muzzle nestling against my left ear. A minute afterwards we
strike a bank, and bang goes off the gun, deafening me,
singeing my hair and the side of my face slightly. ortun
ately the two men in front are at the moment in t e
recumbent position attributive to the shock of the canoe
jarring against the cliff edge of a bank, or they wou ave
had a miscellaneous collection of bits of broken iron pots and
lumps of lead frisking among their vitals. It is a little
difficult to make out how much credit Providence really
deserves in this affair, but a good deal. Of course if It had
taken the trouble to keep us off the bank, or to remind Gray
Shirt to uncock his weapon, the thing would not have happened
at all, but preliminary precaution is not Providence s
peculiarity. Still, when the thing happened It certainly rose
to it. I might have had the back of my head blown out, and
the men might have been killed. I only hope this wont
confirm Pagan permanently into superstition ; for only a few
minutes before, he had been showing me a big charm to keep
him from being hurt by a gun. I f he thinks about it, he will
see there is nothing in the charm, because the other man who
equally escaped was a charmless Christian.
The river into which we ran zig-zags 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.” 1 We all called him an utter fool to relieve our minds,
and made our' way towards the second island, s 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
f 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
1 A common African sensation among natives when alarmed, somewhat
akin to our feeling some one walk over our graves.