Their Long Green Stalks, Which Support The Leaves And Bear
Little Bunches Of Crimson Berries, Take Every Graceful Curve
Imaginable,
And the whole affair is free from insects; and when you
have said this, you have said all there is
To say in favour of
shenja, for those long green stalks of theirs are as tough as
twisted wire, and the graceful curves go to the making of a net,
which rises round you shoulder high, and the hard green leaves when
lying on the ground are fearfully slippery. It is not nice going
down through them, particularly when Nature is so arranged that the
edge of the bank you are descending is a rock-wall ten or twelve
feet high with a swamp of unknown depth at its foot; this
arrangement was very frequent on the second and third day's marches,
and into these swamps the shenja seemed to want to send you head
first and get you suffocated. It is still less pleasant, however,
going up the other side of the ravine when you have got through your
swamp. You have to fight your way upwards among rough rocks,
through this hard tough network of stems; and it took it out of all
of us except the Fans.
These narrow shaded swamps gave us a world of trouble and took up a
good deal of time. Sometimes the leader of the party would make
three or four attempts before he found a ford, going on until the
black, batterlike ooze came up round his neck, and then turning back
and trying in another place; while the rest of the party sat upon
the bank until the ford was found, feeling it was unnecessary to
throw away human life, and that the more men there were paddling
about in that swamp, the more chance there was that a hole in the
bottom of it would be found; and when a hole is found, the
discoverer is liable to leave his bones in it. If I happened to be
in front, the duty of finding the ford fell on me; for none of us
after leaving Efoua knew the swamps personally. I was too
frightened of the Fan, and too nervous and uncertain of the stuff my
other men were made of, to dare show the white feather at anything
that turned up. The Fan took my conduct as a matter of course,
never having travelled with white men before, or learnt the way some
of them require carrying over swamps and rivers and so on. I dare
say I might have taken things easier, but I was like the immortal
Schmelzle, during that omnibus journey he made on his way to Flaetz
in the thunder-storm - afraid to be afraid. I am very certain I
should have fared very differently had I entered a region occupied
by a powerful and ferocious tribe like the Fan, from some districts
on the West Coast, where the inhabitants are used to find the white
man incapable of personal exertion, requiring to be carried in a
hammock, or wheeled in a go-cart or a Bath-chair about the streets
of their coast towns, depending for the defence of their settlement
on a body of black soldiers. This is not so in Congo Francais, and
I had behind me the prestige of a set of white men to whom for the
native to say, "You shall not do such and such a thing;" "You shall
not go to such and such a place," would mean that those things would
be done. I soon found the name of Hatton and Cookson's agent-
general for this district, Mr. Hudson, was one to conjure with among
the trading tribes; and the Ajumba, moreover, although their
knowledge of white men had been small, yet those they had been
accustomed to see were fine specimens. Mr. Fildes, Mr. Cockshut, M.
Jacot, Dr. Pelessier, Pere Lejeune, M. Gacon, Mr. Whittaker, and
that vivacious French official, were not men any man, black or
white, would willingly ruffle; and in addition there was the memory
among the black traders of "that white man MacTaggart," whom an
enterprising trading tribe near Fernan Vaz had had the hardihood to
tackle, shooting him, and then towing him behind a canoe and
slashing him all over with their knives the while; yet he survived,
and tackled them again in a way that must almost pathetically have
astonished those simple savages, after the real good work they had
put in to the killing of him. Of course it was hard to live up to
these ideals, and I do not pretend to have succeeded, or rather that
I should have succeeded had the real strain been put on me.
But to return to that gorilla-land forest. All the rivers we
crossed on the first, second, and third day I was told went into one
or other of the branches of the Ogowe, showing that the long slope
of land between the Ogowe and the Rembwe is towards the Ogowe. The
stone of which the mountains were composed was that same hard black
rock that I had found on the Sierra del Cristal, by the Ogowe
rapids; only hereabouts there was not amongst it those great masses
of white quartz, which are so prominent a feature from Talagouga
upwards in the Ogowe valley; neither were the mountains anything
like so high, but they had the same abruptness of shape. They look
like very old parts of the same range worn down to stumps by the
disintegrating forces of the torrential rain and sun, and the dense
forest growing on them. Frost of course they had not been subject
to, but rocks, I noticed, were often being somewhat similarly split
by rootlets having got into some tiny crevice, and by gradual growth
enlarged it to a crack.
Of our troubles among the timber falls on these mountains I have
already spoken; and these were at their worst between Efoua and
Egaja.
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