dramatic entertainment as answer, after the manner of these
brisk, excitable Fans. One chief, however, soon settled down
to definite details, prefacing his remarks with the silence-
commanding “ Azuna ! Azuna ! ” and his companions grunted
approbation of his observations. He took a piece of plantain
leaf and tore it up into five different-sized bits. These he laid
along the edge of our canoe at different intervals of space,
while he told M’bo things, mainly scandalous, about the
characters of the villages these bits of leaf represented, save
of course about bit A, which represented his own. The interval
between the bits was proportional to the interval
between the villages, and the size of the bits was proportional
to the size of the village. Village number four
was the only one he should recommend our going to. When
all was said, I gave our kindly informants some heads of
tobacco and many thanks. Then M’bo sang them a
hymn, with the assistance of Pierre, half a line behind him
in a different key, but every bit as flat. The Fans seemed
impressed, but any crowd would be by the hymn-singing of
my crew, unless they were inmates of deaf and dumb asylums.
Then we took our farewell, and thanked the village elaborately
for its kind invitation to spend the night there on our way
home, shoved off and paddled away in great style just to
show those Fans what Igalwas could do.
We hadn’t gone 200 yards before we met a current coming
round the end of a rock reef that was too strong for us to
hold our own in, let alone progress. On to the bank I was
ordered and went; it was a low slip of rugged confused
boulders and fragments of rocks, carelessly arranged, and
evidently under water in the wet season. I scrambled along,
the men yelled and shouted and hauled the canoe, and the
inhabitants of the village, seeing we were becoming amusing
again, came, legging it like lamp-1 ighters, after us, young
and old, male and female, to say nothing of the dogs.
Some good souls helped the men haul, while I did my best
to amuse the others by diving headlong from a large rock on
to which I had elaborately climbed, into a thick clump of
willow-leaved shrubs. They applauded my performance
vociferously, and then assisted my efforts to extricate myself,
and during the rest of my scramble they kept close to
me, with keen competition for the front row, in hopes that I
would do something like it again. But I refused the encore,
because, bashful as I am, I could not but feel that my last
performance was carried out with all the superb reckless
abandon of a Sarah Bernhardt, and a display of art of this
order should satisfy any African village for a year at least.
A t last I got across the rocks on to a lovely little beach of
white sand, and stood there talking, surrounded by my
audience, until the canoe got over its difficulties and arrived
almost as scratched as I ; and then we again said farewell
and paddled away, to the great grief of the natives, for they
don’t get a circus up above Njole every week, poor dears.
Now there is ho 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 o f
nine or so of those of ordinary mortals, but I am bound to
say I don’t think, even allowing for this, that he put those
pieces far enough apart. On we paddled a long way before
we picked up village number one, mentioned in that chart. On
again, still longer, till we came to village number two. Village
number three hove in sight high up on a mountain side soon
after, but it was getting dark and the water worse, and the hillsides
growing higher and higher into nobly shaped mountains,,
forming, with their forest-graced steep sides, a ravine that,
in the gathering gloom, looked like an alley-way made of iron,
for the foaming Ogowe. Village number four we anxiously
looked fo r ; village number four we never saw; for round us came
the dark, seeming to come out on to the river from the forests
and the side ravines, where for some hours we had seen it
sleeping, like a sailor with his clothes on in bad weather.
On we paddled, looking for signs of village fires, and seeing
them not. The Erd-geist knew we wanted something, and
seeing how we personally lacked it, thought it was beauty;
and being in a kindly mood, gave it us, sending the lovely
lingering flushes of his afterglow across the sky, which, dying,
left it that divine deep purple velvet which no one has dared to
paint. Out in it came the great stars blazing high above us,
and the dark round us was be-gemmed with fire-flies: but