 CHAPTER 4 THE O'GOWE Wherein the Voyager gives extracts from the log of the move, and of eclaire, 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 twentieth of May I reached Gabon, now called Libreville, the capital of Congo, and thanks to the kindness of Mr. Hudson, I was allowed a passage on a small steamer, then running from Gabon to the O'Gowe 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 O'Gowe set of experiences in the form of diary. June 5th, 1895 Off on move A at 9.30 Passengers Mr. Hudson, Mr. Woods, Mr. Huygens, Pierre Stenitz, 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 do not want him to drop in on the subject of society interest. I expect it is settled now, or pretty nearly. There is considerable amount of mild uproar among the black contingent, and the move 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 rollox to teapots are kept under the seats in good nautical style. We call it 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 slight rot 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 Gombe, 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 wide-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 a light. 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 percent of them are not a light half the time at all. It's the climate. Gombe, however, you may depend on for being a light 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 Gombe Point, the weather becomes distinctly rough, particularly at lunchtime. The Mouve mine sit less than her passengers, and steps 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 a rose-colored glow from its furnace, showing by the great wood-fire the two nearly-naked crewmen stokers shining like polished bronze in their perspiration, as they throw in onto 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 on plunging down the little iron ladder to carry them out himself. At intervals he stands on the rail, with his head craned around 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 nitrous 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 boughs, 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 Ogoaway. 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 breathing 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 a great brown river stretching away unbroken ahead like a broad road of burnished bronze. A stern it has a streak of frosted silver let into it by the mauve's screw. Just about six o'clock we run up to the falaba, the mauve's predecessor in working the ogoe, now a hulk used as a depot by Hayton and Cookson. She is anchored at the entrance of a creek that runs through to the Ferdinand Vase. 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 falaba 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. And the other half are plank-stores for the goods, and a room for the black subtrader 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 Ogoe 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 movee cannot get through the creek to supply the firm's Fernanvaz factories. Subsequently, I heard much of the falaba, which seems to have been a celebrated or rather notorious vessel. Everyone 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 HMS Victorious, if those falaba engines could have been sent to Chatham Dockyard would mention that you could not get any pace upon her, and all who knew her sadly owned, she wouldn't steer, so naturally she spent the greater part of her time on the Ogoe way 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 falaba had the complaints 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 uptrees, but never more than fifteen feet or so. The trade of this lower part of the Ogoe, from the mouth to Lembarenne, a matter of 130 miles is almost nil. Above Lembarenne you are in touch with the rubber and ivory trade. This falaba 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 chins mosquito bars to the ostentions in the cookhouse, their arrangements being constantly interrupted by the white engineer making alarms and excursions amongst them, because when too many of them get on one side, the muve 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 Ogoe, 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 the passengers away forward that made the muve 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, Yusabe, six o'clock. When them long arm catch them place and them short arm catch them place, you come in the morning time. Exit from saloon. Silence. Then. Yusabe, five o'clock. When them long arm catch them place and them short arm catch them place, you come in the morning time. Exit. Silence. Then. Yusabe, 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. Everyone called in the morning time by the reflex row from the rousing of the five o'clocker. This 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, defying 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-reads and lying in the dark shadows of the forest stems. The air is full of long, soft, rich notes of the plantain warblers, and the uproar consequent upon the movee taking on fuel wood which comes alongside in canoe-loads from the falaba. Pierre 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 pier 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 on your possessions dry unless something desperate comes on in the way of rain. By ten twenty-five we have got all our wood aboard and run off up river full speed. The river seems broader above the falaba, 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 Ogoe. It is as full of life and beauty and passion as any symphony, Beethoven ever wrote, the parts changing, interweaving and returning. There are lit motifs here in it, too. See the papyrus ahead, and you know when you get a breast 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 redwoods, looking like a façade of some limitless encode 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 mauvais goes by, her wash sets its 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 mauvais, or legging it like lamplighters 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 a vast wild forest, and the swift, deep, silent river. At almost every village that we pass, and they are frequent after the falaba, 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 uncivilized way, try our noted chunks best value for money, that is to say, tobacco, et cetera, to the mauvais or any other little steamer that may happen to come along hungry for fuel. We stayed a few minutes this afternoon at Ash Yoka, 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 Ash Yoka, Highland showed to the northeast and at 515, without evident cause to the uninitiated, the mauvais took to whistling like a liner. A few minutes later a factory shows up on the hilly north bank, which is war-mans, then just beyond and behind it we see the government post, then Hatton and Cookson factory, all in a line. Opposite Hatton and Cookson there was a pretty little stern wheel steamer nestling against the steep clay bank of Lembarenne Island when we come in sight, but she instantly swept out from it in a perfect curve which lay behind her marked and frosted silver on the water as she dropped down river. I hear now she was the eclair oire, the stern wheeler which runs up and down the Yogo way in connection with a charger's ruinous company subsidized by the government, and when the mauvais 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 in Jolie and back to Lembarenne, from Lembarenne 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 at some of them fire and open them drains one time, and the stokers with hooks pull out the glowing logs onto the iron deck in front of the furnace door and throw water over them, and the mauvais 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 eclair oire. After a few minutes I am escorted on to the broad veranda of Hatten and Cookson's factory, and I sit down under a lamp prepared to contemplate, until dinnertime, the wild beauty of the scene. The idea does not get carried out. In the twinkling of an eye I am stung all around the neck, and recognize 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 veranda, swearing horribly but internally, and fought them. Mr. Hudson, agent, general, and Mr. Cockshut, agent for the Ogoi, 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 hellos, or a solid-plate one ala Simabu 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 Anjole, which we all feel is an absurdly lame excuse, for Anjole 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 recognize me as a suffering saint, says point-blank and savagely. We 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 muve for the night, for it is too late to go round to Gangwe and ask Mademoiselle Chacotte 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 8. In the morning, up at five. Great activity on beach. Muve synchronously taking on wood-fuel and discharging cargo. A very active young French pastor from the Gangwe Mission station is round after the Mission's cargo. Roger Hudson kindly makes inquiries as to whether I may go round to Gangwe and stay with MME Chacotte. He says, oh yes, but as I find he is not M. Chacotte. I do not feel justified in accepting this statement without its having personal confirmation from MME Chacotte, and so, leaving my luggage with a muve, I get them to allow me to go round with him and his cargo to Gangwe, about three-quarters of an hour's paddle, round the upper part of Lombarene Island, and down the broad channel on the other side of it. Gangwe is beautifully situated on a hill as its named notes on the mainland and north bank of the river. MME Chacotte most kindly says I may come, though I know I shall be a fearful nuisance, for there is no room for me to save MME Chacotte's beautifully neat, clean, tidy study. I go back in the canoe and fetch my luggage from the muve 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, Francaise. I camped out that night in MME Chacotte'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 evangelizing tours. Providentially MME Chacotte let me have the room that the girls belonging to the mission school usually slept in to my great relief before MME Chacotte came home. I will not weary you with my diary during my first stay in Kangui. 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 MME Chacotte, 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 recognized 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 Ogoe, I took the opportunity of the riverboat of the Shargors, Rheonis, going up to the Injoli on one of her trips, and joined her. June 22. Eichleruer, charming little stern wheel-steamer exquisitely kept, she has an upper and lower deck, the lower deck for business, the upper deck for wide passengers only. On the upper deck there is a fine, long deckhouse, running almost her whole length. In this are the officer's cabins, the saloon, and the passengers' cabins, too, both large and beautifully fitted up. Captain Verdiere, exceedingly pleasant and constantly sink, ne se passe. A quiet and singularly clean engineer completes the white staff. The passengers consist of Mr. Cockshut, going up river to sea after the sub-factories. A French official bound for Fransville, which it will take him thirty-six days, go as quick as he can in a canoe after Injoli. A tremendously lively person who has had black water fever four times while away in the bush with nothing to leave on but Manoak, 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 recognize. M.S., with his pins-nez, the doctor, and above all the rapids of the Ogoe, rolling his hands round and round each other and clashing them forward with a descriptive ejaculation of wish-flash-bump-bump-bump, and then comes what evidently represents a terrific fly 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 everyone, with Mr. Cawkshut on the subject of the wicked waste of money in keeping the Mouvet and not shipping all goods by the eclaireur, n'est-ce pas? And with a 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. We, we, set to mint. 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 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 fifteen shillings a 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 Lembareni Island we passed the mouth of the chief southern affluent of the Ogoe, the Nguni. It flows in on ostentatiously from the E.S.C., a broad, quiet river, here with low banks and two islands, Walker's Islands, showing just off its entrance. Hereup 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 amphitheater of mountains. It takes, they clare, two days steaming from the mouth of the Nguni to Samba when she can get up, but now in the height of the long dry season neither she nor the Muwe can go because of the sand banks. So Samba is cut off until next October. Hatten 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 Achille 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 Chaloo made his wonderful journeys among them. When I was at Limbarenne, waiting for the Clairwear, a notorious chief descended on a Ngune 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 Ogoe, a powerful and helpful official, and he soon came up with a little canyoneer, taking Mr. Cogshot with him and fully vindicated the honour of the French flag under which all factories here are. The banks of the Ogoe, just above Limbarenne 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 seize their war against it. The blue Nyakonanka Mountains of Acheango land show away to the east-south-eastern arrange, behind us gradually sinking in the distance is the highland on Limbarenne 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-fatched huts along the street in front. These may be fetish huts, or as the captain of the sparrow would say, again they may not. For I have seen similar huts in the villages around Libreville, which were store places for roof mats, of which the natives carefully kept 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. Some makes bark, horns bray. Some makes hillaried 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, bringing the passengers because they have got their best clothes on, and fear that their claret will start and upset them all together with her wash. Enriching 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 a way on higher 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 right, take care of yourself, yes, I'll come and see you soon, etc., etc. While all this is going on, the eclaire quietly slides down river with the current broadside on as if she smelt her stable at Lembarenne. 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 over side 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 around and sent up river again at full speed. We go on upstream 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 Saumokita, where there is a sub-factor of Meshore's war-mans in charge of which is a white man, the only white man between Lembarenne and Injoli. He comes on board and looks only a boy, but is really aged twenty. He is a Frenchman and was at Hatten and Cookson's first, then he joined war-mans 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 twenty-third. 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 agombe, gombe 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 agombe-gombe. The uniformity of the height of the individual trees in one of these patches is striking, and it arises from their all starting fare. 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 around their domicile. Anyway, there they are all one height, and all one color, and apparently allowing no other vegetation to make any headway among them. But I found, when I carefully investigated agombe-gombe 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 agombe-gombe, 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 quarrel some 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 rouse 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 pent-technicon van to stow away your one or two mushroom-shaped stools, knives and cooking-pots, and a kalabash 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 tattle off with the kalabashes. You have, of course, the gun to carry for sleeping or waking, a fan never parts with this gun, and so there you are, finished, as M. Pitchalt would say, and before your new bark house is up, there grows the agombe-gombe 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 a stronger end who may come conveniently into its neighbourhood to be killed and eaten. Meanwhile, the agombe-gombe grows over the houses of the empty end, pretending it's a plantation belonging to the remaining half. I once heard a newcomer 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 agombe-gombe when I see him. This morning the French official seems sad and melancholy. I fancy he has got a Monday-head, kippling, 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 sand banks 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 cloudware breathes hard and has all she can do to fight her way up against it. The hills 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 Talaguga Mission Station. The cladware forthwith has an hysteric fit on her whistle, so as to frighten M. Forget and get him to jash 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 Injuli, so I decide to go on in the cladware and use her as an hotel while there, and then return and stay with M. M. E. 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 cladware 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 Talaguga Gorge where she to live off fighting it. We run on up past Talaguga Island, where the river broadens out again a little, but not much, and reach Injuli by nightfall, and tie up to a tree by Dumas' factory beach. Usual uproar, but as Mr. Cawks shut says, no mosquitoes. The mosquito belt ends abruptly at O. Sao Mokita. Next morning I go ashore and start on a walk. Early road, bright yellow clay as hard as paving-stone. On each side it is most neatly hedged with pineapples, behind these carefully tended acres of coffee bushes planted in long rows. Certainly coffee is one of the most lively 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 staphonotus-shaped and scented flowers lingers in the air. The country spreads before me a lovely valley encompassed by purple-blue mountains. Pitta Laguga 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 chants of stray travelers 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. Umboloani, says I. I, Imbolo, say they a 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, et cetera. Clearly, this is a ardente acclimatación. 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 in 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. Intend 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. Knowing 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, apologizing humbly for intruding on his domain. He smiles and bows beautifully, but horror, he knows no English, I know French. Situation tres inexplicable et tres interesante, 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 bare-headed 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 anyone 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 Braza in Arab head-care. 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. The 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 wander in our respective languages, but in the words of Mr. Squire's, as mentioned in the classics, we shall do in this air most awful go. We are both going mad with a strain of the situation when in walks the engineer's brother from the Eclair-Rouer. He seems intensely surprised to find me sitting in his friend, the planter's parlor after my grim and retiring conduct, on the Eclair-Rouer my voyage up, but the planter tells him all sowsing 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 tres inexplicables 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 Limbarenne. It seems quite harmless. And then the planter calmed and mopping 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 new 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. We, we, certainmente, 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 you, sucre, more kindly than ever, and when I rose intending to bow myself off and go, geese are no geese, back to the clared word he would not let me go. I must see the plantation, tout 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 cada-wompuses of sorts, walking of one's ankle 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 hillsides 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 laborers, at present only eighty of them. The coffee-planted is of three kinds, the elephant-berry, the Arabian, and the san-tome. During our inspection we only had one serious misunderstanding which arose from my scene, for the first time in my life, tree ferns growing in the Ogoi. 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 the 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 Poe. 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 a point of my umbrella, ejaculating cor-cor, like an agitated crow. When at last they understood that my interest in the firms 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, profidentially behind the geese, and I returned down the road to Injole, where I find Mr. Cockshot 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 eclaire where from the post be just she will be up there from Dumas. Off we go up the road, which skirts the riverbank, 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 center of the river you see Injole 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 Warman's factory, then Hatten and Cookson's, and John Holtz, 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 neighbors. Then Dumas's 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 five hundred miles. Immediately beyond the post is a little river falling into the Ogoe, and on its further bank a small village belonging to a chief, who, hearing of the glorious of the government, came down like the Queen of Shiba, 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. Cockshot hunted the administrator of the Ogoe way 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 colonauts is a supply of cola 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 headman 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 Tahome, who are deported to Injoli, and apparently comfortable and deployed 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 a Dumas, who have come down as a convoy from Fransville, 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 men to talk to. What a blessing he will be conversationally to Fransville when he gets in. The Dumas encampment is very picturesque, for they have got their bright-colored chintz mosquito bars erected as tints. Dr. Pilesier then insists on banging down monkey breadfruit 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 Odika 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 clairvoyeur who, although it is past four o'clock, is still down at Dumas's beach. I feel nearly frantic at detaining the doctor, but neither here nor Mr. Cockshut seem in the least hurry, but at last I can stand it no longer. The vision of the administrator of the Agoway warns out but chewing cola not to keep himself awake all night while he finishes his papers to go down on the clairvoyeur tomorrow morning is too painful, so I say I will walk back to Dumas and go on the clairvoyeur 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's beach, off starts the clairvoyeur with a shriek for the post-beach. So I say goodbye to Mr. Cockshut and go back to the poster to Mr. Pélecher 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. A clairvoyeur has to wait for the administrator until ten because he has not done his males. 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 canonier and they are taking him down to Cape Lopez where they hope to get a ship to take him up to Gabon and to the hospital on the Minerve. I heard subsequently that the poor fellow died about forty hours after leaving in Joli at Achioka in Kama country. We get a wait last and run rapidly down river helped by the terrific current. The clairvoyeur has to call a talaguca for planks from Emgacon's sawmill. As soon as we are past the tail of talaguca island, the clairvoyeur 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 Emforget or Emgacon 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 sheep's engines and she can't hold her own against the current. And then Captain Verder 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 talaguca with a mission station apparently slumbering in the sun. This puts the clairvoyeur 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 Emgacon comes along among the trees on the bank and laughs at her. Our rope is thrown to him and the panting a clairvoyeur tied up to a tree close into 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 Emforget and several canoe loads of beautiful red brown mahogany planks are on board and things being finished I say goodbye to the captain and go off with Emforget in a canoe to the shore. Read by Ghandi of Bahatrek.com