In which the voyager goes for bush again and wanders into a new lake
and a new river.
July 22nd, 1895.--Left Kangwe. The four Ajumba {170} did not turn
up early in the morning as had been arranged, but arrived about
eight, in pouring rain, so decided to wait until two o'clock, which
will give us time to reach their town of Arevooma before nightfall,
and may perhaps give us a chance of arriving there dry. At two we
start. We go down river on the Kangwe side of Lembarene Island,
make a pause in front of the Igalwa slave town, which is on the
Island and nearly opposite the Fan town of Fula on the mainland
bank, our motive being to get stores of yam and plantain--and
magnificent specimens of both we get--and then, when our canoe is
laden with them to an extent that would get us into trouble under
the Act if it ran here, off we go again. Every canoe we meet shouts
us a greeting, and asks where we are going, and we say "Rembwe"--and
they say "What! Rembwe!"--and we say "Yes, Rembwe," and paddle on.
I lay among the luggage for about an hour, not taking much interest
in the Rembwe or anything else, save my own headache; but this soon
lifted, and I was able to take notice, just before we reached the
Ajumba's town, called Arevooma. The sandbanks stretch across the
river here nearly awash, so all our cargo of yams has to be thrown
overboard on to the sand, from which they can be collected by being
waded out to. The canoe, thus lightened, is able to go on a little
further, but we are soon hard and fast again, and the crew have to
jump out and shove her off about once every five minutes, and then
to look lively about jumping back into her again, as she shoots over
the cliffs of the sandbanks.
When we reach Arevooma, I find it is a very prettily situated town,
on the left-hand bank of the river--clean and well kept, and
composed of houses built on the Igalwa and M'pongwe plan with walls
of split bamboo and a palm thatch roof. I own I did not much care
for these Ajumbas on starting, but they are evidently going to be
kind and pleasant companions. One of them is a gentlemanly-looking
man, who wears a gray shirt; another looks like a genial Irishman
who has accidentally got black, very black; he is distinguished by
wearing a singlet; another is a thin, elderly man, notably silent;
and the remaining one is a strapping, big fellow, as black as a
wolf's mouth, of gigantic muscular development, and wearing
quantities of fetish charms hung about him. The two first mentioned
are Christians; the other two pagans, and I will refer to them by
their characteristic points, for their honourable names are awfully
alike when you do hear them, and, as is usual with Africans, rarely
used in conversation.
Gray Shirt places his house at my disposal, and both he and his
exceedingly pretty wife do their utmost to make me comfortable. The
house lies at the west end of the town. It is one room inside, but
has, I believe, a separate cooking shed. In the verandah in front
is placed a table, an ivory bundle chair and a gourd of water, and I
am also treated to a calico tablecloth, and most thoughtfully
screened off from the public gaze with more calico so that I can
have my tea in privacy. After this meal, to my surprise Ndaka turns
up. Certainly he is one of the very ugliest men--black or white--I
have ever seen, and I fancy one of the best. He is now on a holiday
from Kangwe, seeing to the settlement of his dead brother's affairs.
The dead brother was a great man in Arevooma and a pagan, but Ndaka,
the Christian Bible-reader, seems to get on perfectly with the
family and is holding tonight a meeting outside his brother's house
and comes with a lantern to fetch me to attend it. Of course I have
to go, headache or no headache.
Most of the town was there, mainly as spectators. Ndaka and my two
Christian boatmen manage the service between them, and what with the
hymns and the mosquitoes the experience is slightly awful. We sit
in a line in front of the house, which is brilliantly lit up--our
own lantern on the ground before us acting as a rival entertainment
to the house lamps inside for some of the best insect society in
Africa, who after the manner of the insect world, insist on
regarding us as responsible for their own idiocy in getting singed;
and sting us in revenge, while we slap hard, as we howl hymns in the
fearful Igalwa and M'pongwe way. Next to an English picnic, the
most uncomfortable thing I know is an open-air service in this part
of Africa. Service being over, Ndaka takes me over the house to
show its splendours. The great brilliancy of its illumination
arises from its being lit by two hanging lamps burning paraffin oil.
The most remarkable point about the house is the floor, which is
made of split, plaited bamboo. It gives under your feet in an
alarming way, being raised some three or four feet above the ground,
and I am haunted by the fear that I shall go through it and give
pain to myself, and great trouble to others before I could be got
out. It is a beautiful piece of workmanship, and Arevooma has every
reason to be proud of it. Having admired these things, I go, dead
tired and still headachy, down the road with my host who carries the
lantern, through an atmosphere that has 45 per cent. of solid matter
in the shape of mosquitoes; then wishing him good-night, I shut
myself in, and illuminate, humbly, with a candle. The furniture of
the house consists mainly of boxes, containing the wealth of Gray
Shirt, in clothes, mirrors, etc. One corner of the room is taken up
by great calabashes full of some sort of liquor, and there is an
ivory bundle chair, a hanging mirror, several rusty guns, and a
considerable collection of china basins and jugs. Evidently Gray
Shirt is rich. The most interesting article to me, however, just
now is the bed hung over with a clean, substantial, chintz mosquito
bar, and spread with clean calico and adorned with patchwork-covered
pillows. So I take off my boots and put on my slippers; for it
never does in this country to leave off boots altogether at anytime
and risk getting bitten by mosquitoes on the feet, when you are on
the march; because the rub of your boot on the bite always produces
a sore, and a sore when it comes in the Gorilla country, comes to
stay.
No sooner have I carefully swished all the mosquitoes from under the
bar and turned in, than a cat scratches and mews at the door--turn
out and let her in. She is evidently a pet, so I take her on to the
bed with me. She is a very nice cat--sandy and fat--and if I held
the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl, I should have no
hesitation in saying she had in her the soul of Dame Juliana
Berners, such a whole-souled devotion to sport does she display,
dashing out through the flaps of the mosquito bar after rats which,
amid squeals from the rats and curses from her, she kills amongst
the china collection. Then she comes to me, triumphant, expecting
congratulations, and accompanied by mosquitoes, and purrs and kneads
upon my chest until she hears another rat.
Tuesday, July 23rd.--Am aroused by violent knocking at the door in
the early gray dawn--so violent that two large centipedes and a
scorpion drop on to the bed. They have evidently been tucked away
among the folds of the bar all night. Well "when ignorance is bliss
'tis folly to be wise," particularly along here. I get up without
delay, and find myself quite well. The cat has thrown a basin of
water neatly over into my bag during her nocturnal hunts; and when
my tea comes I am informed a man "done die" in the night, which
explains the firing of guns I heard. I inquire what he has died of,
and am told "He just truck luck, and then he die." His widows are
having their faces painted white by sympathetic lady friends, and
are attired in their oldest, dirtiest clothes, and but very few of
them; still, they seem to be taking things in a resigned spirit.
These Ajumba seem pleasant folk. They play with their pretty brown
children in a taking way. Last night I noticed some men and women
playing a game new to me, which consisted in throwing a hoop at each
other. The point was to get the hoop to fall over your adversary's
head. It is a cheerful game. Quantities of the common house-fly
about--and, during the early part of the morning, it rains in a
gentle kind of way; but soon after we are afloat in our canoe it
turns into a soft white mist.
We paddle still westwards down the broad quiet waters of the O'Rembo
Vongo. I notice great quantities of birds about here--great
hornbills, vividly coloured kingfishers, and for the first time the
great vulture I have often heard of, and the skin of which I will
take home before I mention even its approximate spread of wing.
There are also noble white cranes, and flocks of small black and
white birds, new to me, with heavy razor-shaped bills, reminding one
of the Devonian puffin. The hornbill is perhaps the most striking
in appearance. It is the size of a small, or say a good-sized hen
turkey. Gray Shirt says the flocks, which are of eight or ten,
always have the same quantity of cocks and hens, and that they live
together "white man fashion," i.e. each couple keeping together.
They certainly do a great deal of courting, the cock filling out his
wattles on his neck like a turkey, and spreading out his tail with
great pomp and ceremony, but very awkwardly. To see hornbills on a
bare sandbank is a solemn sight, but when they are dodging about in
the hippo grass they sink ceremony, and roll and waddle, looking--my
man said--for snakes and the little sand-fish, which are close in
under the bank; and their killing way of dropping their jaws--I
should say opening their bills--when they are alarmed is comic. I
think this has something to do with their hearing, for I often saw
two or three of them in a line on a long branch, standing, stretched
up to their full height, their great eyes opened wide, and all with
their great beaks open, evidently listening for something. Their
cry is most peculiar and can only be mistaken for a native horn; and
although there seems little variety in it to my ear, there must be
more to theirs, for they will carry on long confabulations with each
other across a river, and, I believe, sit up half the night and talk
scandal.
There were plenty of plantain-eaters here, but, although their
screech was as appalling as I have heard in Angola, they were not
regarded, by the Ajumba at any rate, as being birds of evil omen, as
they are in Angola. Still, by no means all the birds here only
screech and squark. Several of them have very lovely notes. There
is one who always gives a series of infinitely beautiful, soft,
rich-toned whistles just before the first light of the dawn shows in
the sky, and one at least who has a prolonged and very lovely song.
This bird, I was told in Gaboon, is called Telephonus erythropterus.
I expect an ornithologist would enjoy himself here, but I cannot--
and will not--collect birds. I hate to have them killed any how,
and particularly in the barbarous way in which these natives kill
them.
The broad stretch of water looks like a long lake. In all
directions sandbanks are showing their broad yellow backs, and there
will be more showing soon, for it is not yet the height of the dry.
We are perpetually grounding on those which by next month will be
above water. These canoes are built, I believe, more with a view to
taking sandbanks comfortably than anything else; but they are by no
means yet sufficiently specialised for getting off them. Their flat
bottoms enable them to glide on to the banks, and sit there, without
either upsetting or cutting into the sand, as a canoe with a keel
would; but the trouble comes in when you are getting off the steep
edge of the bank, and the usual form it takes is upsetting. So far
my Ajumba friends have only tried to meet this difficulty by tying
the cargo in.
I try to get up the geography of this region conscientiously.
Fortunately I find Gray Shirt, Singlet, and Pagan can speak trade
English. None of them, however, seem to recognise a single blessed
name on the chart, which is saying nothing against the chart and its
makers, who probably got their names up from M'pongwes and Igalwas
instead of Ajumba, as I am trying to. Geographical research in this
region is fraught with difficulty, I find, owing to different tribes
calling one and the same place by different names; and I am sure the
Royal Geographical Society ought to insert among their "Hints" that
every traveller in this region should carefully learn every separate
native word, or set of words, signifying "I don't know,"--four
villages and two rivers I have come across out here solemnly set
down with various forms of this statement, for their native name.
Really I think the old Portuguese way of naming places after Saints,
etc., was wiser in the long run, and it was certainly pleasanter to
the ear. My Ajumba, however, know about my Ngambi and the Vinue all
right and Eliva z'Ayzingo, so I must try and get cross bearings from
these.
We have an addition to our crew this morning--a man who wants to go
and get work at John Holt's sub-factory away on the Rembwe. He has
been waiting a long while at Arevooma, unable to get across, I am
told, because the road is now stopped between Ayzingo and the Rembwe
by "those fearful Fans." "How are we going to get through that
way?" says I, with natural feminine alarm. "We are not, sir," says
Gray Shirt. This is what Lady MacDonald would term a chatty little
incident; and my hair begins to rise as I remember what I have been
told about those Fans and the indications I have already seen of its
being true when on the Upper Ogowe. Now here we are going to try to
get through the heart of their country, far from a French station,
and without the French flag. Why did I not obey Mr. Hudson's orders
not to go wandering about in a reckless way! Anyhow I am in for it,
and Fortune favours the brave. The only question is: Do I
individually come under this class? I go into details. It seems
Pagan thinks he can depend on the friendship of two Fans he once met
and did business with, and who now live on an island in Lake Ncovi--
Ncovi is not down on my map and I have never heard of it before--
anyhow thither we are bound now.
Each man has brought with him his best gun, loaded to the muzzle,
and tied on to the baggage against which I am leaning--the muzzles
sticking out each side of my head: the flint locks covered with
cases, or sheaths, made of the black-haired skins of gorillas,
leopard skin, and a beautiful bright bay skin, which I do not know,
which they say is bush cow--but they call half a dozen things bush
cow. These guns are not the "gas-pipes" I have seen up north; but
decent rifles which have had the rifling filed out and the locks
replaced by flint locks and converted into muzzle loaders, and many
of them have beautiful barrels. I find the Ajumba name for the
beautiful shrub that has long bunches of red, yellow and cream-
coloured young leaves at the end of its branches is "obaa." I also
learn that in their language ebony and a monkey have one name. The
forest on either bank is very lovely. Some enormously high columns
of green are formed by a sort of climbing plant having taken
possession of lightning-struck trees, and in one place it really
looks exactly as if some one had spread a great green coverlet over
the forest, so as to keep it dry. No high land showing in any
direction. Pagan tells me the extinguisher-shaped juju filled with
medicine and made of iron is against drowning--the red juju is "for
keep foot in path." Beautiful effect of a gleam of sunshine
lighting up a red sandbank till it glows like the Nibelungen gold.
Indeed the effects are Turneresque to-day owing to the mist, and the
sun playing in and out among it.
The sandbanks now have their cliffs to the N.N.W. and N.W. At 9.30,
the broad river in front of us is apparently closed by sandbanks
which run out from the banks thus: -
yellow}
S. bank bright-red} N. bank.
yellow}
Current running strong along south bank. This bank bears testimony
of this also being the case in the wet season, for a fringe of torn-
down trees hangs from it into the river. Pass Seke, a town on north
bank, interchanging the usual observations regarding our
destination. The river seems absolutely barred with sand again; but
as we paddle down it, the obstructions resolve themselves into spits
of sand from the north bank and the largest island in mid-stream,
which also has a long tail, or train, of sandbank down river. Here
we meet a picturesque series of canoes, fruit and trade laden, being
poled up stream, one man with his pole over one side, the other with
his pole over the other, making a St. Andrew's cross as you meet
them end on.
Most luxurious, charming, and pleasant trip this. The men are
standing up swinging in rhythmic motion their long, rich red wood
paddles in perfect time to their elaborate melancholy, minor key
boat song. Nearly lost with all hands. Sandbank palaver--only when
we were going over the end of it, the canoe slips sideways over its
edge. River deep, bottom sand and mud. This information may be
interesting to the geologist, but I hope I shall not be converted by
circumstances into a human sounding apparatus again to-day. Next
time she strikes I shall get out and shove behind.
We are now skirting the real north bank, and not the bank of an
island or islands as we have been for some time heretofore. Lovely
stream falls into this river over cascades. The water is now rough
in a small way and the width of the river great, but it soon is
crowded again with wooded islands. There are patches and wreaths of
a lovely, vermilion-flowering bush rope decorating the forest, and
now and again clumps of a plant that shows a yellow and crimson
spike of bloom, very strikingly beautiful. We pass a long tunnel in
the bush, quite dark as you look down it--evidently the path to some
native town. The south bank is covered, where the falling waters
have exposed it, with hippo grass. Terrible lot of mangrove flies
about, although we are more than one hundred miles above the
mangrove belt. River broad again--tending W.S.W., with a broad
flattened island with attributive sandbanks in the middle. The fair
way is along the south bank of the river. Gray Shirt tells me this
river is called the O'Rembo Vongo, or small River, so as to
distinguish it from the main stream of the Ogowe which goes down
past the south side of Lembarene Island, as well I know after that
canoe affair of mine. Ayzingo now bears due north--and native
mahogany is called "Okooma." Pass village called Welli on north
bank. It looks like some gipsy caravans stuck on poles. I expect
that village has known what it means to be swamped by the rising
river; it looks as if it had, very hastily in the middle of some
night, taken to stilts, which I am sure, from their present rickety
condition, will not last through the next wet season, and then some
unfortunate spirit will get the blame of the collapse. I also learn
that it is the natal spot of my friend Kabinda, the carpenter at
Andande. Now if some of these good people I know would only go and
distinguish themselves, I might write a sort of county family
history of these parts; but they don't, and I fancy won't. For
example, the entrance--or should I say the exit?--of a broadish
little river is just away on the south bank. If you go up this
river--it runs S.E.--you get to a good-sized lake; in this lake
there is an island called Adole; then out of the other side of the
lake there is another river which falls into the Ogowe main stream--
but that is not the point of the story, which is that on that island
of Adole, Ngouta, the interpreter, first saw the light. Why he ever
did--there or anywhere--Heaven only knows! I know I shall never
want to write his biography.
On the western bank end of that river going to Adole, there is an
Igalwa town, notable for a large quantity of fine white ducks and a
clump of Indian bamboo. My informants say, "No white man ever live
for this place," so I suppose the ducks and bamboo have been
imported by some black trader whose natal spot this is. The name of
this village is Wanderegwoma. Stuck on sandbank--I flew out and
shoved behind, leaving Ngouta to do the balancing performances in
the stern. This O'Rembo Vongo divides up just below here, I am
told, when we have re-embarked, into three streams. One goes into
the main Ogowe opposite Ayshouka in Nkami country--Nkami country
commences at Ayshouka and goes to the sea--one into the Ngumbi, and
one into the Nunghi--all in the Ouroungou country. Ayzingo now lies
N.E. according to Gray Shirt's arm. On our river there is here
another broad low island with its gold-coloured banks shining out,
seemingly barring the entire channel, but there is really a canoe
channel along by both banks.
We turn at this point into a river on the north bank that runs north
and south--the current is running very swift to the north. We run
down into it, and then, it being more than time enough for chop, we
push the canoe on to a sandbank in our new river, which I am told is
the Karkola. I, after having had my tea, wander off, and find
behind our high sandbank, which like all the other sandbanks above
water now, is getting grown over with hippo grass--a fine light
green grass, the beloved food of both hippo and manatee--a forest,
and entering this I notice a succession of strange mounds or heaps,
made up of branches, twigs, and leaves, and dead flowers. Many of
these heaps are recent, while others have fallen into decay.
Investigation shows they are burial places. Among the debris of an
old one there are human bones, and out from one of the new ones
comes a stench and a hurrying, exceedingly busy line of ants,
demonstrating what is going on. I own I thought these mounds were
some kind of bird's or animal's nest. They look entirely unhuman in
this desolate reach of forest. Leaving these, I go down to the
water edge of the sand, and find in it a quantity of pools of
varying breadth and expanse, but each surrounded by a rim of dark
red-brown deposit, which you can lift off the sand in a skin. On
the top of the water is a film of exquisite iridescent colours like
those on a soap bubble, only darker and brighter. In the river
alongside the sand, there are thousands of those beautiful little
fish with a black line each side of their tails. They are perfectly
tame, and I feed them with crumbs in my hand. After making every
effort to terrify the unknown object containing the food--gallant
bulls, quite two inches long, sidling up and snapping at my fingers-
-they come and feed right in the palm, so that I could have caught
them by the handful had I wished. There are also a lot of those
weird, semi-transparent, yellow, spotted little sandfish with cup-
shaped pectoral fins, which I see they use to enable them to make
their astoundingly long leaps. These fish are of a more nervous and
distrustful disposition, and hover round my hand but will not come
into it. Indeed I do not believe the other cheeky little fellows
would allow them to.
The men, having had their rest and their pipes, shout for me, and
off we go again. The Karkola {181} soon widens to about 100 feet;
it is evidently very deep here; the right bank (the east) is
forested, the left, low and shrubbed, one patch looking as if it
were being cleared for a plantation, but no village showing. A big
rock shows up on the right bank, which is a change from the clay and
sand, and soon the whole character of the landscape changes. We
come to a sharp turn in the river, from north and south to east and
west--the current very swift. The river channel dodges round
against a big bank of sword grass, and then widens out to the
breadth of the Thames at Putney. I am told that a river runs out of
it here to the west to Ouroungou country, and so I imagine this
Karkola falls ultimately into the Nazareth. We skirt the eastern
banks, which are covered with low grass with a scanty lot of trees
along the top. High land shows in the distance to the S.S.W. and
S.W., and then we suddenly turn up into a broad river or straith,
shaping our course N.N.E. On the opposite bank, on a high dwarf
cliff, is a Fan town. "All Fan now," says Singlet in anything but a
gratified tone of voice.
It is a strange, wild, lonely bit of the world we are now in,
apparently a lake or broad--full of sandbanks, some bare and some in
the course of developing into permanent islands by the growth on
them of that floating coarse grass, any joint of which being torn
off either by the current, a passing canoe, or hippos, floats down
and grows wherever it settles. Like most things that float in these
parts, it usually settles on a sandbank, and then grows in much the
same way as our couch grass grows on land in England, so as to form
a network, which catches for its adopted sandbank all sorts of
floating debris; so the sandbank comes up in the world. The waters
of the wet season when they rise drown off the grass; but when they
fall, up it comes again from the root, and so gradually the sandbank
becomes an island and persuades real trees and shrubs to come and
grow on it, and its future is then secured.
We skirt alongside a great young island of this class; the sword
grass some ten or fifteen feet high. It has not got any trees on it
yet, but by next season or so it doubtless will have. The grass is
stabbled down into paths by hippos, and just as I have realised who
are the road-makers, they appear in person. One immense fellow,
hearing us, stands up and shows himself about six feet from us in
the grass, gazes calmly, and then yawns a yawn a yard wide and
grunts his news to his companions, some of whom--there is evidently
a large herd--get up and stroll towards us with all the flowing
grace of Pantechnicon vans in motion. We put our helm paddles hard
a starboard and leave that bank.
Our hasty trip across to the bank of the island on the other side
being accomplished, we, in search of seclusion and in the hope that
out of sight would mean out of mind to hippos, shot down a narrow
channel between semi-island sandbanks, and those sandbanks, if you
please, are covered with specimens--as fine a set of specimens as
you could wish for--of the West African crocodile. These
interesting animals are also having their siestas, lying sprawling
in all directions on the sand, with their mouths wide open. One
immense old lady has a family of lively young crocodiles running
over her, evidently playing like a lot of kittens. The heavy musky
smell they give off is most repulsive, but we do not rise up and
make a row about this, because we feel hopelessly in the wrong in
intruding into these family scenes uninvited, and so apologetically
pole ourselves along rapidly, not even singing. The pace the canoe
goes down that channel would be a wonder to Henley Regatta. When
out of ear-shot I ask Pagan whether there are many gorillas,
elephants, or bush cows round here. "Plenty too much," says he; and
it occurs to me that the corn-fields are growing golden green away
in England; and soon there rises up in my mental vision a picture
that fascinated my youth in the Fliegende Blatter, representing
"Friedrich Gerstaeker auf der Reise." That gallant man is depicted
tramping on a serpent, new to M. Boulenger, while he attempts to
club, with the butt end of his gun, a most lively savage who,
accompanied by a bison, is attacking him in front. A terrific and
obviously enthusiastic crocodile is grabbing the tail of the
explorer's coat, and the explorer says "Hurrah! das gibt wieder
einen prachtigen Artikel fur Die Allgemeine Zeitung." I do not know
where in the world Gerstaeker was at the time, but I should fancy
hereabouts. My vigorous and lively conscience also reminds me that
the last words a most distinguished and valued scientific friend had
said to me before I left home was, "Always take measurements, Miss
Kingsley, and always take them from the adult male." I know I have
neglected opportunities of carrying this commission out on both
those banks, but I do not feel like going back. Besides, the men
would not like it, and I have mislaid my yard measure.
The extent of water, dotted with sandbanks and islands in all
directions, here is great, and seems to be fringed uniformly by low
swampy land, beyond which, to the north, rounded lumps of hills show
blue. On one of the islands is a little white house which I am told
was once occupied by a black trader for John Holt. It looks a
desolate place for any man to live in, and the way the crocodiles
and hippo must have come up on the garden ground in the evening time
could not have enhanced its charms to the average cautious man. My
men say, "No man live for that place now." The factory, I believe,
has been, for some trade reason, abandoned. Behind it is a great
clump of dark-coloured trees. The rest of the island is now covered
with hippo grass looking like a beautifully kept lawn. We lie up
for a short rest at another island, also a weird spot in its way,
for it is covered with a grove of only one kind of tree, which has a
twisted, contorted, gray-white trunk and dull, lifeless-looking,
green, hard foliage.
I learn that these good people, to make topographical confusion
worse confounded, call a river by one name when you are going up it,
and by another when you are coming down; just as if you called the
Thames the London when you were going up, and the Greenwich when you
were coming down. The banks all round this lake or broad, seem all
light-coloured sand and clay. We pass out of it into a channel.
Current flowing north. As we are entering the channel between banks
of grass-overgrown sand, a superb white crane is seen standing on
the sand edge to the left. Gray Shirt attempts to get a shot at it,
but it--alarmed at our unusual appearance--raises itself up with one
of those graceful preliminary curtseys, and after one or two
preliminary flaps spreads its broad wings and sweeps away, with its
long legs trailing behind it like a thing on a Japanese screen.
The river into which we ran zigzags about, and then takes a course
S.S.E. It is studded with islands slightly higher than those we
have passed, and thinly clad with forest. The place seems alive
with birds; flocks of pelican and crane rise up before us out of the
grass, and every now and then a crocodile slides off the bank into
the water. Wonderfully like old logs they look, particularly when
you see one letting himself roll and float down on the current. In
spite of these interests I began to wonder where in this lonely land
we were to sleep to-night. In front of us were miles of distant
mountains, but in no direction the slightest sign of human
habitation. Soon we passed out of our channel into a lovely,
strangely melancholy, lonely-looking lake--Lake Ncovi, my friends
tell me. It is exceedingly beautiful. The rich golden sunlight of
the late afternoon soon followed by the short-lived, glorious
flushes of colour of the sunset and the after-glow, play over the
scene as we paddle across the lake to the N.N.E.--our canoe leaving
a long trail of frosted silver behind her as she glides over the
mirror-like water, and each stroke of the paddle sending down air
with it to come up again in luminous silver bubbles--not as before
in swirls of sand and mud. The lake shore is, in all directions,
wreathed with nobly forested hills, indigo and purple in the dying
daylight. On the N.N.E. and N.E. these come directly down into the
lake; on N.W., N., S.W., and S.E. there is a band of well-forested
ground, behind which they rise. In the north and north-eastern part
of the lake several exceedingly beautiful wooded islands show, with
gray rocky beaches and dwarf cliffs.
Sign of human habitation at first there was none; and in spite of
its beauty, there was something which I was almost going to say was
repulsive. The men evidently felt the same as I did. Had any one
told me that the air that lay on the lake was poison, or that in
among its forests lay some path to regions of utter death, I should
have said--"It looks like that"; but no one said anything, and we
only looked round uneasily, until the comfortable-souled Singlet
made the unfortunate observation that he "smelt blood." {185} We
all called him an utter fool to relieve our minds, and made our way
towards the second island. When we got near enough to it to see
details, a large village showed among the trees on its summit, and a
steep dwarf cliff, overgrown with trees and creeping plants came
down to a small beach covered with large water-washed gray stones.
There was evidently some kind of a row going on in that village,
that took a lot of shouting too. We made straight for the beach,
and drove our canoe among its outlying rocks, and then each of my
men stowed his paddle quickly, slung on his ammunition bag, and
picked up his ready loaded gun, sliding the skin sheath off the
lock. Pagan got out on to the stones alongside the canoe just as
the inhabitants became aware of our arrival, and, abandoning what I
hope was a mass meeting to remonstrate with the local authorities on
the insanitary state of the town, came--a brown mass of naked
humanity--down the steep cliff path to attend to us, whom they
evidently regarded as an Imperial interest. Things did not look
restful, nor these Fans personally pleasant. Every man among them--
no women showed--was armed with a gun, and they loosened their
shovel-shaped knives in their sheaths as they came, evidently
regarding a fight quite as imminent as we did. They drew up about
twenty paces from us in silence. Pagan and Gray Shirt, who had
joined him, held out their unembarrassed hands, and shouted out the
name of the Fan man they had said they were friendly with: "Kiva-
Kiva." The Fans stood still and talked angrily among themselves for
some minutes, and then, Silence said to me, "It would be bad palaver
if Kiva no live for this place," in a tone that conveyed to me the
idea he thought this unpleasant contingency almost a certainty. The
Passenger exhibited unmistakable symptoms of wishing he had come by
another boat. I got up from my seat in the bottom of the canoe and
leisurely strolled ashore, saying to the line of angry faces
"M'boloani" in an unconcerned way, although I well knew it was
etiquette for them to salute first. They grunted, but did not
commit themselves further. A minute after they parted to allow a
fine-looking, middle-aged man, naked save for a twist of dirty cloth
round his loins and a bunch of leopard and wild cat tails hung from
his shoulder by a strip of leopard skin, to come forward. Pagan
went for him with a rush, as if he were going to clasp him to his
ample bosom, but holding his hands just off from touching the Fan's
shoulder in the usual way, while he said in Fan, "Don't you know me,
my beloved Kiva? Surely you have not forgotten your old friend?"
Kiva grunted feelingly, and raised up his hands and held them just
off touching Pagan, and we breathed again. Then Gray Shirt made a
rush at the crowd and went through great demonstrations of affection
with another gentleman whom he recognised as being a Fan friend of
his own, and whom he had not expected to meet here. I looked round
to see if there was not any Fan from the Upper Ogowe whom I knew to
go for, but could not see one that I could on the strength of a
previous acquaintance, and on their individual merits I did not feel
inclined to do even this fashionable imitation embrace. Indeed I
must say that never--even in a picture book--have I seen such a set
of wild wicked-looking savages as those we faced this night, and
with whom it was touch-and-go for twenty of the longest minutes I
have ever lived, whether we fought--for our lives, I was going to
say, but it would not have been even for that, but merely for the
price of them.
Peace having been proclaimed, conversation became general. Gray
Shirt brought his friend up and introduced him to me, and we shook
hands and smiled at each other in the conventional way. Pagan's
friend, who was next introduced, was more alarming, for he held his
hands for half a minute just above my elbows without quite touching
me, but he meant well; and then we all disappeared into a brown mass
of humanity and a fog of noise. You would have thought, from the
violence and vehemence of the shouting and gesticulation, that we
were going to be forthwith torn to shreds; but not a single hand
really touched me, and as I, Pagan, and Gray Shirt went up to the
town in the midst of the throng, the crowd opened in front and
closed in behind, evidently half frightened at my appearance. The
row when we reached the town redoubled in volume from the fact that
the ladies, the children, and the dogs joined in. Every child in
the place as soon as it saw my white face let a howl out of it as if
it had seen his Satanic Majesty, horns, hoofs, tail and all, and
fled into the nearest hut, headlong, and I fear, from the
continuance of the screams, had fits. The town was exceedingly
filthy--the remains of the crocodile they had been eating the week
before last, and piles of fish offal, and remains of an elephant,
hippo or manatee--I really can't say which, decomposition was too
far advanced--united to form a most impressive stench. The bark
huts are, as usual in a Fan town, in unbroken rows; but there are
three or four streets here, not one only, as in most cases. The
palaver house is in the innermost street, and there we went, and
noticed that the village view was not in the direction in which we
had come, but across towards the other side of the lake. I told the
Ajumba to explain we wanted hospitality for the night, and wished to
hire three carriers for to-morrow to go with us to the Rembwe.
For an hour and three-quarters by my watch I stood in the
suffocating, smoky, hot atmosphere listening to, but only faintly
understanding, the war of words and gesture that raged round us. At
last the fact that we were to be received being settled, Gray
Shirt's friend led us out of the guard house--the crowd flinching
back as I came through it--to his own house on the right-hand side
of the street of huts. It was a very different dwelling to Gray
Shirt's residence at Arevooma. I was as high as its roof ridge and
had to stoop low to get through the door-hole. Inside, the hut was
fourteen or fifteen feet square, unlit by any window. The door-hole
could be closed by pushing a broad piece of bark across it under two
horizontally fixed bits of stick. The floor was sand like the
street outside, but dirtier. On it in one place was a fire, whose
smoke found its way out through the roof. In one corner of the room
was a rough bench of wood, which from the few filthy cloths on it
and a wood pillow I saw was the bed. There was no other furniture
in the hut save some boxes, which I presume held my host's earthly
possessions. From the bamboo roof hung a long stick with hooks on
it, the hooks made by cutting off branching twigs. This was
evidently the hanging wardrobe, and on it hung some few fetish
charms, and a beautiful ornament of wild cat and leopard tails, tied
on to a square piece of leopard skin, in the centre of which was a
little mirror, and round the mirror were sewn dozens of common shirt
buttons. In among the tails hung three little brass bells and a
brass rattle; these bells and rattles are not only "for dandy," but
serve to scare away snakes when the ornament is worn in the forest.
A fine strip of silky-haired, young gorilla skin made the band to
sling the ornament from the shoulder when worn. Gorillas seem well
enough known round here. One old lady in the crowd outside, I saw,
had a necklace made of sixteen gorilla canine teeth slung on a pine-
apple fibre string. Gray Shirt explained to me that this is the
best house in the village, and my host the most renowned elephant
hunter in the district.
We then returned to the canoe, whose occupants had been getting
uneasy about the way affairs were going "on top," on account of the
uproar they heard and the time we had been away. We got into the
canoe and took her round the little promontory at the end of the
island to the other beach, which is the main beach. By arriving at
the beach when we did, we took our Fan friends in the rear, and they
did not see us coming in the gloaming. This was all for the best,
it seems, as they said they should have fired on us before they had
had time to see we were rank outsiders, on the apprehension that we
were coming from one of the Fan towns we had passed, and with whom
they were on bad terms regarding a lady who bolted there from her
lawful lord, taking with her--cautious soul!--a quantity of rubber.
The only white man who had been here before in the memory of man,
was a French officer who paid Kiva six dollars to take him
somewhere, I was told--but I could not find out when, or what
happened to that Frenchman. {189} It was a long time ago, Kiva
said, but these folks have no definite way of expressing duration of
time nor, do I believe, any great mental idea of it; although their
ideas are, as usual with West Africans, far ahead of their language.
All the goods were brought up to my hut, and while Ngouta gets my
tea we started talking the carrier palaver again. The Fans received
my offer, starting at two dollars ahead of what M. Jacot said would
be enough, with utter scorn, and every dramatic gesture of dissent;
one man, pretending to catch Gray Shirt's words in his hands, flings
them to the ground and stamps them under his feet. I affected an
easy take-it-or-leave-it-manner, and looked on. A woman came out of
the crowd to me, and held out a mass of slimy gray abomination on a
bit of plantain leaf--smashed snail. I accepted it and gave her
fish hooks. She was delighted and her companions excited, so she
put the hooks into her mouth for safe keeping. I hurriedly
explained in my best Fan that I do not require any more snail; so
another lady tried the effect of a pine-apple. There might be no
end to this, so I retired into trade and asked what she would sell
it for. She did not want to sell it--she wanted to give it me; so I
gave her fish hooks. Silence and Singlet interposed, saying the
price for pine-apples is one leaf of tobacco, but I explained I was
not buying. Ngouta turned up with my tea, so I went inside, and had
it on the bed. The door-hole was entirely filled with a mosaic of
faces, but no one attempted to come in. All the time the carrier
palaver went on without cessation, and I went out and offered to
take Gray Shirt's and Pagan's place, knowing they must want their
chop, but they refused relief, and also said I must not raise the
price; I was offering too big a price now, and if I once rise the
Fan will only think I will keep on rising, and so make the palaver
longer to talk. "How long does a palaver usually take to talk round
here?" I ask. "The last one I talked," says Pagan, "took three
weeks, and that was only a small price palaver." "Well," say I, "my
price is for a start to-morrow--after then I have no price--after
that I go away." Another hour however sees the jam made, and to my
surprise I find the three richest men in this town of M'fetta have
personally taken up the contract--Kiva my host, Fika a fine young
fellow, and Wiki, another noted elephant hunter. These three Fans,
the four Ajumba and the Igalwa, Ngouta, I think will be enough.
Moreover I fancy it safer not to have an overpowering percentage of
Fans in the party, as I know we shall have considerable stretches of
uninhabited forest to traverse; and the Ajumba say that the Fans
will kill people, i.e. the black traders who venture into their
country, and cut them up into neat pieces, eat what they want at the
time, and smoke the rest of the bodies for future use. Now I do not
want to arrive at the Rembwe in a smoked condition, even should my
fragments be neat, and I am going in a different direction to what I
said I was when leaving Kangwe, and there are so many ways of
accounting for death about here--leopard, canoe capsize, elephants,
etc.--that even if I were traced--well, nothing could be done then,
anyhow--so will only take three Fans. One must diminish dead
certainties to the level of sporting chances along here, or one can
never get on.
No one, either Ajumba or Fan, knew the exact course we were to take.
The Ajumba had never been this way before--the way for black traders
across being via Lake Ayzingo, the way Mr. Goode of the American
Mission once went, and the Fans said they only knew the way to a big
Fan town called Efoua, where no white man or black trader had yet
been. There is a path from there to the Rembwe they knew, because
the Efoua people take their trade all to the Rembwe. They would,
they said, come with me all the way if I would guarantee them safety
if they "found war" on the road. This I agreed to do, and arranged
to pay off at Hatton and Cookson's subfactory on the Rembwe, and
they have "Look my mouth and it be sweet, so palaver done set."
Every load then, by the light of the bush lights held by the women,
we arranged. I had to unpack my bottles of fishes so as to equalise
the weight of the loads. Every load is then made into a sort of
cocoon with bush rope.
I was left in peace at about 11.30 P.M., and clearing off the
clothes from the bench threw myself down and tried to get some
sleep, for we were to start, the Fans said, before dawn. Sleep
impossible--mosquitoes! lice!!--so at 12.40 I got up and slid aside
my bark door. I found Pagan asleep under his mosquito bar outside,
across the doorway, but managed to get past him without rousing him
from his dreams of palaver which he was still talking aloud, and
reconnoitred the town. The inhabitants seemed to have talked
themselves quite out and were sleeping heavily. I went down then to
our canoe and found it safe, high up among the Fan canoes on the
stones, and then I slid a small Fan canoe off, and taking a paddle
from a cluster stuck in the sand, paddled out on to the dark lake.
It was a wonderfully lovely quiet night with no light save that from
the stars. One immense planet shone pre-eminent in the purple sky,
throwing a golden path down on to the still waters. Quantities of
big fish sprung out of the water, their glistening silver-white
scales flashing so that they look like slashing swords. Some bird
was making a long, low boom-booming sound away on the forest shore.
I paddled leisurely across the lake to the shore on the right, and
seeing crawling on the ground some large glow-worms, drove the canoe
on to the bank among some hippo grass, and got out to get them.
While engaged on this hunt I felt the earth quiver under my feet,
and heard a soft big soughing sound, and looking round saw I had
dropped in on a hippo banquet. I made out five of the immense
brutes round me, so I softly returned to the canoe and shoved off,
stealing along the bank, paddling under water, until I deemed it
safe to run out across the lake for my island. I reached the other
end of it to that on which the village is situated; and finding a
miniature rocky bay with a soft patch of sand and no hippo grass,
the incidents of the Fan hut suggested the advisability of a bath.
Moreover, there was no china collection in that hut, and it would be
a long time before I got another chance, so I go ashore again, and,
carefully investigating the neighbourhood to make certain there was
no human habitation near, I then indulged in a wash in peace.
Drying one's self on one's cummerbund is not pure joy, but it can be
done when you put your mind to it. While I was finishing my toilet
I saw a strange thing happen. Down through the forest on the lake
bank opposite came a violet ball the size of a small orange. When
it reached the sand beach it hovered along it to and fro close to
the ground. In a few minutes another ball of similarly coloured
light came towards it from behind one of the islets, and the two
waver to and fro over the beach, sometimes circling round each
other. I made off towards them in the canoe, thinking--as I still
do--they were some brand new kind of luminous insect. When I got on
to their beach one of them went off into the bushes and the other
away over the water. I followed in the canoe, for the water here is
very deep, and, when I almost thought I had got it, it went down
into the water and I could see it glowing as it sunk until it
vanished in the depths. I made my way back hastily, fearing my
absence with the canoe might give rise, if discovered, to trouble,
and by 3.30 I was back in the hut safe, but not so comfortable as I
had been on the lake. A little before five my men are stirring and
I get my tea. I do not state my escapade to them, but ask what
those lights were. "Akom," said the Fan, and pointing to the shore
of the lake where I had been during the night they said, "they came
there, it was an 'Aku'"--or devil bush. More than ever did I regret
not having secured one of those sort of two phenomena. What a joy a
real devil, appropriately put up in raw alcohol, would have been to
my scientific friends!
Wednesday, July 24th.--We get away about 5.30, the Fans coming in a
separate canoe. We call at the next island to M'fetta to buy some
more aguma. The inhabitants are very much interested in my
appearance, running along the stony beach as we paddle away, and
standing at the end of it until we are out of sight among the many
islands at the N.E. end of Lake Ncovi. The scenery is savage; there
are no terrific cliffs nor towering mountains to make it what one
usually calls wild or romantic, but there is a distinction about it
which is all its own. This N.E. end has beautiful sand beaches on
the southern side, in front of the forested bank, lying in smooth
ribbons along the level shore, and in scollops round the
promontories where the hills come down into the lake. The forest on
these hills, or mountains--for they are part of the Sierra del
Cristal--is very dark in colour, and the undergrowth seems scant.
We presently come to a narrow but deep channel into the lake coming
from the eastward, which we go up, winding our course with it into a
valley between the hills. After going up it a little way we find it
completely fenced across with stout stakes, a space being left open
in the middle, broader than the spaces between the other stakes; and
over this is poised a spear with a bush rope attached, and weighted
at the top of the haft with a great lump of rock. The whole affair
is kept in position by a bush rope so arranged just under the level
of the water that anything passing through the opening would bring
the spear down. This was a trap for hippo or manatee (Ngany
'imanga), and similar in structure to those one sees set in the
hippo grass near villages and plantations, which serve the double
purpose of defending the vegetable supply, and adding to the meat
supply of the inhabitants. We squeeze through between the stakes so
as not to let the trap off, and find our little river leads us into
another lake, much smaller than Ncovi. It is studded with islands
of fantastic shapes, all wooded with high trees of an equal level,
and with little or no undergrowth among them, so their pale gray
stems look like clusters of columns supporting a dark green ceiling.
The forest comes down steep hill sides to the water edge in all
directions; and a dark gloomy-looking herb grows up out of black
slime and water, in a bank or ribbon in front of it. There is
another channel out of this lake, still to the N.E. The Fans say
they think it goes into the big lake far far away, i.e., Lake
Ayzingo. From the look of the land, I think this river connecting
Ayzingo and Lake Ncovi wanders down this valley between the mountain
spurs of the Sierra del Cristal, expanding into one gloomy lake
after another. We run our canoe into a bank of the dank dark-
coloured water herb to the right, and disembark into a fitting
introduction to the sort of country we shall have to deal with
before we see the Rembwe--namely, up to our knees in black slime.