fourth funeral, two youngsters (junior clerks of the deceased)
from drink brought on by fright, fell into the grave before
the coffin, which got lowered on to them, and all three
had to be hauled out again. “ Barely necessary though, was
it ? ” said another member of the party, “ for those two had to
have a grave of their own before next sundown. And. the
general consensus of opinion was that one of these periodic
epidemics was “ just about due now.” Next to the scenery of
“ a River,” commend me for cheerfulness to the local convert
sation of its mangrove-swamp region ; and every truly important
West African river has its mangrove-swamp belt,
which extends inland as far as the tide waters make1 it brackT
ish, and which has a depth and extent from the banks
depending on the configuration of the country. Above this
belt comes uniformly a region of high forest, haying towards
the, river frontage clay cliffs, sometimes high, as in the case of
the Old Calabar at Adiabo, more frequently dwarf cliffs, as
in the Forcados up at Warree, and in the Ogowd,— for a long
stretch through Kama country. After the clay cliffs region you
come to. a region of rapids, caused by the river cutting its way
through a mountain range ; such ranges are the Pallaballa,
causing the Livingstone rapids of the Congo; the Sierra del
Cristal, those of the Ogowe, and many lesser rivers ; the
Rumby and Omon ranges, those of the Old Calabar and
Cross Rivers.
Naturally in different parts these separate regions vary in
size. The mangrove-swamp may be only a fringe at the
mouth of the river, or it may cover hundreds of square miles.
The clay cliffs may extend for only a mile or so along the
bank, or they may, as on the Ogowe, extend for 130. And so it
is also with the rapids: in some rivers, for instance the
Cameroons, there are only a few miles of them, in ethers
there are many miles; in the Ogowe there are as many as
50Q ; and these rapids may be close to the river mouth, as in
most of the Gold Coast rivers, save the Ancobra and the
V o lta ; or they may be far in the interior, as in the Cross
River, where they commence at about 200 miles ; and on the
Ogowd where they commence at about 208 miles from the sea
coast; ’this depends on the nearness or remoteness from the
coast line of the mountain ranges which run down the west
side of the continent; ranges (apparently of very different
geological formations), which have no end of different names,
but about which little is known in detail.1
i And now we will leave generalisations on West African
rivers and. go into particulars regarding one little known in
England, and called by its owners, the French, the greatest
strictly equatorial river in the world— the Ogowe.
1 The Sierra del Cristal and the Pallaballa range are, by some
geographers, held to be identical ; but I have reason to doubt this, for
the specimens of rock brought home by me have been identified by the
Geological Survey, those of the Pallaballa range as mica schist and
quartz, those of the Sierra del Cristal as “ probably schistose grit, but not
definitely determinable by inspection,” and “ quartz rock.” The quantity
of mica in the sands of the Ogowe, I think, come into it from its affluents
rom t e , Congo region, because you do not get these mica sands in
nvers which are entirely from the Sierra del Cristal, such as the Muni.
Ihe Remby and Omon ranges are probably identical with the Sierra del
-Cristal, for m them as m the Sierra you do not get the glistening dove-
coloured rock with a sparse vegetation growing on it, as you do in the
Jrallabaila region.