flies and out beyond this pool of utter night flew by unceas-
ingly the white foam of the rapids; sound there was none
save their thunder. The majesty and beauty of the scene
fascinated me, and I stood leaning with my back against a
rock pinnacle watching it. Do not imagine it gave rise,
in what I am pleased to call my mind, to those
complicated, poetical reflections natural beauty seems to bring
out in other people’s minds. It never works that way with
me; I just lose all sense of human individuality, all memory
of human life, with its grief and worry and doubt, and become
part of the atmosphere. I f I have a heaven, that will be mine,
and I verily believe that if I were left alone long enough with
such a scene as this or on the deck of an African liner in the
Bights, watching her funnel and masts swinging to and fro in
the great long leisurely roll against the sky, I should be found
soulless and dead ; but I never have a chance of that. This
night my absent Kras, as my Fanti friends would call them,
were sent hurrying home badly scared to their attributive
body by a fearful shriek tearing through the voice of the
Ogowe up into the silence of the hills. I woke with a shudder
and found myself -sore and stiff, but made hastily in the
direction of the shriek, fancying some of our hosts had been
spearing one of the crew-—a vain and foolish fancy I apologise
for. What had happened was that my men, thinking it wiser to
keep an eye on our canoe, had come down and built a fire
close to her and put up their mosquito-bars as tents. One of
the men, tired out by his day’s work, had sat down on one of
the three logs, whose ends, pointed to a common centre where
the fire is, constitute the universal stove of this region. He
was taking a last pipe before turning in, but sleep had taken
him, and the wretch of a fire had sneaked along in the log
under him and burnt him suddenly. The shriek was
his way of mentioning the fact. Having got up these facts
I left the victim seated in a remedial ■ cool pool of water and
climbed back to the village, whose inhabitants, tired at last,
were going to sleep. M’bo, I found, had hung up my
mosquito-bar over one of the hard wood benches, and going
cautiously under it I lit a night-light and read myself asleep
with my damp dilapidated old Horace.
Woke at 4 A.M. lying on the ground among the plantain
stems, having by a reckless movement fallen out of the house.
Thanks be there are no mosquitoes. I don’t know how I
escaped the rats which swarm here, running about among the
huts and the inhabitants in the evening, with a tameness
shocking to see. I turned in again until six o clock, when we
started getting things ready to go up river again, carefully
providing ourselves with a new stock of poles, and subsidising
a native to come with us and help us to fight the rapids.
The greatest breadth of the river channel we now saw, in
the daylight, to be the S.S.W. branch ; this was the one we
had been swept into, and was almost completely barred by
rock. The other one to the N.N.W. was more open, and the
river rushed through it, a terrific, swirling mass of water. Had
we got caught in this, we should have got past Kembe Island,
and gone to glory. Whenever the shelter of the spits of land or
of the reefs was sufficient to allow the water to lay down its
sand, strange shaped sandbanks showed, as regular in form as if
they had been smoothed by human hands. They rise above
the water in a slope, the low end or tail against the current,
the down-stream end terminating in an abrupt miniature
cliff, sometimes six and seven feet above the water ; that they
are the same shape when they have not got their heads above
water you will find by sticking on them in a canoe, which I did
several tirhes, with a sort of automatic devotion to scientific
research peculiar to me. Your best way of getting off is to
push on in the direction of the current, carefully preparing
for the shock of suddenly coming off the cliff end.
We left the landing place rocks of Kembe Island about 8,
and no sooner had we got afloat, than, in the twinkling of
an eye, we were swept, broadside on, right across the river
to the north bank, and then engaged in a heavy fight
with a severe rapid. After passing this, the river is fairly uninterrupted
by rock for a while, and is silent and swift. Wheq
you are ascending such a piece the effect is strange ; you see
the water flying by the side of your canoe, as you vigorously
drive your paddle into it with short rapid Strokes, and you
forthwith fancy you are travelling at the rate of a North-
Western express ; but you just raise your eyes, my friend, and
N 2