Beneath And Between You And Them Lie
The Rotting Mud Waters Of Bonny River, And Away Up And Down River,
Miles Of Rotting Mud Waters Fringed With Walls Of Rotting Mud
Mangrove-Swamp.
The only break in them - one can hardly call it a
relief to the scenery - are the gaunt black
Ribs of the old hulks,
once used as trading stations, which lie exposed at low water near
the shore, protruding like the skeletons of great unclean beasts who
have died because Bonny water was too strong even for them.
Raised on piles from the mud shore you will see the white-painted
factories and their great store-houses for oil; each factory likely
enough with its flag at half-mast, which does not enliven the
scenery either, for you know it is because somebody is "dead again."
Throughout and over all is the torrential downpour of the wet-season
rain, coming down night and day with its dull roar. I have known it
rain six mortal weeks in Bonny River, just for all the world as if
it were done by machinery, and the interval that came then was only
a few wet days, where-after it settled itself down to work again in
the good West Coast waterspout pour for more weeks.
While your eyes are drinking in the characteristics of Bonny scenery
you notice a peculiar smell - an intensification of that smell you
noticed when nearing Bonny, in the evening, out at sea. That's the
breath of the malarial mud, laden with fever, and the chances are
you will be down to-morrow.
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