There are patches and wreaths of a lovely, vermilion-flowering'
bush rope decorating the forest, and now and again clumps
o f a plant that shows a yellow and crimson spike of bloom,
very strikingly beautiful. We pass a long tunnel in the bus ,
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 o f
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 o f
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 o f
Lembarene Island, as well I know after that canoe affair o f
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 loqks 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 o f
these good people I know would only go and distinguish
themselves, I might write a sort of county family history o f
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
l a k e 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 irt
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 Ogowé 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. I 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 débris 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.
R