable to leave his bones in
it.  If I happened to be in front, the duty of finding the ford
fell on me; for none of us after leaving Efoua knew the swamps personally. 
I was too frightened of the Fan, and too nervous and uncertain of the
stuff my other men were made of, to dare show the white feather at anything
that turned up.  The Fan took my conduct as a matter of course,
never having travelled with white men before, or learnt the way some
of them require carrying over swamps and rivers and so on.  I dare
say I might have taken things easier, but I was like the immortal Schmelzle,
during that omnibus journey he made on his way to Flætz in the
thunder-storm – afraid to be afraid.  I am very certain I should
have fared very differently had I entered a region occupied by a powerful
and ferocious tribe like the Fan, from some districts on the West Coast,
where the inhabitants are used to find the white man incapable of personal
exertion, requiring to be carried in a hammock, or wheeled in a go-cart
or a Bath-chair about the streets of their coast towns, depending for
the defence of their settlement on a body of black soldiers.  This
is not so in Congo Français, and I had behind me the prestige
of a set of white men to whom for the native to say, “You shall
not do such and such a thing;” “You shall not go to such
and such a place,” would mean that those things would be done. 
I soon found the name of Hatton and Cookson’s agent-general for
this district, Mr. Hudson, was one to conjure with among the trading
tribes; and the Ajumba, moreover, although their knowledge of white
men had been small, yet those they had been accustomed to see were fine
specimens.  Mr. Fildes, Mr. Cockshut, M. Jacot, Dr. Pélessier,
Père Lejeune, M. Gacon, Mr. Whittaker, and that vivacious French
official, were not men any man, black or white, would willingly ruffle;
and in addition there was the memory among the black traders of “that
white man MacTaggart,” whom an enterprising trading tribe near
Fernan Vaz had had the hardihood to tackle, shooting him, and then towing
him behind a canoe and slashing him all over with their knives the while;
yet he survived, and tackled them again in a way that must almost pathetically
have astonished those simple savages, after the real good work they
had put in to the killing of him.  Of course it was hard to live
up to these ideals, and I do not pretend to have succeeded, or rather
that I should have succeeded had the real strain been put on me.

But to return to that gorilla-land forest.  All the rivers we
crossed on the first, second, and third day I was told went into one
or other of the branches of the Ogowé, showing that the long
slope of land between the Ogowé and the Rembwé is towards
the Ogowé.  The stone of which the mountains were composed
was that same hard black rock that I had found on the Sierra del Cristal,
by the Ogowé rapids; only hereabouts there was not amongst it
those great masses of white quartz, which are so prominent a feature
from Talagouga upwards in the Ogowé valley; neither were the
mountains anything like so high, but they had the same abruptness of
shape.  They look like very old parts of the same range worn down
to stumps by the disintegrating forces of the torrential rain and sun,
and the dense forest growing on them.  Frost of course they had
not been subject to, but rocks, I noticed, were often being somewhat
similarly split by rootlets having got into some tiny crevice, and by
gradual growth enlarged it to a crack.

Of our troubles among the timber falls on these mountains I have
already spoken; and these were at their worst between Efoua and Egaja. 
I had suffered a good deal from thirst that day, unboiled water being
my ibet and we were all very nearly tired out with the athletic sports
since leaving Efoua.  One thing only we knew about Egaja for sure,
and that was that not one of us had a friend there, and that it was
a town of extra evil repute, so we were not feeling very cheerful when
towards evening time we struck its outermost plantations, their immediate
vicinity being announced to us by Silence treading full and fair on
to a sharp ebony spike driven into the narrow path and hurting himself. 
Fortunately, after we passed this first plantation, we came upon a camp
of rubber collectors – four young men; I got one of them to carry Silence’s
load and show us the way into the town, when on we went into more plantations.

There is nothing more tiresome than finding your path going into
a plantation, because it fades out in the cleared ground, or starts
playing games with a lot of other little paths that are running about
amongst the crops, and no West African path goes straight into a stream
or a plantation, and straight out the other side, so you have a nice
time picking it up again.

We were spared a good deal of fine varied walking by our new friend
the rubber collector; for I noticed he led us out by a path nearly at
right angles to the one by which we had entered.  He then pitched
into a pit which was half full of thorns, and which he observed he did
not know was there, demonstrating that an African guide can speak the
truth.  When he had got out, he handed back Silence’s load
and got a dash of tobacco for his help; he left us to devote the rest
of his evening by his forest fire to unthorning himself, while we proceeded
to wade a swift, deepish river that crossed the path he told us led
into Egaja, and then went across another bit of forest and downhill
again.  “Oh, bless those swamps!” thought I, “here’s
another,” but no – not this time.  Across the bottom of the
steep ravine, from one side to another, lay an enormous tree as a bridge,
about fifteen feet above a river, which rushed beneath it, over a boulder-encumbered
bed.  I took in the situation at a glance, and then and there I
would have changed that bridge for any swamp I have ever seen, yea,
even for a certain bush-rope bridge in which I once wound myself up
like a buzzing fly in a spider’s web.  I was fearfully tired,
and my legs shivered under me after the falls and emotions of the previous
part of the day, and my boots were slippery with water soaking.

The Fans went into the river, and half swam, half waded across. 
All the Ajumba, save Pagan, followed, and Ngouta got across with their
assistance.  Pagan thought he would try the bridge, and I thought
I would watch how the thing worked.  He got about three yards along
it and then slipped, but caught the tree with his hands as he fell,
and hauled himself back to my side again; then he went down the bank
and through the water.  This was not calculated to improve one’s
nerve; I knew by now I had got to go by the bridge, for I saw I was
not strong enough in my tired state to fight the water.  If only
the wretched thing had had its bark on it would have been better, but
it was bare, bald, and round, and a slip meant death on the rocks below. 
I rushed it, and reached the other side in safety, whereby poor Pagan
got chaffed about his failure by the others, who said they had gone
through the water just to wash their feet.

The other side, when we got there, did not seem much worth reaching,
being a swampy fringe at the bottom of a steep hillside, and after a
few yards the path turned into a stream or backwater of the river. 
It was hedged with thickly pleached bushes, and covered with liquid
water on the top of semi-liquid mud.  Now and again for a change
you had a foot of water on top of fearfully slippery harder mud, and
then we light-heartedly took headers into the bush, sideways, or sat
down; and when it was not proceeding on the evil tenor of its way, like
this, it had holes in it; in fact, I fancy the bottom of the holes was
the true level, for it came near being as full of holes as a fishing-net,
and it was very quaint to see the man in front, who had been paddling
along knee-deep before, now plop down with the water round his shoulders;
and getting out of these slippery pockets, which were sometimes a tight
fit, was difficult.

However that is the path you have got to go by, if you’re not
wise enough to stop at home; the little bay of shrub overgrown swamp
fringing the river on one side and on the other running up to the mountain
side.

At last we came to a sandy bank, and on that bank stood Egaja, the
town with an evil name even among the Fan, but where we had got to stay,
fair or foul.  We went into it through its palaver house, and soon
had the usual row.

I had detected signs of trouble among my men during the whole day;
the Ajumba were tired, and dissatisfied with the Fans; the Fans were
in high feather, openly insolent to Ngouta, and anxious for me to stay
in this delightful locality, and go hunting with them and divers other
choice spirits, whom they assured me we could easily get to join us
at Efoua.  I kept peace as well as I could, explaining to the Fans
I had not enough money with me now, because I had not, when starting,
expected such magnificent opportunities to be placed at my disposal;
and promising to come back next year – a promise I hope to keep – and
then we would go and have a grand time of it.  This state of a
party was a dangerous one in which to enter a strange Fan town, where
our security lay in our being united.  When the first burst of
Egaja conversation began to boil down into something reasonable, I found
that a villainous-looking scoundrel, smeared with soot and draped in
a fragment of genuine antique cloth, was a head chief in mourning. 
He placed a house at my disposal, quite a mansion, for it had no less
than four apartments.  The first one was almost entirely occupied
by a bedstead frame that was being made up inside on account of the
small size of the door.

This had to be removed before we could get in with the baggage at
all.  While this removal was being effected with as much damage
to the house and the article as if it were a quarter-day affair in England,
the other chief arrived.  He had been sent for, being away down
the river fishing when we arrived.  I saw at once he was a very
superior man to any of the chiefs I had yet met with.  It was not
his attire, remarkable though that was for the district, for it consisted
of a gentleman’s black frock-coat such as is given in the ivory
bundle, a bright blue felt sombrero hat, an ample cloth of Boma check;
but his face and general bearing was distinctive, and very powerful
and intelligent; and I knew that Egaja, for good or bad, owed its name
to this man, and not to the mere sensual, brutal-looking one. 
He was exceedingly courteous, ordering his people to bring me a stool
and one for himself, and then a fly-whisk to battle with the evening
cloud of sand-flies.  I got Pagan to come and act as interpreter
while the rest were stowing the baggage, etc.  After compliments,
“Tell the chief,” I said, “that I hear this town of
his is thief town.”

“Better not, sir,” says Pagan.

“Go on,” said I, “or I’ll tell him myself.”

So Pagan did.  It was a sad blow to the chief.

“Thief town, this highly respectable town of Egaja! a town
whose moral conduct in all matters (Shedule) was an example to all towns,
called a thief town!  Oh, what a wicked world!”

I said it was; but I would reserve my opinion as to whether Egaja
was a part of the wicked world or a star-like exception, until I had
experienced it myself.  We then discoursed on many matters, and
I got a great deal of interesting fetish information out of the chief,
which was valuable to me, because the whole of this district had not
been in contact with white culture; and altogether I and the chief became
great friends.

Just when I was going in to have my much-desired tea, he brought
me his mother – an old lady, evidently very bright and able, but, poor
woman, with the most disgusting hand and arm I have ever seen. 
I am ashamed to say I came very near being sympathetically sick in the
African manner on the spot.  I felt I could not attend to it, and
have my tea afterwards, so I directed one of the canoe-shaped little
tubs, used for beating up the manioc in, to be brought and filled with
hot water, and then putting into it a heavy dose of Condy’s fluid,
I made her sit down and lay the whole arm in it, and went and had my
tea.  As soon as I had done I went outside, and getting some of
the many surrounding ladies to hold bush-lights, I examined the case. 
The whole hand was a mass of yellow pus, streaked with sanies, large
ulcers were burrowing into the fore-arm, while in the arm-pit was a
big abscess.  I opened the abscess at once, and then the old lady
frightened me nearly out of my wits by gently subsiding, I thought dying,
but I soon found out merely going to sleep.  I then washed the
abscess well out, and having got a lot of baked plantains, I made a
big poultice of them, mixed with boiling water and more Condy in the
tub, and laid her arm right in this; and propping her up all round and
covering her over with cloths I requisitioned from her son, I left her
to have her nap while I went into the history of the case, which was
that some forty-eight hours ago she had been wading along the bank,
catching crawfish, and had been stung by “a fish like a snake”;
so I presume the ulcers were an old-standing palaver.  The hand
had been a good deal torn by the creature, and the pain and swelling
had been so great she had not had a minute’s sleep since. 
As soon as the poultice got chilled I took her arm out and cleaned it
again, and wound it round with dressing, and had her ladyship carried
bodily, still asleep, into her hut, and after rousing her up, giving
her a dose of that fine preparation, pil. crotonis cum hydrargi,
saw her tucked up on her own plank bedstead for the night, sound asleep
again.  The chief was very anxious to have some pills too; so I
gave him some, with firm injunctions only to take one at the first time. 
I knew that that one would teach him not to take more than one forever
after, better than I could do if I talked from June to January. 
Then all the afflicted of Egaja turned up, and wanted medical advice. 
There was evidently a good stiff epidemic of the yaws about; lots of
cases of dum with the various symptoms; ulcers of course galore; a man
with a bit of a broken spear head in an abscess in the thigh; one which
I believe a professional enthusiast would call a “lovely case”
of filaria, the entire white of one eye being full of the active little
worms and a ridge of surplus population migrating across the bridge
of the nose into the other eye, under the skin, looking like the bridge
of a pair of spectacles.  It was past eleven before I had anything
like done, and my men had long been sound asleep, but the chief had
conscientiously sat up and seen the thing through.  He then went
and fetched some rolls of bark cloth to put on my plank, and I gave
him a handsome cloth I happened to have with me, a couple of knives,
and some heads of tobacco and wished him goodnight; blockading my bark
door, and picking my way over my sleeping Ajumba into an inner apartment
which I also blockaded, hoping I had done with Egaja for some hours. 
No such thing.  At 1.45 the whole town was roused by the frantic
yells of a woman.  I judged there was one of my beauties of Fans
mixed up in it, and there was, and after paying damages, got back again
by 2.30 A.M., and off to sleep again instantly.  At four sharp,
whole town of Egaja plunged into emotion, and worse shindy.  I
suggested to the Ajumba they should go out; but no, they didn’t
care a row of pins if one of our Fans did get killed, so I went, recognising
Kiva’s voice in high expostulation.  Kiva, it seems, a long
time ago had a transaction in re a tooth of ivory with a man
who, unfortunately, happened to be in this town to-night, and Kiva owed
the said man a coat. {223}

Kiva, it seems, has been spending the whole evening demonstrating
to his creditor that, had he only known they were to meet, he would
have brought the coat with him – a particularly beautiful coat – and
the reason he has not paid it before is that he has mislaid the creditor’s
address.  The creditor says he has called repeatedly at Kiva’s
village, that notorious M’fetta, and Kiva has never been at home;
and moreover that Kiva’s wife (one of them) stole a yellow dog
of great value from his (the creditor’s) canoe.  Kiva says,
women will be women, and he had gone off to sleep thinking the affair
had blown over and the bill renewed for the time being.  The creditor
had not gone to sleep; but sat up thinking the affair over and remembered
many cases, all cited in full, of how Kiva had failed to meet his debts;
also Kiva’s brother on the mother’s side and uncle ditto;
and so has decided to foreclose forthwith on the debtor’s estate,
and as the estate is represented by and consists of Kiva’s person,
to take and seize upon it and eat it.

It is always highly interesting to observe the germ of any of our
own institutions existing in the culture of a lower race.  Nevertheless
it is trying to be hauled out of one’s sleep in the middle of
the night, and plunged into this study.  Evidently this was a trace
of an early form of the Bankruptcy Court; the court which clears a man
of his debt, being here represented by the knife and the cooking pot;
the whitewashing, as I believe it is termed with us, also shows, only
it is not the debtor who is whitewashed, but the creditors doing themselves
over with white clay to celebrate the removal of their enemy from his
sphere of meretricious activity.  This inversion may arise from
the fact that whitewashing a creditor who was about to be cooked would
be unwise, as the stuff would boil off the bits and spoil the gravy. 
There is always some fragment of sound sense underlying African institutions. 
Kiva was, when I got out, tied up, talking nineteen to the dozen; and
so was every one else; and a lady was working up white clay in a pot.

I dare say I ought to have rushed at him and cut his bonds, and killed
people in a general way with a revolver, and then flown with my band
to the bush; only my band evidently had no flying in them, being tucked
up in the hut pretending to be asleep, and uninterested in the affair;
and although I could have abandoned the band without a pang just then,
I could not so lightheartedly fly alone with Kiva to the bush and leave
my fishes; so I shouted Azuna to the Bankruptcy Court, and got a Fan
who spoke trade English to come and interpret for me; and from him I
learnt the above stated outline of the proceedings up to the time. 
Regarding the original iniquity of Kiva, my other Fans held the opinion
that the old Scotch lady had regarding certain passages in the history
of the early Jews – that it was a long time ago, and aiblins it was
no true.

Fortunately for the reader it is impossible for me to give in full
detail the proceedings of the Court.  I do not think if the whole
of Mr. Pitman’s school of shorthand had been there to take them
down the thing could possibly have been done in word-writing. 
If the late Richard Wagner, however, had been present he could have
scored the performance for a full orchestra; and with all its weird
grunts and roars, and pistol-like finger clicks, and its elongated words
and thigh slaps, it would have been a masterpiece.

I got my friend the chief on my side; but he explained he had no
jurisdiction, as neither of the men belonged to his town; and I explained
to him, that as the proceedings were taking place in his town he had
a right of jurisdiction ipso facto.  The Fan could not translate
this phrase, so we gave it the chief raw; and he seemed to relish it,
and he and I then cut into the affair together, I looking at him with
admiration and approval when he was saying his say, and after his “Azuna”
had produced a patch of silence he could move his tongue in, and he
similarly regarding me during my speech for the defence.  We neither,
I expect, understood each other, and we had trouble with our client,
who would keep pleading “Not guilty,” which was absurd. 
Anyhow we produced our effect, my success arising from my concluding
my speech with the announcement that I would give the creditor a book
on Hatton and Cookson for the coat, and I would deduct it from Kiva’s
pay.

But, said the Court: “We look your mouth and it be sweet mouth,
but with Hatton and Cookson we can have no trade.”  This
was a blow to me.  Hatton and Cookson was my big Ju Ju, and it
was to their sub-factory on the Rembwé that I was bound. 
On inquiry I elicited another cheerful little fact which was they could
not deal with Hatton and Cookson because there was “blood war
on the path that way.”  The Court said they would take a
book on Holty, but with Holty i.e. Mr. John Holt, I had no deposit
of money, and I did not feel justified in issuing cheques on him, knowing
also he could not feel amiable towards wandering scientists, after what
he had recently gone through with one.  Not that I doubt for one
minute but that his representatives would have honoured my book; for
the generosity and helpfulness of West African traders is unbounded
and long-suffering.  But I did not like to encroach on it, all
the more so from a feeling that I might never get through to refund
the money.  So at last I paid the equivalent value of the coat
out of my own trade-stuff; and the affair was regarded by all parties
as satisfactorily closed by the time the gray dawn was coming up over
the forest wall.  I went in again and slept in snatches until I
got my tea about seven, and then turned out to hurry my band out of
Egaja.  This I did not succeed in doing until past ten.  One
row succeeded another with my men; but I was determined to get them
out of that town as quickly as possible, for I had heard so much from
perfectly reliable and experienced people regarding the treacherousness
of the Fan.  I feared too that more cases still would be brought
up against Kiva, from the résumé of his criminal
career I had had last night, and I knew it was very doubtful whether
my other three Fans were any better than he.  There was his grace’s
little murder affair only languishing for want of evidence owing to
the witnesses for the prosecution being out elephant-hunting not very
far away; and Wiki was pleading an alibi, and a twin brother,
in a bad wife palaver in this town.  I really hope for the sake
of Fan morals at large, that I did engage the three worst villains in
M’fetta, and that M’fetta is the worst town in all Fan land,
inconvenient as this arrangement was to me personally.  Anyhow,
I felt sure my Pappenheimers would take a lot of beating for good solid
crime, among any tribe anywhere.  Moreover, the Ajumba wanted meat,
and the Fans, they said, offered them human.  I saw no human meat
at Egaja, but the Ajumba seem to think the Fans eat nothing else, which
is a silly prejudice of theirs, because the Fans do.  I think in
this case the Ajumba thought a lot of smoked flesh offered was human. 
It may have been; it was in neat pieces; and again, as the Captain of
the late s.s. Sparrow would say, “it mayn’t.” 
But the Ajumba have a horror of cannibalism, and I honestly believe
never practise it, even for fetish affairs, which is a rare thing in
a West African tribe where sacrificial and ceremonial cannibalism is
nearly universal.  Anyhow the Ajumba loudly declared the Fans were
“bad men too much,” which was impolitic under existing circumstances,
and inexcusable, because it by no means arose from a courageous defiance
of them; but the West African!  Well! “’E’s a
devil an’ a ostrich an’ a orphan child in one.”

The chief was very anxious for me to stay and rest, but as his mother
was doing wonderfully well, and the other women seemed quite to understand
my directions regarding her, I did not feel inclined to risk it. 
The old lady’s farewell of me was peculiar: she took my hand in
her two, turned it palm upwards, and spat on it.  I do not know
whether this is a constant form of greeting among the Fan; I fancy not. 
Dr. Nassau, who explained it to me when I saw him again down at Baraka,
said the spitting was merely an accidental by-product of the performance,
which consisted in blowing a blessing; and as I happened on this custom
twice afterwards, I feel sure from observation he is right.

The two chiefs saw us courteously out of the town as far as where
the river crosses the out-going path again, and the blue-hatted one
gave me some charms “to keep my foot in path,” and the mourning
chief lent us his son to see us through the lines of fortification of
the plantation.  I gave them an equal dash, and in answer to their
question as to whether I had found Egaja a thief-town, I said that to
call Egaja a thief-town was rank perjury, for I had not lost a thing
while in it; and we parted with mutual expression of esteem and hopes
for another meeting at an early date.

The defences of the fine series of plantations of Egaja on this side
were most intricate, to judge from the zigzag course our guide led us
through them.  He explained they had to be because of the character
of the towns towards the Rembwé.  After listening to this
young man, I really began to doubt that the Cities of the Plain had
really been destroyed, and wondered whether some future revision committee
will not put transported for destroyed.  This young man certainly
hit off the character of Sodom and Gomorrah to the life, in describing
the towns towards the Rembwé, though he had never heard Sodom
and Gomorrah named.  He assured me I should see the difference
between them and Egaja the Good, and I thanked him and gave him his
dash when we parted; but told him as a friend, I feared some alteration
must take place, and some time elapse before he saw a regular rush of
pilgrim worshippers of Virtue coming into even Egaja the Good, though
it stood just as good a chance and better than most towns I had seen
in Africa.

We went on into the gloom of the Great Forest again; that forest
that seemed to me without end, wherein, in a lazy, hazy-minded sort
of way, I expected to wander through by day and drop in at night to
a noisy savage town for the rest of my days.

We climbed up one hill, skirted its summit, went through our athletic
sports over sundry timber falls, and struck down into the ravine as
usual.  But at the bottom of that ravine, which was exceeding steep,
ran a little river free from swamp.  As I was wading it I noticed
it had a peculiarity that distinguished it from all the other rivers
we had come through; and then and there I sat down on a boulder in its
midst and hauled out my compass.  Yes, by Allah! it’s going
north-west and bound as we are for Rembwé River.  I went
out the other side of that river with a lighter heart than I went in,
and shouted the news to the boys, and they yelled and sang as we went
on our way.

All along this bit of country we had seen quantities of rubber vines,
and between Egaja and Esoon we came across quantities of rubber being
collected.  Evidently there was a big camp of rubber hunters out
in the district very busy.  Wiki and Kiva did their best to teach
me the trade.  Along each side of the path we frequently saw a
ring of stout bush rope, raised from the earth on pegs about a foot
to eighteen inches.  On the ground in the middle stood a calabash,
into which the ends of the pieces of rubber vine were placed, the other
ends being supported by the bush rope ring.  Round the outside
of some of these rings was a slow fire, which just singes the tops of
the bits of rubber vine as they project over the collar or ring, and
causes the milky juice to run out of the lower end into the calabash,
giving out as it does so a strong ammoniacal smell.  When the fire
was alight there would be a group of rubber collectors sitting round
it watching the cooking operations, removing those pieces that had run
dry and placing others, from a pile at their side, in position. 
On either side of the path we continually passed pieces of rubber vine
cut into lengths of some two feet or so, and on the top one or two leaves
plaited together, or a piece of bush rope tied into a knot, which indicated
whose property the pile was.

The method of collection employed by the Fan is exceedingly wasteful,
because this fool of a vegetable Landolphia florida (Ovariensis)
does not know how to send up suckers from its root, but insists on starting
elaborately from seeds only.  I do not, however, see any reasonable
hope of getting them to adopt more economical methods.  The attempt
made by the English houses, when the rubber trade was opened up in 1883
on the Gold Coast, to get the more tractable natives there to collect
by incisions only, has failed; for in the early days a man could get
a load of rubber almost at his own door on the Gold Coast, and now he
has to go fifteen days’ journey inland for it.  When a Fan
town has exhausted the rubber in its vicinity, it migrates, bag and
baggage, to a new part of the forest.  The young unmarried men
are the usual rubber hunters.  Parties of them go out into the
forest, wandering about in it and camping under shelters of boughs by
night, for a month and more at a time, during the dry seasons, until
they have got a sufficient quantity together; then they return to their
town, and it is manipulated by the women, and finally sold, either to
the white trader, in districts where he is within reach, or to the M’pongwe
trader who travels round buying it and the collected ivory and ebony,
like a Norfolk higgler.  In districts like these I was in, remote
from the M’pongwe trader, the Fans carry the rubber to the town
nearest to them that is in contact with the black trader, and sell it
to the inhabitants, who in their turn resell it to their next town,
until it reaches him.  This passing down of the rubber and ivory
gives rise between the various towns to a series of commercial complications
which rank with woman palaver for the production of rows; it being the
sweet habit of these Fans to require a life for a life, and to regard
one life as good as another.  Also rubber trade and wife palavers
sweetly intertwine, for a man on the kill in re a wife palaver
knows his best chance of getting the life from the village he has a
grudge against lies in catching one of that village’s men when
he may be out alone rubber hunting.  So he does this thing, and
then the men from the victim’s village go and lay for a rubber
hunter from the killer’s village; and then of course the men from
the killer’s village go and lay for rubber hunters from victim
number one’s village, and thus the blood feud rolls down the vaulted
chambers of the ages, so that you, dropping in on affairs, cannot see
one end or the other of it, and frequently the people concerned have
quite forgotten what the killing was started for.  Not that this
discourages them in the least.  Really if Dr. Nassau is right,
and these Fans are descendants of Adam and Eve, I expect the Cain and
Abel killing palaver is still kept going among them.

Wiki, being great on bush rope, gave me much information regarding
rubber, showing me the various other vines besides the true rubber vine,
whose juice, mingled with the true sap by the collector when in the
forest, adds to the weight; a matter of importance, because rubber is
bought by weight.  The other adulteration gets done by the ladies
in the villages when the collected sap is handed over to them to prepare
for the markets.

This preparation consists of boiling it in water slightly, and adding
a little salt, which causes the gummy part to separate and go to the
bottom of the pot, where it looks like a thick cream.  The water
is carefully poured off this deposit, which is then taken out and moulded,
usually in the hands; but I have seen it run into moulds made of small
calabashes with a stick or piece of iron passing through, so that when
the rubber is set this can be withdrawn.  A hole being thus left
the balls can be threaded on to a stick, usually five on one stick,
for convenience of transport.  It is during the moulding process
that most of the adulteration gets in.  Down by the side of many
of the streams there is a white chalky-looking clay which is brought
up into the villages, powdered up, and then hung up over the fire in
a basket to attain a uniform smuttiness; it is then worked into the
rubber when it is being made up into balls.  Then a good chunk
of Koko, Arum esculentum (Koko is better than yam, I may remark,
because it is heavier), also smoked approximately the right colour,
is often placed in the centre of the rubber ball.  In fact, anything
is put there, that is hopefully regarded as likely to deceive the white
trader.  So great is the adulteration, that most of the traders
have to cut each ball open.  Even the Kinsembo rubber, which is
put up in clusters of bits shaped like little thimbles formed by rolling
pinches of rubber between the thumb and finger, and which one would
think difficult to put anything inside of, has to be cut, because “the
simple children of nature” who collect it and bring it to that
“swindling white trader” struck upon the ingenious notion
that little pieces of wood shaped like the thimbles and coated by a
dip in rubber were excellent additions to a cluster.

The pure rubber, when it is made, looks like putty, and has the same
dusky-white colour; but, owing to the balls being kept in the huts in
baskets in the smoke, and in wicker-work cages in the muddy pools to
soak up as much water as possible before going into the hands of the
traders, they get almost inky in colour.

CHAPTER IX. FROM ESOON TO AGONJO.

In which the Voyager sets forth the beauties of the way from Esoon
to N’dorko, and gives some account of the local Swamps.

Our next halting place was Esoon, which received us with the usual
row, but kindly enough; and endeared itself to me by knowing the Rembwé,
and not just waving the arm in the air, in any direction, and saying
“Far, far plenty bad people live for that side,” as the
other towns had done.  Of course they stuck to the bad people part
of the legend; but I was getting quite callous as to the moral character
of new acquaintances, feeling sure that for good solid murderous rascality
several of my old Fan acquaintances, and even my own party, would take
a lot of beating; and yet, one and all, they had behaved well to me. 
Esoon gave me to understand that of all the Sodoms and Gomorrahs that
town of Egaja was an easy first, and it would hardly believe we had
come that way.  Still Egaja had dealt with us well.  However
I took less interest – except, of course, as a friend, in some details
regarding the criminal career of Chief Blue-hat of Egaja – in the opinion
of Esoon regarding the country we had survived, than in the information
it had to impart regarding the country we had got to survive on our
way to the Big River, which now no longer meant the Ogowé, but
the Rembwé.  I meant to reach one of Hatton and Cookson’s
sub-factories there, but – strictly between ourselves – I knew no more
at what town that factory was than a Kindergarten Board School child
does.  I did not mention this fact; and a casual observer might
have thought that I had spent my youth in that factory, when I directed
my inquiries to the finding out the very shortest route to it. 
Esoon shook its head.  “Yes, it was close, but it was impossible
to reach Uguma’s factory.”  “Why?” 
“There was blood war on the path.”  I said it was no
war of mine.  But Esoon said, such was the appalling depravity
of the next town on the road, that its inhabitants lay in wait at day
with loaded guns and shot on sight any one coming up the Esoon road,
and that at night they tied strings with bells on across the road and
shot on hearing them.  No one had been killed since the first party
of Esoonians were fired on at long range, because no one had gone that
way; but the next door town had been heard by people who had been out
in the bush at night, blazing down the road when the bells were tinkled
by wild animals.  Clearly that road was not yet really healthy.

The Duke, who as I have said before, was a fine courageous fellow,
ready to engage in any undertaking, suggested I should go up the road
– alone by myself – first – a mile ahead of the party – and the next
town, perhaps, might not shoot at sight, if they happened to notice
I was something queer; and I might explain things, and then the rest
of the party would follow.  “There’s nothing like dash
and courage, my dear Duke,” I said, “even if one display
it by deputy, so this plan does you great credit; but as my knowledge
of this charming language of yours is but small, I fear I might create
a wrong impression in that town, and it might think I had kindly brought
them a present of eight edible heathens – you and the remainder of my
followers, you understand.”  My men saw this was a real danger,
and this was the only way I saw of excusing myself.  It is at such
a moment as this that the Giant’s robe gets, so to speak, between
your legs and threatens to trip you up.  Going up a forbidden road,
and exposing yourself as a pot shot to ambushed natives would be jam
and fritters to Mr. MacTaggart, for example; but I am not up to that
form yet.  So I determined to leave that road severely alone, and
circumnavigate the next town by a road that leaves Esoon going W.N.W.,
which struck the Rembwé by N’dorko, I was told, and then
follow up the bank of the river until I picked up the sub-factory. 
Subsequent experience did not make one feel inclined to take out a patent
for this plan, but at the time in Esoon it looked nice enough.

Some few of the more highly cultured inhabitants here could speak
trade English a little, and had been to the Rembwé, and were
quite intelligent about the whole affair.  They had seen white
men.  A village they formerly occupied nearer the Rembwé
had been burnt by them, on account of a something that had occurred
to a Catholic priest who visited it.  They were, of course, none
of them personally mixed up in this sad affair, so could give no details
of what had befallen the priest.  They knew also “the Mové,”
which was a great bond of union between us.  “Was I a wife
of them Mové white man,” they inquired – “or
them other white man?”  I civilly said them Mové
men were my tribe, and they ought to have known it by the look of me. 
They discussed my points of resemblance to “the Mové
white man,” and I am ashamed to say I could not forbear from smiling,
as I distinctly recognised my friends from the very racy description
of their personal appearance and tricks of manner given by a lively
Esoonian belle who had certainly met them.  So content and happy
did I become under these soothing influences, that I actually took off
my boots, a thing I had quite got out of the habit of doing, and had
them dried.  I wanted to have them rubbed with palm oil, but I
found, to my surprise, that there was no palm oil to be had, the tree
being absent, or scarce in this region, so I had to content myself with
having them rubbed with a piece of animal fat instead.  I chaperoned
my men, while among the ladies of Esoon – a forward set of minxes –
with the vigilance of a dragon; and decreed, like the Mikado of Japan,
“that whosoever leered or winked, unless connubially linked, should
forthwith be beheaded,” have their pay chopped, I mean; and as
they were beginning to smell their pay, they were careful; and we got
through Esoon without one of them going into jail; no mean performance
when you remember that every man had a past – to put it mildly.

Esoon is not situated like the other towns, with a swamp and the
forest close round it; but it is built on the side of a fairly cleared
ravine among its plantain groves.  When you are on the southern
side of the ravine, you can see Esoon looking as if it were hung on
the hillside before you.  You then go through a plantation down
into the little river, and up into the town – one long, broad, clean-kept
street.  Leaving Esoon you go on up the hill through another plantation
to the summit.  Immediately after leaving the town we struck westwards;
and when we got to the top of the next hill we had a view that showed
us we were dealing with another type of country.  The hills to
the westward are lower, and the valleys between them broader and less
heavily forested, or rather I should say forested with smaller sorts
of timber.  All our paths took us during the early part of the
day up and down hills, through swamps and little rivers, all flowing
Rembwé-wards.  About the middle of the afternoon, when we
had got up to the top of a high hill, after having had a terrible time
on a timber fall of the first magnitude, into which four of us had fallen,
I of course for one, I saw a sight that made my heart stand still. 
Stretching away to the west and north, winding in and out among the
feet of the now isolated mound-like mountains, was that never to be
mistaken black-green forest swamp of mangrove; doubtless the fringe
of the River Rembwé, which evidently comes much further inland
than the mangrove belt on the Ogowé.  This is reasonable
and as it should be, though it surprised me at the time; for the great
arm of the sea which is called the Gaboon is really a fjord, just like
Bonny and Opobo rivers, with several rivers falling into it at its head,
and this fjord brings the sea water further inland.  In addition
to this the two rivers, the ’Como (Nkâmâ) and Rembwé
that fall into this Gaboon, with several smaller rivers, both bring
down an inferior quantity of fresh water, and that at nothing like the
tearing, tide-beating back pace of the Ogowé.  As my brother
would say, “It’s perfectly simple if you think about it;”
but thinking is not my strong point.  Anyhow I was glad to see
the mangrove-belt; all the gladder because I did not then know how far
it was inland from the sea, and also because I was fool enough to think
that a long line I could see, running E. and W. to the north of where
I stood, was the line of the Rembwé river; which it was not,
as we soon found out.  Cheered by this pleasing prospect, we marched
on forgetful of our scratches, down the side of the hill, and down the
foot slope of it, until we struck the edge of the swamp.  We skirted
this for some mile or so, going N.E.  Then we struck into the swamp,
to reach what we had regarded as the Rembwé river.  We found
ourselves at the edge of that open line we had seen from the mountain. 
Not standing, because you don’t so much as try to stand on mangrove
roots unless you are a born fool, and then you don’t stand long,
but clinging, like so many monkeys, to the net of aërial roots
which surrounded us, looking blankly at a lake of ink-black slime. 
It was half a mile across, and some miles long.  We could not see
either the west or east termination of it, for it lay like a rotten
serpent twisted between the mangroves.  It never entered into our
heads to try to cross it, for when a swamp is too deep for mangroves
to grow in it, “No bottom lib for them dam ting,” as a Kruboy
once said to me, anent a small specimen of this sort of ornament to
a landscape.  But we just looked round to see which direction we
had better take.  Then I observed that the roots, aërial and
otherwise, were coated in mud, and had no leaves on them, for a foot
above our heads.  Next I noticed that the surface of the mud before
us had a sort of quiver running through it, and here and there it exhibited
swellings on its surface, which rose in one place and fell in another. 
No need for an old coaster like me to look at that sort of thing twice
to know what it meant, and feeling it was a situation more suited to
Mr. Stanley than myself, I attempted to emulate his methods and addressed
my men.  “Boys,” said I, “this beastly hole is
tidal, and the tide is coming in.  As it took us two hours to get
to this sainted swamp, it’s time we started out, one time, and
the nearest way.  It’s to be hoped the practice we have acquired
in mangrove roots in coming, will enable us to get up sufficient pace
to get out on to dry land before we are all drowned.”  The
boys took the hint.  Fortunately one of the Ajumbas had been down
in Ogowé, it was Gray Shirt, who “sabed them tide palaver.” 
The rest of them, and the Fans, did not know what tide meant, but Gray
Shirt hustled them along and I followed, deeply regretting that my ancestors
had parted prematurely with prehensile tails, for four limbs, particularly
when two of them are done up in boots and are not sufficient to enable
one to get through a mangrove swamp network of slimy roots rising out
of the water, and swinging lines of aërial ones coming down to
the water à la mangrove, with anything approaching safety. 
Added to these joys were any quantity of mangrove flies, a broiling
hot sun, and an atmosphere three-quarters solid stench from the putrefying
ooze all round us.  For an hour and a half thought I, Why did I
come to Africa, or why, having come, did I not know when I was well
off and stay in Glass?  Before these problems were settled in my
mind we were close to the true land again, with the water under us licking
lazily among the roots and over our feet.

We did not make any fuss about it, but we meant to stick to dry land
for some time, and so now took to the side of a hill that seemed like
a great bubble coming out of the swamp, and bore steadily E. until we
found a path.  This path, according to the nature of paths in this
country, promptly took us into another swamp, but of a different kind
to our last – a knee-deep affair, full of beautiful palms and strange
water plants, the names whereof I know not.  There was just one
part where that abomination, pandanus, had to be got through,
but, as swamps go, it was not at all bad.  I ought to mention that
there were leeches in it, lest I may be thought too enthusiastic over
its charms.  But the great point was that the mountains we got
to on the other side of it, were a good solid ridge, running, it is
true, E. and W., while we wanted to go N.; still on we went waiting
for developments, and watching the great line of mangrove-swamp spreading
along below us to the left hand, seeing many of the lines in its dark
face, which betokened more of those awesome slime lagoons that we had
seen enough of at close quarters.

About four o’clock we struck some more plantations, and passing
through these, came to a path running north-east, down which we went. 
I must say the forest scenery here was superbly lovely.  Along
this mountain side cliff to the mangrove-swamp the sun could reach the
soil, owing to the steepness and abruptness and the changes of curves
of the ground; while the soft steamy air which came up off the swamp
swathed everything, and although unpleasantly strong in smell to us,
was yet evidently highly agreeable to the vegetation.  Lovely wine
palms and rafia palms, looking as if they had been grown under glass,
so deliciously green and profuse was their feather-like foliage, intermingled
with giant red woods, and lovely dark glossy green lianes, blooming
in wreaths and festoons of white and mauve flowers, which gave a glorious
wealth of beauty and colour to the scene.  Even the monotony of
the mangrove-belt alongside gave an additional charm to it, like the
frame round a picture.

As we passed on, the ridge turned N. and the mangrove line narrowed
between the hills.  Our path now ran east and more in the middle
of the forest, and the cool shade was charming after the heat we had
had earlier in the day.  We crossed a lovely little stream coming
down the hillside in a cascade; and then our path plunged into a beautiful
valley.  We had glimpses through the trees of an amphitheatre of
blue mist-veiled mountains coming down in a crescent before us, and
on all sides, save due west where the mangrove-swamp came in. 
Never shall I forget the exceeding beauty of that valley, the foliage
of the trees round us, the delicate wreaths and festoons of climbing
plants, the graceful delicate plumes of the palm trees, interlacing
among each other, and showing through all a background of soft, pale,
purple-blue mountains and forest, not really far away, as the practised
eye knew, but only made to look so by the mist, which has this trick
of giving suggestion of immense space without destroying the beauty
of detail.  Those African misty forests have the same marvellous
distinctive quality that Turner gives one in his greatest pictures. 
I am no artist, so I do not know exactly what it is, but I see it is
there.  I luxuriated in the exquisite beauty of that valley, little
thinking or knowing what there was in it besides beauty, as Allah “in
mercy hid the book of fate.”  On we went among the ferns
and flowers until we met a swamp, a different kind of swamp to those
we had heretofore met, save the little one last mentioned.  This
one was much larger, and a gem of beauty; but we had to cross it. 
It was completely furnished with characteristic flora.  Fortunately
when we got to its edge we saw a woman crossing before us, but unfortunately
she did not take a fancy to our appearance, and instead of staying and
having a chat about the state of the roads, and the shortest way to
N’dorko, she bolted away across the swamp.  I noticed she
carefully took a course, not the shortest, although that course immersed
her to her armpits.  In we went after her, and when things were
getting unpleasantly deep, and feeling highly uncertain under foot,
we found there was a great log of a tree under the water which, as we
had seen the lady’s care at this point, we deemed it advisable
to walk on.  All of us save one, need I say that one was myself?
effected this with safety.  As for me, when I was at the beginning
of the submerged bridge, and busily laying about in my mind for a definite
opinion as to whether it was better to walk on a slippy tree trunk bridge
you could see, or on one you could not, I was hurled off by that inexorable
fate that demands of me a personal acquaintance with fluvial and paludial
ground deposits; whereupon I took a header, and am thereby able to inform
the world, that there is between fifteen and twenty feet of water each
side of that log.  I conscientiously went in on one side, and came
up on the other.  The log, I conjecture, is odum or ebony, and
it is some fifty feet long; anyhow it is some sort of wood that won’t
float.  Gray Shirt says it is a bridge across an under-swamp river. 
Having survived this and reached the opposite bank, we shortly fell
in with a party of men and women, who were taking, they said, a parcel
of rubber to Holty’s.  They told us N’dorko was quite
close, and that the plantations we saw before us were its outermost
ones, but spoke of a swamp, a bad swamp.  We knew it, we said,
in the foolishness of our hearts thinking they meant the one we had
just forded, and leaving them resting, passed on our way; half-a-mile
further on we were wiser and sadder, for then we stood on the rim of
one of the biggest swamps I have ever seen south of the Rivers. 
It stretched away in all directions, a great sheet of filthy water,
out of which sprang gorgeous marsh plants, in islands, great banks of
screw pine, and coppices of wine palm, with their lovely fronds reflected
back by the still, mirror-like water, so that the reflection was as
vivid as the reality, and above all remarkable was a plant, {241}
new and strange to me, whose pale-green stem came up out of the water
and then spread out in a flattened surface, thin, and in a peculiarly
graceful curve.  This flattened surface had growing out from it
leaves, the size, shape and colour of lily of the valley leaves; until
I saw this thing I had held the wine palm to be the queen of grace in
the vegetable kingdom, but this new beauty quite surpassed her.

Our path went straight into this swamp over the black rocks forming
its rim, in an imperative, no alternative, “Come-along-this-way”
style.  Singlet, who was leading, carrying a good load of bottled
fish and a gorilla specimen, went at it like a man, and disappeared
before the eyes of us close following him, then and there down through
the water.  He came up, thanks be, but his load is down there now,
worse luck.  Then I said we must get the rubber carriers who were
coming this way to show us the ford; and so we sat down on the bank
a tired, disconsolate, dilapidated-looking row, until they arrived. 
When they came up they did not plunge in forthwith; but leisurely set
about making a most nerve-shaking set of preparations, taking off their
clothes, and forming them into bundles, which, to my horror, they put
on the tops of their heads.  The women carried the rubber on their
backs still, but rubber is none the worse for being under water. 
The men went in first, each holding his gun high above his head. 
They skirted the bank before they struck out into the swamp, and were
followed by the women and by our party, and soon we were all up to our
chins.

We were two hours and a quarter passing that swamp.  I was one
hour and three-quarters; but I made good weather of it, closely following
the rubber-carriers, and only going in right over head and all twice. 
Other members of my band were less fortunate.  One and all, we
got horribly infested with leeches, having a frill of them round our
necks like astrachan collars, and our hands covered with them, when
we came out.

We had to pass across the first bit of open country I had seen for
a long time – a real patch of grass on the top of a low ridge, which
is fringed with swamp on all sides save the one we made our way to,
the eastern.  Shortly after passing through another plantation,
we saw brown huts, and in a few minutes were standing in the middle
of a ramshackle village, at the end of which, through a high stockade,
with its gateway smeared with blood which hung in gouts, we saw our
much longed for Rembwé River.  I made for it, taking small
notice of the hubbub our arrival occasioned, and passed through the
gateway, setting its guarding bell ringing violently; I stood on the
steep, black, mud slime bank, surrounded by a noisy crowd.  It
is a big river, but nothing to the Ogowé, either in breadth or
beauty; what beauty it has is of the Niger delta type – black mud-laden
water, with a mangrove swamp fringe to it in all directions.  I
soon turned back into the village and asked for Ugumu’s factory. 
“This is it,” said an exceedingly dirty, good-looking, civil-spoken
man in perfect English, though as pure blooded an African as ever walked. 
“This is it, sir,” and he pointed to one of the huts on
the right-hand side, indistinguishable in squalor from the rest. 
“Where’s the Agent?” said I.  “I’m
the Agent,” he answered.  You could have knocked me down
with a feather.  “Where’s John Holt’s factory?”
said I.  “You have passed it; it is up on the hill.” 
This showed Messrs. Holt’s local factory to be no bigger than
Ugumu’s.  At this point a big, scraggy, very black man with
an irregularly formed face the size of a tea-tray and looking generally
as if he had come out of a pantomime on the Arabian Nights, dashed
through the crowd, shouting, “I’m for Holty, I’m for
Holty.”  “This is my trade, you go ’way,”
says Agent number one.  Fearing my two Agents would fight and damage
each other, so that neither would be any good for me, I firmly said,
“Have you got any rum?”  Agent number one looked crestfallen,
Holty’s triumphant.  “Rum, fur sure,” says he;
so I gave him a five-franc piece, which he regarded with great pleasure,
and putting it in his mouth, he legged it like a lamplighter away to
his store on the hill.  “Have you any tobacco?” said
I to Agent number one.  He brightened, “Plenty tobacco, plenty
cloth,” said he; so I told him to give me out twenty heads. 
I gave my men two heads apiece.  I told them rum was coming, and
ordered them to take the loads on to Hatton and Cookson’s Agent’s
hut and then to go and buy chop and make themselves comfortable. 
They highly approved of this plan, and grunted assent ecstatically;
and just as the loads were stowed Holty’s anatomy hove in sight
with a bottle of rum under each arm, and one in each hand; while behind
him came an acolyte, a fat, small boy, panting and puffing and doing
his level best to keep up with his long-legged flying master. 
I gave my men some and put the rest in with my goods, and explained
that I belonged to Hatton and Cookson’s (it’s the proper
thing to belong to somebody), and that therefore I must take up my quarters
at their Store; but Holty’s energetic agent hung about me like
a vulture in hopes of getting more five franc-piece pickings. 
I sent Ngouta off to get me some tea, and had the hut cleared of an
excited audience, and shut myself in with Hatton and Cookson’s
agent, and asked him seriously and anxiously if there was not a big
factory of the firm’s on the river, because it was self-evident
he had not got anything like enough stuff to pay off my men with, and
my agreement was to pay off on the Rembwé, hence my horror at
the smallness of the firm’s N’dorko store.  “Besides,”
I said, “Mr. Glass (I knew the head Rembwé agent of Hatton
and Cookson was a Mr. Glass), you have only got cloth and tobacco, and
I have promised the Fans to pay off in whatever they choose, and I know
for sure they want powder.”  “I am not Mr. Glass,”
said my friend; “he is up at Agonjo, I only do small trade for
him here.”  Joy!!!! but where’s Agonjo?  To make
a long story short I found Agonjo was an hour’s paddle up the
Rembwé and the place we ought to have come out at.  There
was a botheration again about sending up a message, because of a war
palaver; but I got a pencil note, with my letter of introduction from
Mr. Cockshut to Sanga Glass, at last delivered to that gentleman; and
down he came, in a state of considerable astonishment, not unmixed with
alarm, for no white man of any kind had been across from the Ogowé
for years, and none had ever come out at N’dorko.  Mr. Glass
I found an exceedingly neat, well-educated M’pongwe gentleman
in irreproachable English garments, and with irreproachable, but slightly
floreate, English language.  We started talking trade, with
my band in the middle of the street; making a patch of uproar in the
moonlit surrounding silence.  As soon as we thought we had got
one gentleman’s mind settled as to what goods he would take his
pay in, and were proceeding to investigate another gentleman’s
little fancies, gentleman number one’s mind came all to pieces
again, and he wanted “to room his bundle,” i.e. change
articles in it for other articles of an equivalent value, if it must
be, but of a higher, if possible.  Oh ye shopkeepers in England
who grumble at your lady customers, just you come out here and try to
serve, and satisfy a set of Fans!  Mr. Glass was evidently an expert
at the affair, but it was past 11 p.m. before we got the orders written
out, and getting my baggage into some canoes, that Mr. Glass had brought
down from Agonjo, for N’dorko only had a few very wretched ones,
I started off up river with him and all the Ajumba, and Kiva, the Fan,
who had been promised a safe conduct.  He came to see the bundles
for his fellow Fans were made up satisfactorily.  The canoes being
small there was quite a procession of them.  Mr. Glass and I shared
one, which was paddled by two small boys; how we ever got up the Rembwé
that night I do not know, for although neither of us were fat, the canoe
was a one man canoe, and the water lapped over the edge in an alarming
way.  Had any of us sneezed, or had it been daylight when two or
three mangrove flies would have joined the party, we must have foundered;
but all went well; and on arriving at Agonjo Mr. Glass most kindly opened
his store, and by the light of lamps and lanterns, we picked out the
goods from his varied and ample supply, and handed them over to the
Ajumba and Kiva, and all, save three of the Ajumba, were satisfied. 
The three, Gray Shirt, Silence, and Pagan quietly explained to me that
they found the Rembwé price so little better than the Lembarene
price that they would rather get their pay off Mr. Cockshut, than risk
taking it back through the Fan country, so I gave them books on him. 
I gave all my remaining trade goods, and the rest of the rum to the
Fans as a dash, and they were more than satisfied.  I must say
they never clamoured for dash for top.  The Passenger we had brought
through with us, who had really made himself very helpful, was quite
surprised at getting a bundle of goods from me.  My only anxiety
was as to whether Fika would get his share all right; but I expect he
did, for the Ajumbas are very honest men; and they were going back with
my Fan friends.  I found out, by the by, the reason of Fika’s
shyness in coming through to the Rembwé; it was a big wife palaver.

I had a touching farewell with the Fans: and so in peace, good feeling,
and prosperity I parted company for the second time with “the
terrible M’pongwe,” whom I hope to meet with again, for
with all their many faults and failings, they are real men.  I
am faint-hearted enough to hope, that our next journey together, may
not be over a country that seems to me to have been laid down as an
obstacle race track for Mr. G. F. Watts’s Titans, and to have
fallen into shocking bad repair.

CHAPTER X. BUSH TRADE AND FAN CUSTOMS.

Wherein the Voyager, having fallen among the black traders, discourses
on these men and their manner of life; and the difficulties and dangers
attending the barter they carry on with the bush savages; and on some
of the reasons that makes this barter so beloved and followed by both
the black trader and the savage.  To which is added an account
of the manner of life of the Fan tribe; the strange form of coinage
used by these people; their manner of hunting the elephant, working
in iron; and such like things.

I spent a few, lazy, pleasant days at Agonjo, Mr. Glass doing all
he could to make me comfortable, though he had a nasty touch of fever
on him just then.  His efforts were ably seconded by his good lady,
an exceedingly comely Gaboon woman, with pretty manners, and an excellent
gift in cookery.  The third member of the staff was the store-keeper,
a clever fellow: I fancy a Loango from his clean-cut features and spare
make, but his tribe I know not for a surety.

One of these black trader factories is an exceedingly interesting
place to stay at, for in these factories you are right down on the bed
rock of the trade.  On the Coast, for the greater part, the white
traders are dealing with black traders, middle men, who have procured
their trade stuff from the bush natives, who collect and prepare it. 
Here, in the black trader factory, you see the first stage of the export
part of the trade: namely the barter of the collected trade stuff between
the collector and the middleman.  I will not go into details regarding
it.  What I saw merely confirmed my opinion that the native is
not cheated; no, not even by a fellow African trader; and I will merely
here pause to sing a pæan to a very unpopular class – the black
middleman as he exists on the South-West Coast.  It is impossible
to realise the gloom of the lives of these men in bush factories, unless
you have lived in one.  It is no use saying “they know nothing
better and so don’t feel it,” for they do know several things
better, being very sociable men, fully appreciative of the joys of a
Coast town, and their aim, object and end in life is, in almost every
case, to get together a fortune that will enable them to live in one,
give a dance twice a week, card parties most nights, and dress themselves
up so that their fellow Coast townsmen may hate them and their townswomen
love them.  From their own accounts of the dreadful state of trade;
and the awful and unparalleled series of losses they have had, from
the upsetting of canoes, the raids and robberies made on them and their
goods by “those awful bush savages”; you would, if you were
of a trustful disposition, regard the black trader with an admiring
awe as the man who has at last solved the great commercial problem of
how to keep a shop and live by the loss.  Nay, not only live, but
build for himself an equivalent to a palatial residence, and keep up,
not only it, but half a dozen wives, with a fine taste for dress every
one of them.  I am not of a trustful disposition and I accept those
“losses” with a heavy discount, and know most of the rest
of them have come out of my friend the white trader’s pockets. 
Still I can never feel the righteous indignation that I ought to feel,
when I see the black trader “down in a seaport town with his Nancy,”
etc., as Sir W. H. S. Gilbert classically says, because I remember those
bush factories.

Mr. Glass, however, was not a trader who made a fortune by losing
those of other people; for he had been many years in the employ of the
firm.  He had risen certainly to the high post and position of
charge of the Rembwé, but he was not down giddy-flying at Gaboon. 
His accounts of his experiences when he had been many years ago away
up the still little known Nguni River, in a factory in touch with the
lively Bakele, then in a factory among Fans and Igalwa on the Ogowé,
and now among Fans and Skekiani on the Rembwé, were fascinating,
and told vividly of the joys of first starting a factory in a wild district. 
The way in which your customers, for the first month or so, enjoyed
themselves by trying to frighten you, the trader, out of your wits and
goods, and into giving them fancy prices for things you were trading
in, and for things of no earthly use to you, or any one else! 
The trader’s existence during this period is marked by every unpleasantness
save dulness; from that he is spared by the presence of a mob of noisy,
dangerous, thieving savages all over his place all day; invading his
cook-house, to put some nastiness into his food as a trade charm; helping
themselves to portable property at large; and making themselves at home
to the extent of sitting on his dining-table.  At night those customers
proceed to sleep all over the premises, with a view to being on hand
to start shopping in the morning.  Woe betide the trader if he
gives in to this, and tolerates the invasion, for there is no chance
of that house ever being his own again; and in addition to the local
flies, etc., on the table-cloth, he will always have several big black
gentlemen to share his meals.  If he raises prices, to tide over
some extra row, he is a lost man; for the Africans can understand prices
going up, but never prices coming down; and time being no object, they
will hold back their trade.  Then the district is ruined, and the
trader along with it, for he cannot raise the price he gets for the
things he buys.

What that trader has got to do, is to be a “Devil man.” 
They always kindly said they recognised me as one, which is a great
compliment.  He must betray no weakness, but a character which
I should describe as a compound of the best parts of those of Cardinal
Richelieu, Brutus, Julius Caesar, Prince Metternich, and Mezzofanti,
the latter to carry on the native language part of the business; and
he must cast those customers out, not only from his house; but from
his yard; and adhere to the “No admittance except on business”
principle.  This causes a good deal of unpleasantness, and the
trader’s nights are now cheered by lively war-dances outside his
stockade; the accompanying songs advertising that the customers are
coming over the stockade to raid the store, and cut up the trader “into
bits like a fish.”  Sometimes they do come – and then – finish;
but usually they don’t; and gradually settle down, and respect
the trader greatly as “a Devil man”; and do business on
sound lines during the day.  Over the stockade at night, by ones
and twos, stealing, they will come to the end of the chapter.

Moonlight nights are fairly restful for the bush trader, but when
it is inky black, or pouring with rain, he has got to be very much out
and about, and particularly vigilant has he got to be on tornado nights
– a most uncomfortable sort of weather to attend to business in, I assure
you.

The factory at Agonjo was typical; the house is a fine specimen of
the Igalwa style of architecture; mounted on poles above the ground;
the space under the house being used as a store for rubber in barrels,
and ebony in billets; thereby enabling the trader to hover over these
precious possessions, sleeping and waking, like a sitting hen over her
eggs.  Near to the house are the sleeping places for the beach
hands, and the cook-house.  In front, in a position commanded by
the eye from the verandah, and well withdrawn from the stockade, are
great piles of billets of red bar wood.  The whole of the clean,
sandy yard containing these things, and divers others, is surrounded
by a stout stockade, its main face to the river frontage, the water
at high tide lapping its base, and at low tide exposing in front of
it a shore of black slime.  Although I cite this factory as a typical
factory of a black trader, it is a specimen of the highest class, for,
being in connection with Messrs. Hatton and Cookson it is well kept
up and stocked.  Firms differ much in this particular.  Messrs.
Hatton and Cookson, like Messrs. Miller Brothers in the Bights, take
every care that lies in their power of the people who serve them, down
to the Kruboys working on their beaches, giving ample and good rations
and providing good houses.  But this is not so with all firms on
the Coast.  I have seen factories belonging to the Swedish houses
beside which this factory at Agonjo is a palace although those factories
are white man factories, and the unfortunate white men in them are expected
by these firms to live on native chop – an expectation the Agents by
no means realise, for they usually die.  Black hands, however,
do not suffer much at the hands of such firms, for the Swedish Agents
are a quiet, gentlemanly set of men, in the best sense of that much
misused term, and they do not employ on their beaches such a staff of
black helpers as the English houses, so the two or three Kruboys on
a starvation beach can fairly well fend for themselves, for there is
always an adjacent village, and in that village there are always chickens,
and on the shore crabs, and in the river fish, and for the rest of his
diet the Kruboy flirts with the local ladies.

Although, as I have laid down, the bush factory at its best is a
place, as Mr. Tracey Tupman would say, more fitted for a wounded heart
than for one still able to feast on social joys, it is a luxurious situation
for a black trader compared to the other form of trading he deals with
– that of travelling among the native villages in the bush.  This
has one hundred times the danger, and a thousand times the discomfort,
and is a thoroughly unhealthy pursuit.  The journeys these bush
traders make are often remarkable, and they deserve great credit for
the courage and enterprise they display.  Certainly they run less
risk of death from fever than a white man would; but, on the other hand,
their colour gives them no protection; and their chance of getting murdered
is distinctly greater, the white governmental powers cannot revenge
their death, in the way they would the death of a white man, for these
murders usually take place away in some forest region, in a district
no white man has ever penetrated.

You will naturally ask how it is that so many of these men do survive
“to lead a life of sin” as a missionary described to me
their Coast town life to be.  This question struck me as requiring
explanation.  The result of my investigations, and the answers
I have received from the men themselves, show that there is a reason
why the natives do not succumb every time to the temptation to kill
the trader, and take his goods, and this is twofold: firstly, all trade
in West Africa follows definite routes, even in the wildest parts of
it; and so a village far away in the forest, but on the trade route,
knows that as a general rule twice a year, a trader will appear to purchase
its rubber and ivory.  If he does not appear somewhere about the
expected time, that village gets uneasy.  The ladies are impatient
for their new clothes; the gentlemen half wild for want of tobacco;
and things coming to a crisis, they make inquiries for the trader down
the road, one village to another, and then, if it is found that a village
has killed the trader, and stolen all his goods, there is naturally
a big palaver, and things are made extremely hot, even for equatorial
Africa, for that village by the tobaccoless husbands of the clothesless
wives.  Herein lies the trader’s chief safety, the village
not being an atom afraid, or disinclined to kill him, but afraid of
their neighbouring villages, and disinclined to be killed by them. 
But the trader is not yet safe.  There is still a hole in his armour,
and this is only to be stopped up in one way, namely, by wives; for
you see although the village cannot safely kill him, and take all his
goods, they can still let him die safely of a disease, and take part
of them, passing on sufficient stuff to the other villages to keep them
quiet.  Now the most prevalent disease in the African bush comes
out of the cooking pot, and so to make what goes into the cooking pot
– which is the important point, for earthen pots do not in themselves
breed poison – safe and wholesome, you have got to have some one who
is devoted to your health to attend to the cooking affairs, and who
can do this like a wife?  So you have a wife – one in each village
up the whole of your route.  I know myself one gentleman whose
wives stretch over 300 miles of country, with a good wife base in a
Coast town as well.  This system of judiciously conducted alliances,
gives the black trader a security nothing else can, because naturally
he marries into influential families at each village, and all his wife’s
relations on the mother’s side regard him as one of themselves,
and look after him and his interests.  That security can lie in
women, especially so many women, the so-called civilised man may ironically
doubt, but the security is there, and there only, and on a sound basis,
for remember the position of a travelling trader’s wife in a village
is a position that gives the lady prestige, the discreet husband showing
little favours to her family and friends, if she asks for them when
he is with her; and then she has not got the bother of having a man
always about the house, and liable to get all sorts of silly notions
into his head if she speaks to another gentleman, and then go and impart
these notions to her with a cutlass, or a kassengo, as the more domestic
husband, I am assured by black ladies, is prone to.

You may now, I fear, be falling into the other adjacent error – from
the wonder why any black trader survives, namely, into the wonder why
any black trader gets killed; with all these safeguards, and wives. 
But there is yet another danger, which no quantity of wives, nor local
jealousies avail to guard him through.  This danger arises from
the nomadic habits of the bush tribes, notably the Fan.  For when
a village has made up its mind to change its district, either from having
made the district too hot to hold it, with quarrels with neighbouring
villages; or because it has exhausted the trade stuff, i.e. rubber
and ivory in reach of its present situation; or because some other village
has raided it, and taken away all the stuff it was saving to sell to
the black trader; it resolves to give itself a final treat in the old
home, and make a commercial coup at one fell swoop.  Then
when the black trader turns up with his boxes of goods, it kills him,
has some for supper, smokes the rest, and takes it and the goods, and
departs to found new homes in another district.

The bush trade I have above sketched is the bush trade with the Fans. 
In those districts on the southern banks of the Ogowé the main
features of the trade, and the trader’s life are the same, but
the details are more intricate, for the Igalwa trader from Lembarene,
Fernan Vaz, or Njole, deals with another set of trading tribes, not
first hand with the collectors.  The Fan villages on the trade
routes may, however, be regarded as trade depots, for to them filters
the trade stuff of the more remote villages, so the difference is really
merely technical, and in all villages alike the same sort of thing occurs.

The Igalwa or M’pongwe trader arrives with the goods he has
received from the white trader, and there are great rejoicing and much
uproar as his chests and bundles and demijohns are brought up from the
canoe.  And presently, after a great deal of talk, the goods are
opened.  The chiefs of the village have their pick, and divide
this among the principal men of the village, who pay for it in part
with their store of collected rubber or ivory, and take the rest on
trust, promising to collect enough rubber to pay the balance on the
next visit of the trader.  Thereby the trader has a quantity of
debts outstanding in each village, liable to be bad debts, and herein
lies his chief loss.  Each chief takes a certain understood value
in goods as a commission for himself – nyeno – giving the trader,
as a consideration for this, an understood bond to assist him in getting
in the trust granted to his village.  This nyeno he utilises
in buying trade stuff from villages not on the trade route.  Among
the Fans the men who have got the goods stand by with these to trade
for rubber with the general public and bachelors of the village, in
a way I will presently explain.  In tribes like Ajumbas, Adooma,
etc., the men having the goods travel off, as traders, among their various
bush tribes, similarly paying their nyeno, and so by the time
the goods reach the final producing men, only a small portion of them
is left, but their price has necessarily risen.  Still it is quite
absurd for a casual white traveller, who may have dropped in on the
terminus of a trade route, to cry out regarding the small value the
collector (who is often erroneously described as the producer) gets
for his stuff, compared to the price it fetches in Europe.  For
before it even reaches the factory of the Coast Settlement, that stuff
has got to keep a whole series of traders.  It appears at first
bad that this should be the case, but the case it is along the west
coast of the continent save in the districts commanded by the Royal
Niger company, who, with courage and enterprise, have pushed far inland,
and got in touch with the great interior trade routes – a performance
which has raised in the breasts of the Coast trader tribes who have
been supplanted, a keen animosity, which like most animosity in Africa,
is not regardful of truth.  The tribes that have had the trade
of the Bight of Biafra passing through their hands have been accustomed,
according to the German Government who are also pressing inland, to
make seventy-five per cent. profit on it, and they resent being deprived
of this.  A good deal is to be said in favour of their views; among
other things that the greater part of the seaboard districts of West
Africa, I may say every part from Sierra Leone to Cameroon, is structurally
incapable of being self-supporting under existing conditions. 
Below Cameroon, on my beloved South-west coast, which is infinitely
richer than the Bight of Benin, rich producing districts come down to
the sea in most places until you reach the Congo; but here again the
middleman is of great use to the interior tribes, and if they do have
to pay him seventy-five per cent, serve them right.  They should
not go making wife palaver, and blood palaver all over the place to
such an extent that the inhabitants of no village, unless they go
en masse, dare take a ten mile walk, save at the risk of their lives,
in any direction, so no palaver live.

We will now enter into the reason that induces the bush man to collect
stuff to sell among the Fans, which is the expensiveness of the ladies
in the tribe.  A bush Fan is bound to marry into his tribe, because
over a great part of the territory occupied by them there is no other
tribe handy to marry into; and a Fan residing in villages in touch with
other tribes, has but little chance of getting a cheaper lady. 
For there is, in the Congo Français and the country adjacent
to the north of it (Batanga), a regular style of aristocracy which may
be summarised firstly thus: All the other tribes look down on the Fans,
and the Fans look down on all the other tribes.  This aristocracy
has sub-divisions, the M’pongwe of Gaboon are the upper circle
tribe; next come the Benga of Corisco; then the Bapuka; then the Banaka. 
This system of aristocracy is kept up by the ladies.  Thus a M’pongwe
lady would not think of marrying into one of the lower tribes, so she
is restricted, with many inner restrictions, to her own tribe. 
A Benga lady would marry a M’pongwe, or a Benga, but not a Banaka,
or Bapuka; and so on with the others; but not one of them would marry
a Fan.  As for the men, well of course they would marry any lady
of any tribe, if she had a pretty face, or a good trading connection,
if they were allowed to: that’s just man’s way.  To
the south-east the Fans are in touch with the Bakele, a tribe that has
much in common with the Fan, but who differ from them in getting on
in a very friendly way with the little dwarf people, the Matimbas, or
Watwa, or Akoa: people the Fans cannot abide.  With these Bakele
the Fan can intermarry, but there is not much advantage in so doing,
as the price is equally high, but still marry he must.