am and what I am doing in the middle of his coffee plantation,
cm S c I ®arly is’ as aPPears from his obsequious body-guard
0 ac ,S’ interested in me also. We gaze at each other,
an smile some more, but stiffly, and he stands bareheaded in
the sun in an awful way. It’s murder I’m committing, hard
He, as is fitting for his superior sex, displays intelligence
first and says, “ Interpreter,” waving his hand to the
south. I say “ Yes,” in my best Fan, an enthusiastic, intelligent
grunt which any one must understand. He leads the
way back towards those geese— perhaps, by the by, that is why
e wears those divided skirts— and we enter a beautifully neatly
built bamboo house, and sit down opposite to each other at a
table and wait for the interpreter who is being fetched. The
house is low on the ground and of native construction, but most
beautifully kept, and arranged with an air of artistic feeling
quite as unexpected as the rest of my surroundings. I notice
upon the walls sets of pictures of terrific incidents in Algerian
campaigns, and a copy of that superb head of M. de Brazza in
Arab headgear. Soon the black minions who have been sent to
find one of theplantation hands who is supposed to know French
and English, return with the “ interpreter.” That young man
is a fraud. He does not know English— not even coast English
— and all he has got under his precious wool is an abysmal
ignorance darkened by terror ; and so, after one or two futile
attempts and some frantic scratching at both those regions
which an African seems to regard as the seats of intellectual
inspiration, he bolts out of the door. Situation terrible!
My host and I smile wildly at each other, and both wonder in
our respective languages what, in the words of Mr. Squeers as
mentioned in the classics— we “ shall do in this ’ere most awful
go.” We are both going mad with the strain of the situation,
when in walks the engineer’s brother from the Éclaireur. He
seems intensely surprised to find me sitting in his friend the
planter’s parlour after my grim and retiring conduct on the
Eclaireur on my voyage up. But the planter tells him all,
sousing him in torrents of words, full of the violence of an
outbreak of pent-up emotion. I do not understand what he
says, but I catch “ très inexplicable ” and things like that.
The calm brother of the engineer sits down at the table, and I
am sure tells the planter something like this : “ Calm yourself,
my friend, we picked up this curiosity at Lembarene. It seems
quite harmless.” And then the planter calmed, and mopped a
\ perspiring brow, and so did I, and we smiled more freely, feeling
the mental atmosphere had become less tense and cooler.
We both simply beamed on our deliverer, and the planter
[ gave hirp lots of things to drink. I had nothing about me
; except a head of tobacco in my pocket, which I did not feel
I was a suitable offering. Now the engineer’s brother, although
I he would not own to it, knew English, so I told him how the
I beauty of the road had lured me on, and how I was interested
in coffee-planting, and how much I admired the magnifi-
I cence of this plantation, and all the enterprise and energy it
I represented.
■ | “ Oui, oui, certainement;’ said he, and translated. My
friend the planter seemed charmed ; it was the first sign
of anything approaching reason he had seen in me. He
wanted me to have eau sucrée more kindly than ever, and when '
I rose, intending to bow myself off and go, geese or no geese,
back to the Éclaireur, he would not let me go. ; I must see the'
plantation, toute la plantation. So presently all three of us
go out and thoroughly do the plantation, the most well-
ordered, well-cultivated plantation I have ever seen, and a
very noble monument to the knowledge and industry of the
planter. For two hot hours these two perfect gentlemen
showed me over it. I also behaved well, for petticoats, great
as they are, do not prevent insects and catawumpuses
of sorts walking up one’s ankles and feeding on one as one
stands on the long grass which has been most wisely cut and
laid round the young trees for mulching. This plantation is
of; great extent on the hill-sides and in the valley bottom
portions of it are just coming into bearing. The whole is
Ikept as perfectly as a garden, amazing as the work of one
white man with only a staff of unskilled native labourers— at
present only eighty of them. The coffee planted is of three
kinds, the Elephant berry, the Arabian, and the San Thomé
During our inspection, we only had one serious misunder-
ndmg which arose from my seeing for the first time in my
life tree-ferns growing in the Ogowé. There were three of them
L 2