ground was strewn with great cast blossoms, thick, wax-like,
glorious cups of orange and crimson and pure white, each one
of which was in itself a handful, and which told us that some of
the trees around us were showing a glory of colour to heaven
alone. Sprinkled among them were bunches of pure stepha-
notis-like flowers, which said that the gaunt bush-ropes were
rubber vines that had burst into flower when they had seen the
sun. These flowers we came across in nearly every type of
forest all the way, for rubber abounds here.
I will weary you no longer now with the different kinds of
forest and only tell you I have let you off several. The natives
have separate names for seven different kinds, and these
might, I think, be easily run up to nine.
A certain sort of friendship soon arose between the Fans
and me. We each recognised that we belonged to that same
section of the human race with whom it is better to drink than
to fight. We knew we would each have killed the other, if
sufficient inducement were offered, and so we took a certain
amount of care that the inducement should not arise. Gray
Shirt and Pagan also, their trade friends, the Fans treated with
an independent sort of courtesy ; but Silence, Singlet, the
Passenger, and above all Ngouta, they openly did not care a
row of pins for, and I have small doubt that had it not been
for us other three they would have killed and eaten these very
amiable gentlemen with as much compunction as an English
sportsman would kill as many rabbits. They on their part
hated the Fan, and never lost an opportunity of telling me
“ these Fan be bad man too much.” I must not forget to
mention the other member of our party, a Fan gentleman with
the manners of a duke and the habits of a dustbin. He
came with us, quite uninvited by me, and never asked for any
.pay; I think he only wanted to see the fun, and drop in for a
fight if there was one going on, and to pick up the pieces
generally. He was evidently a man of some importance,
from the way the others treated him; and moreover he had a
splendid gun, with a gorilla skin sheath for its lock, and ornamented
all over its stock with brass nails. His costume consisted
of a small piece of dirty rag round his loins ; and whenever
we were going through dense undergrowth, or wading a
swamp, he wore that filament tucked up scandalously short.
Whenever we were sitting down in the forest having one of our
nondescript meals, he always sat next to me and appropriated
the tin. Then' he would fill his pipe, and turning to me with
the easy grace of aristocracy, would say what may be translated
as “ My dear Princess, could you favour me with a
lucifer ? i
I used to say, “ My dear Duke, charmed, Pm sure,” and give
him one ready lit.
I dared not trust him with the box whole, having a personal
conviction that he would have kept it. I asked him what he
would do suppose I was not there with a box of lucifers ;
and he produced a bush-cow’s horn with a neat wood lid
tied on with tie tie, and from out of it he produced a flint
and steel and demonstrated. Unfortunately all his grace’s
minor possessions, owing to the scantiness of his attire, were
in one and the same pine-apple-fibre bag which he wore slung
across his shoulder ; and these possessions, though not great,
were as dangerous to the body as a million sterling is said to
be to the soul, for they consisted largely of gunpowder and
snuff, and their separate receptacles leaked and their contents
commingled, so that demonstration on fire-making
methods among the Fan ended in an awful bang and blow-up
in a small way, and the Professor and his pupil sneezed like
fury for ten minutes, and a cruel world laughed till it nearly
died, for twenty. Still that bag with all its failings was a
wonder for its containing power.
The first day in the forest we came across a snake1— a
beauty with a new red-brown and yellow-patterned velvety skin,
about three feet six inches long and as thick as a man’s thigh.
Ngouta met it, hanging from a bough, and shot backwards
like a lobster, Ngouta having among his many weaknesses a
rooted horror of snakes. This snake the Ogowe natives all hold
in great aversion. For the bite of other sorts of snakes they
profess to have remedies, but for this they have none. If,
however, a native is stung by one he usually conceals the fact
that it was this particular kind, and tries to get any chance
the native doctor’s medicine may give. The Duke stepped
1 Vipera nasicornis; M’pongwe, Ompenle.