CHAPTER VI I I
TALAGOUGA
Concerning the district of T a t o j L with observations and admonition
on the capture of serpents.
F(?RGf T received me most kindly and hospitably, she
\vith her husband and her infant daughter, and M. and Mme
Gacon represent the Mission Evangtffique and the white race
at Talagouga. Mme. Gacon is the lady the planter took
me fo r , and when I saw her, with her sweet young face and
g0ld' Colourecl hair, I felt highly flattered,
ther that planter must be very short-sighted or the colour
of my hair must have misled him, not that mine is pale gold,
but hay-coloured. I don’t know how he did it. Mme. Foreet
is a perfectly lovely French girl, with a pale transparent skin
and the most perfect great dark eyes, with indescribable
c arm, ^race o manner, and vivacity in conversation. It
grieves me to think of her, wasted on this savage wilderness
surrounded by its deadly fever air. Oranie Forget, otherwise
the baby, although I am not a general admirer of babies of
her age a mere matter of months— is also charming; I am
not saymg this because she flattered me by taking to m e -
all babies and children do th a t-b u t she has great style, and
have no doubt she will grow up to be a beauty too, but she
would have made a dead certainty of it, if she had taken after
her mother.
miss.ion station at Talagouga is hitched on to the rockv
hillside, which rises so abruptly from the river that there is
hardly room for the narrow footpath which runs along the
river frontage of it. And when you are on the Forgets’
verandah it seems as if you could easily roll right off it into the
dark, deep, hurrying Ogowi. I suggest this to Mme. Forget as
an awful future for Oranie, but she has thought of it and wired
the verandah up. You go up a steep flight of steps into the
house, which is raised on poles gome fifteen feet above the
ground in front, and you walk through it against the hillside,
made up mostly of enormous boulders of quartz, for Talagouga
mountains are the western termination of the side of the Sierra
del Cristal range. When you get through the house you come to
more stairs, cut out now in the hillside rock and leading to the
STA TIO N OF TH E MISSION E V A X G E U Q U E , T A LA G O U G A .
kitchen to the right, and to the store buildings ; to the left they
continue up to the church, which is still higher up the hill-face.
That church is the prettiest I have seen in Africa. I do not
say I should like to sit in it, because there seems to me no
proper precautions taken to exclude snakes, lizards, or insects,
and there would be great difficulty in concentrating one’s
mind on the higher life in the presence of these fearfbUy
prevalent lower forms. Talagouga church commences as a