year in. But the difference in the banks, though an unending
alternation between two appearances, is weird.
At high-water you do not see the mangroves displaying
their ankles in the way that shocked Captain Lugard. They
look most respectable, their foliage rising densely in a wall
irregularly striped here and there by the white line of an
aerial root, coming straight down into the water from some upper
branch as straight as a plummet, in the strange, knowing way
an aerial root of a mangrove does, keeping the hard straight line
until it gets some two feet above water-level, and then spreading
out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the water and
grasp the mud. Banks indeed at high water can hardly be said
to exist, the water stretching away into the mangrove swamps
for miles and miles, and you can then go, in a suitable
small canoe, away among these swamps as far as you
please.
This is a fascinating pursuit. For people who like that sort of
thing it is just the sort of thing they like, as the art critic of
a provincial town wisely observed anent an impressionist
picture recently acquired for the municipal gallery. But it is a
pleasure to be indulged in with caution ; for one thing, you are
certain to come across crocodiles. Now a crocodile drifting
down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a
sand-bank in the sun, is. a picturesque adornment to the landscape
when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write
home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but
when you are away among .the swamps in a small dug-out
canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake— a thing
he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming
along— and when he has got his foot upon his native' heath—
that is to say, his tail within holding reach of his native mud—
he is highly interesting, and you may not be able to write home
about him— and you get frightened on your own behalf. For
crocodiles can, and often do, in such places, grab at people in
small canoes. I have known of several natives ■ losing their
lives in this w a y ; some native villages are approachable
from the main river by a short cut, as it were, through the
mangrove swamps, and the inhabitants of such villages will
now and then go across this way with small canoes instead of
by the constant channel to the village, which is almost always
winding. In addition to this unpleasantness you are liable—
until you realise the danger from experience, or have native
advice on the point— to get tide-trapped away in the
swamps; the water falling round you when you are away in
some deep pool or lagoon, and you find you cannot get back to
the main river. For you cannot get out and drag your canoe
across the stretches of mud that separate you from it, because
the mud is of too unstable a nature and too deep, and sinking
into it means staying in it, at any rate until some geologist of
the remote future may come across you, in a fossilised state,
when that mangrove swamp shall have become dry land. Of
course if you really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and
really care about Posterity, and Posterity’s Science, you will
jump over into the black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered
by the thought of the terrific sensation you will produce
20,000 years hence, and the care you will' be taken of then by
your fellow-creatures, in a museum. But if you are a mere
ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me, you stop in youi
lagoon until the tide rises again ; most of your attention is
directed to dealing with an “ at home ” to crocodiles and mangrove
flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime round you.
What little time you have over you will employ in wondering
why you came to West Africa, and why, after having
reached this point of absurdity, you need have gone and
painted the lily and adorned the rose, by being such a
colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove swamps.
Twice this chatty little incident, as Lady MacDonald would
call it, has happened to me, but never again if I can help it.
On one occasion, the last, a mighty Silurian, as The Daily
Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front paws over the
stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance.
I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance
right,1 and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle, when
he withdrew, and I paddled into the very middle of the lagoon,
hoping the water there was too deep for him or any of his
friends,to repeat the performance. Presumably it was, for no
U 1 It is no use saying because I was frightened, for this miserably
understates the case.