 CHAPTER V. THE RAPIDS OF THE OGOE. The log of an aduma canoe, during a voyage undertaken to the rapids of the river Ogoe, with some account of the diverse disasters that befell thereon. Mme. Forget received me most kindly, and thanks to her ever-thoughtful hospitality, I spent a very pleasant time at Alaguga, wandering about the forest and collecting fishes from the native fishermen, and seeing the strange forms of some of these Talaguga region fishes, and the marked difference between them, and those of Lembarenne. I set my heart on going up into the region of the Ogoe rapids. For some time no one whom I could get hold of regarded it as a feasible scheme, but at last M. Gokhan thought it might be managed. I said I would give a reward of a hundred francs to any one who would lend me a canoe and a crew, and I would pay the working expenses, food, wages, etc. M. Gokhan had a good canoe and could spare me two English-speaking Igalwas, one of whom had been part of the way with M. M. Aligrette and Tia Ceres, when they made their journey up to Fransville, 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 partmento with a few things, got some trade goods, wound up my watch, ascertained the date of the day of the month, and borrowed three hairpins from M. M. E. Forget, then down came disappointment. On my return from the bush that evening, M. M. E. Forget said M. Gokhan said it was impossible. The fans round Tallaguga wouldn't go at any price above Injole, because they were certain they would be killed and eaten by the upriver fans. Internally, consigning the entire tribe to regions where they will get a rise in temperature even on this climate, I went with M. M. E. Forget to M. Gokhan and we talked it over. Finally, M. Gokhan thought he could let me have two more Igaloas 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 Ogoe. I established 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 Igaloa crew, the hull surmounted by the French flag, flying from an indifferent stick. M. and M. M. E. Forget provide me with everything I can possibly require, and say that the blood of half my crew is half alcohol. On the hull 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 Injole, 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 headman, standing in the boughs 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 unseaman-like 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 Igaloa type. We got up just past Telaguga Island, and then tie up against the bank of Emgazanget'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, Inbo, what's the matter, and he answers, with a derisive laugh. He be full, man. He go for tiff, plantain, and don't got shot. Embo does not make it clear where the sin in this affair is exactly located. I expect it is in being full, man. Having got our supply of long-stout poles, we push off and paddle on again. Before we reach, in Joli, I recognize my crew have got the grumbles, and at once inquire into the reason. Embo sadly informs me that they no got chopped, having been provided only with plantain and no meat or fish to eat with it. I promise to get them plenty at in Joli, and contentment settles on the crew and they sing. After about three hours we reach in Joli, and I proceed to interview the authorities. Dr. Pilesier is a way 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 paliver 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 M. M. E. Quinne. 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 Adumas, the proper crew for the rapids, and they are way up river now with a convoy. True, O King, I answer, but Madame Quinne went right up to L'Austerville, 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 societies list in their hints to travellers nor majeurs 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 chopped for my men, and go first to Haddon 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. Bo and the crew beam with satisfaction. Mine is clouded by finding when they have carried off the booty to the canoe, 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 good-bye to the agent. Adieu, mademoiselle, says he in a forever 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 five hundred miles where I can show it off. Away we go, still damp from the rain we have come through, but drawing nicely with a day and cheerful about the chop. The Ogoe is broad at Injole, and its banks not mountainous, as at Talaguga. 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 Injole we are facing our first rapid. Great grey-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 around 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 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 around, 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 sa, 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 it in a manner more befitting an insect than an insect hunter, and then scramble up it into a closed 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 under 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 knives 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 Ogoe. 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. Allegret 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 tomorrow when we wanted to reach Kondo Kondo. So we went against the bank just to ask about the situation and character of the upriver 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 a silence commanding, Azuna! Azuna! And his companions grunted a probation 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 Igalois could do. We hadn't gone two hundred 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 rock 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 onto 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 onto 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 in Jolie every week, poor deers. 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 against and longer till we came to village number two. Village number three, Hovenside, high upon a mountainside soon after, but it was getting dark and the water worse, and the hillsides growing higher and higher into nobly shaped mountains, forming with their forced grazed steep sides a ravine that, in the gathering gloom, looked like an alleyway made of iron for the foaming Ogoe. Village number four we anxiously looked for, village number four we never saw, for round us came the dark, seeming to come out onto 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 earth-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 bejemmed with fireflies, 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 earth-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 polled and paddled. About eight p.m. we came to a corner, a bad one, but we were unable to leap onto 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 Viet Armi's plan, breaking ever and non a pole. About nine-thirty 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 a wash, we survived and got her straight again, and got into her and drove her unmercifully. She struck again and bucked like a bronco, 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 around the rim of the canoe, and the meaning of which I did not understand when I left Taraguga. We sorted ourselves out hastily and set her at it again. Smash went a sorely tried pole and a paddle. Round and round we spun in an exultant whirl-pull, which in a light-hearted, malicious 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 wide water we went. While hitched among the rocks the arrangement of our crew had been altered, Pierre joining Imbo and the bows, this piece of precaution was frustrated by our getting turned around, so our position was what you might call precarious, until we got into another whirl-pull, when we persuaded nature to start us right and on. This was only a matter of minutes, whirl-pulls being plentiful, and then Imbo and Pierre, provided with our surviving poles, stood in the bows to fend us off rocks as we shot towards them, while we mid-ship paddles sat, helping to steer, and when occasion arose, which occasion did with lightning rapidity, to whack the whirl-pulls 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. Mid-ship backed and flapped like fury. Imbo 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 Imbo and Pierre, they were driven back on me, who got flattened onto 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 onto 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 in the middle of the canoe did some very spirited flapping, our whirlpool breaking was no more successful than Imbo and Pierre's fending off, and many a wild waltz we danced that night with the waters of the river Ogoe. 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 bow 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 left them 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 starlit 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, often started among the rock boulders. I would climb up on to a rock table, fall off it on the other side onto 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, broader narrow pools among the rocks, out of that over more rocks, et cetera, et cetera. 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. Imbo 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 Imbo, and when we got to the shore, the rest of the wanderers being collected, we said, chances are there's a village around 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 four to five degrees, Imbo sided 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-matt-built huts, very low and squalid. In its tiny street and a fair 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-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. Imbo secured a—well, I don't exactly know what to call it, for my youth. It was, I fancy, the remains of the village clubhouse. 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-matt 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 lay down with their burning ends propped up, off the ground with stones, and emitting as is their want, a rather mockish but not altogether unpleasant smell, and volumes of smoke which finds its way out through the thatch, living on the inside of it a rich oily varnish of a bright warm brown color. They give a very good light, provided someone 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 headmen 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 men with great self-confidence and superiority. The majority of the village had a slight acquaintance already with this interesting animal being I found a Dumas. They had made a settlement on Kimbe Island some two years or so ago. Then the fans came and attacked to them and killed and ate several. The a Dumas left and fled to the French authority at Indole, and remained under its guarding shadow until the French came up and chastised the fans and burnt their village, and the a Dumas, 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 Kimbe 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 southwest of Fransville, and, as I have already said, are the tribe used by the French authorities to take convoys up and down the Ogoe to Fransville. 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 36-days journey from Indole with good luck. The practical route is via Loango and Brazzaville. The a Dumas told us the convoy which had gone up with a fervent government official had had trouble with the rapids and had spent five days on Condocondo dragging up the canoes empty by means of ropes and chains carrying the cargo that was in them along on land until 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 eleven-ten 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 Ogoe 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 Naoku, on the further side of the river surrounded by his companion peaks, looked his grandest, silhouetted heart 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 this great blunt mass all passage, while away to the northeast a cone- shaped peak showed conspicuous which I afterwards knew as Kangwe. In the darkness round me flitted thousands of fireflies and out beyond this pool of utter night flew by unceasingly the white foam of the rapids, sound there was none to 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 hardwood benches, and, going cautiously under it, I lit a nightlight and read myself asleep with my damp, dilapidated old horrors. Woke at four 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 subsidizing a native to come with us and help us fight the rapids. The greatest breadth of the river channel we now saw in the daylight to be the south-southwest branch this was the one we had been swept into and was almost completely barred by rock. The other one to the north-northwest 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 Kimby 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 sand-banks 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 downstream 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 Kimby Island about eight, and no sooner had we got a float then. 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 traveling at the rate of a northwestern express, but you just raise your eyes, my friend, and look at that bank which is standing very nearly still, and you will realize 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 north northwest, south southeast, 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 got on famously for twenty whole restful minutes which lulls us all into a false sense of security, and my crew sing in bongwei songs descriptive of how they go to their homes to see their wives and families and friends, giving chafing descriptions of their friends, characteristics, and of their failings which cause bursts of laughter from those among us who recognize the illusions, 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 hardly 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 Holties. They have decided to take their next trade to Hatten and Cookson, or vice versa, and then comes the chorus, applauding the wisdom of such a decision, and extolling the excellence of Hatten and Cookson's goods or Holties. These in bongwei and Igalua 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 men 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 ghaz and krumen and bubi, and in all cases the tunes are only voice tunes, not for instrumental performance. The instrumental music consists of that marvelously 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 merimba 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 floored elaboration, very different from the one they fought the rapids to, of sosur, sosur, sosur, sosur, ush, sosur, 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, ringing it well, it sends a 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 tabletop kind, and not those precious, closed 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, sosur, across the river, to have it out with that current. We do, and at its head, find a rapid, and notice on the mountainside a village clearing, the first sign of human habitation we have seen today. Above this rapid we get a treat of still water, the main current of the Ogoe, flying along by the South Bank. On our side there are sand banks 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 stand still, 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-flect 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 Ogoe 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-forced spurs of Lombanyaku. 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 Ogoe 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 Ogoe was rushing down through it. But we clung to the bank and rocks with hands, poles, and paddles, and did it. Really, the worst part was not in the gateway, but just before it. For here there is a great whirlpool. Its center hollowed some one or two feet below its rim. It is caused, my Kim Bay 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 France, 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 shortcut to the lower regions that I had less exploring enthusiasm about it than even about its opposite neighbor, although they told me no man had gone down them thing. Probably that much to be honoured Frenchmen 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 Kenbei island men said that just here abouts 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 subfluvial 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, Kangwei. 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 Kangwei. The name of this mountain is Njoko and the name of the clear small river that apparently monopolizes 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 riverbed comes up in a ridge, too high for much water to come over at the 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 Ogoi, 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 east northeast. 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 Ogoi 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 recognized a new sound. The rush and roar of the Ogoi 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 Umbo, 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 walls seized 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 Mount 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 grey blues and purples, those nearer indigo and black. We soon passed these 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 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 Aduma from Kenbei Island especially drew my attention to this shrub, telling me his people who worked to 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 lifelines, 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 Ogoe 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, held strong 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 the 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 and all sides flickered the fireflies, 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 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 Ogoe rapids, for I have done so already sufficiently to make you understand the sort of work going up them in tales, 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 traversed 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 Eclair Oire. He would have been truly great in his description of his voyage to Fransville. I wonder how he would have done his unpacking of canoes, and his experiences on condo-condo 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 Fransville, and I hope also to the good fathers at Lestorville, for those places must be just slightly somber 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. Mbou 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 off 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. Mbou did not see this, but was too good a question 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 forever over the Ogoe 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 Mbou did not quite come off, and a mist 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 Ogoe, irritated at the hindrance we were occasioning, but we never met the rocks of Mbou'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 center of the swiftest part of the current in order to void them. The grandest part of the whole time was coming down below the Alemba, where the whole great Ogoe 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 a 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 Ogoe in a most dangerous manner. I hope to see the Ogoe next time in the wet season. There must be several more of these great sheets of water than 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 amphitheater in the Sierra del Cristal. End of Chapter 5 The Rapids of Ogoe Read by Kehinde of Bahatrek.com Part 1 of Chapter 6 Lemborene of Travels in West Africa This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Travels in West Africa by Mary H. Kingsley. Part 1 of Chapter 6 Lemborene In which is given some account of the episode of the hippopotame and of the voyager's attempts at controlling an Ogoe canoe and also of the Igalwa tribe. I say good-bye to Talaguga with much regret and go on board the eclaire when she returns from Injole 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 semen-like form through the nearest door out onto 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, he 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 onto 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 can find myself to woman's true sphere and assist in a humble way by catching the wine and vicky water bottles, glasses and plates of food which at every performance are jeopardized by the members of the nobler sex starting off with a considerable quantity of the ample tablecloth 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 warman's agent, Forinjole, as to who shall reach Limbarenne first, and the German agent has started off some time before they declare war 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 Ogoway 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 warman's launch having passed down. He communicates this to the engineer. It is impossible she could have passed the cladware since they started, therefore she must be somewhere behind it at a sub-factory. Ne se passe? Oui, oui, certainment, says the engineer. The engineer is by these considerations all so lulled and feels he may do something else but scan the river, Allah, sister Anne. 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 refved by an inchoate howl of agony. I drop my little work and take to the deck, but it is after all only that shy retiring young man practicing secretly on his clarionette. 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 sand banks, where the Hippopotame should be, but I can't 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 for me to recognize the four stumps as the deceased legs, and soon the canoe is alongside them and makes fast to one, and then starts to paddle back, hippo and all, to the cladwer. But no such thing, let them paddle and shout as hard as they like. The hippo's weight simply anchors them. The cladwer by now has dropped down the river past them and has to sweep round and run back. Recognizing promptly what the trouble is, the energetic captain grabs up a broom, ties a light cord belonging to the lead line 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 someone, 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 chargeware ruinist 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 shutter 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. The heavy haulser which has been paid out after it has dragged it down, so he hauls it on board again. The cladware 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 the 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 cladware 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 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 downstairs again. By looking down the ladder I can see the pink, pig-like hippo whose color has been soaked out by the water, lying on the lower deck, in the captain and engineer, slitting down the skin intent on gallaging operations. Providentially my prophetic soul induces me to leave the top of the ladder and go forward, run to Winnerd, 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 to go as one man for the brandy bottle, and they wanted it if every 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 Lembareni who got dashes of it on our arrival there. Hippo flesh is not to be despised by black men 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 Clair d'Or all night, for it was dark when we reached Lembareni, 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 Lembareni district and saw and learned many things, I owe most of what I learned to M and Mme Jakot, 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 Lembareni's shrieks of laughter now, and to myself they gave great pleasure. My first attempt was made at Talaguga one very hot afternoon. M and Mme forget were, I thought, safe having their siestas. Orani was with Mme Jakot. I knew where Mme Jakot was for certain. She was with M Jakot, 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 gave a little stretch of slack water between the bank and the mill-race-like current of the Ogoe, 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, learned how to paddle standing up by and by, good so far. I rapidly learned how to steer from the bow, but I could not get up any pace. Intend 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, eye-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 slipping 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 via 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 piece of information regarding navigation that would be applicable to the management of long-tailed aduma 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 presupposed 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 the 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 M. M. E. forget, M. M. Gakan, M. Gakan 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 diver's 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 crapped 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 advise 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. Per chance, thought I, the pace region in a canoe may be in its center, so I got along on my knees into the center to experiment. Bitter failure, the canoe took to Siddling Down River, broadside on like Mr. Winkle's horse. Shouts of laughter from the bank. Both bow and stern education utterly inapplicable to center, and so, seeing I was utterly thrown away there, I crept into the boughs, and in a few more minutes I steered my canoe, perfectly in among its fellows by the bank, and secured it there. M. M. E., 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, Tito tumming 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 T, 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 in depth of the river, got alarmed. Well, when I got down to Limbarene 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 Dr. Gunther has approved of my fishes, and the other is that I can paddle an Ogoe canoe. Pace, style, steering, and all, all same for one, as if I were an Ogoe 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. M. M. E. Jacotte gave me every help in canoeing, for she is a remarkably clear-headed woman, and recognized 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 sand-banks were showing their yellow heads in all directions when I came down from Talaguga, 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 sand-bank, and every day was visited by the boys and girls in canoes to see how much longer they would have to wait for the sand-bank'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 center of the clear water. Clear here, down this side of Lembarini Island, because the river runs fairly quiet and has time to deposit its mud. Dark brown the Ogoi 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. Canoelode after canoelode of boys and girls went to the sand-bank, some doing a little fishing around its rim, others bringing the washing there, all sky-larking and singing. Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sand-bank, the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it, the gaudy-coloured patchwork quilts, and chins mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangue 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 sand-bank and they kept them up very late, and all the time there came from it a soft murmur of laughter and song. Ami. 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 sand-bank, and this was that M. M. E. Jacquotte found such pleasure in taking her work on to the veranda 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, you do 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. Jacquotte was a fine, powerful, energetic man in the prime of life. He was a teetotailer 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 around his hospital 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 Ogoa district. He was, when I left, busily employed in compiling a dictionary of the fan-tongue and had many other works on language and 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 M. M. Jacote in the evenings would sing old French songs, Swiss songs, English songs in their rich full voices, and then if you stole softly out onto the veranda you would often find it crowded with a silent black audience listening intently. The amount of work M. and M. M. Jacote used to get through was to me amazing, and I think that the Ogoa Protestant mission sadly shorthanded 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 Evangelique go to and fro throughout the district round each station on evangelizing work among some of the most dangerous and uncivilized 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 Ogoa districts because when you have got a clearing made in all the buildings up you have by no means finished with the affair for you have to fight the Ogoa 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 Ogoaway 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 in which I will speak of later they have not even the brass bars and cheetahs that are in use 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 check which is called a bond or book and these bonds are cashed i.e. good at the store they are for three amounts five fura a dollar one fura a frank desu fifty centimes half a fura the value given for these bonds is the same from government trade and mission although the mission evangelical 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 laborers on the stations are paid off in this bonds and when any representative of the mission is away on a journey food bought for themselves and their canoe cruise is paid for in bonds 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 bonds a 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 kameroons a crew cheap copper and you have a lot of worry to affect 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 kongo francès 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 bond out in boom a 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 bond for a week's bush catering he is in kongo francès incapable of deciding what he will have when it comes to the point he comes into the shop with a bond in his hand and we will say for example the idea in his head that he wants fish hooks jupez he calls them but confronted with a 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 wife 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 desires of changing it for some other article or articles remember also that these ban too like the negroes think externally in a loud voice like mr. Kipling's aunt he smells most awful vile and if he be a fan he accompanies his observations with violent dramatic gestures and let the customers 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 companion's 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 storework 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 evangelique schools does not include teaching the boys trades the girls fare somewhat better as they get instructions 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 out for improvement they having just the very easiest and laziest way possible of dealing with food the food supply consists of plantain yam coco sweet potatoes maize pumpkin pineapple and okris fish both wet and smoked and flesh of many kinds including human in certain districts snails snakes and crayfish and big maggot-like pupae of the rhinoceros beetle and the rincoforus palmatorum for sweetmeats the sugarcane abounds but it is only used chewed on natural for seasoning there is that bark that tastes like an onion an onion distinctly passe but powerful and permanent particularly if it has been used in one of the native made rough earthen pots these pots have a very cavemen look about them there are unglazed unlitid 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 color they impart to even your own white rice out of all these varied material the natives of the congo frances forests produce dirtily carelessly and wastefully a dull indigestible diet yam sweet potatoes okras and amaze are not so much cultivated or used as among the negroes and the daily food is practically plantain picked wild 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 is 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 under 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 fufu on the leeward kank on the windward envada in corisco oguma in the ogoe 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 smelled 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 civilized equivalent i believe that this way of preparing the staple article of diet is largely responsible for that dire and frequent disease caught 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 fresher 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 a toothsome taste and texture of a piece of old tarpaulin and of part one of chapter six read by cahinde of bahatrack.com