In
The Higher Valleys Where The Dim Light Shone Faintly, One Could See
Wreaths And Clouds Of Silver-Gray Mist Lying, Basking Lazily Or
Rolling To And Fro.
Olangi seemed to stretch right across the
river, blocking with his great blunt mass all passage; while away to
the N.E. a cone-shaped peak showed conspicuous, which I afterwards
knew as Kangwe.
In the darkness round me flitted thousands of fire-
flies and out beyond this pool of utter night flew by unceasingly
the white foam of the rapids; sound there was none save their
thunder. The majesty and beauty of the scene fascinated me, and I
stood leaning with my back against a rock pinnacle watching it. Do
not imagine it gave rise, in what I am pleased to call my mind, to
those complicated, poetical reflections natural beauty seems to
bring out in other people's minds. It never works that way with me;
I just lose all sense of human individuality, all memory of human
life, with its grief and worry and doubt, and become part of the
atmosphere. M'bo, I found, had hung up my mosquito-bar over one of
the hard wood benches, and going cautiously under it I lit a night-
light and read myself asleep with my damp dilapidated old Horace.
Woke at 4 A.M. lying on the ground among the plantain stems, having
by a reckless movement fallen out of the house. Thanks be there are
no mosquitoes. I don't know how I escaped the rats which swarm
here, running about among the huts and the inhabitants in the
evening, with a tameness shocking to see. I turned in again until
six o'clock, when we started getting things ready to go up river
again, carefully providing ourselves with a new stock of poles, and
subsidising a native to come with us and help us to fight the
rapids.
The greatest breadth of the river channel we now saw, in the
daylight, to be the S.S.W. branch; this was the one we had been
swept into, and was almost completely barred by rock. The other one
to the N.N.W. was more open, and the river rushed through it, a
terrific, swirling mass of water. Had we got caught in this, we
should have got past Kembe Island, and gone to Glory. Whenever the
shelter of the spits of land or of the reefs was sufficient to allow
the water to lay down its sand, strange shaped sandbanks showed, as
regular in form as if they had been smoothed by human hands. They
rise above the water in a slope, the low end or tail against the
current; the down-stream end terminating in an abrupt miniature
cliff, sometimes six and seven feet above the water; that they are
the same shape when they have not got their heads above water you
will find by sticking on them in a canoe, which I did several times,
with a sort of automatic devotion to scientific research peculiar to
me.
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