The Pere's Is
Quite The Travelling Canoe, With A Little Stage Of Bamboo Aft,
Covered With A Hood Of Palm Thatch, Under Which You Can Make
Yourself Quite Comfortable, And Keep Yourself And Your Possessions
Dry, Unless Something Desperate Comes On In The Way Of Rain.
By 10.25 we have got all our wood aboard, and run off up river full
speed.
The river seems broader above the Fallaba, but this is
mainly on account of its being temporarily unencumbered with
islands. A good deal of the bank we have passed by since leaving
Nazareth Bay on the south side has been island shore, with a channel
between the islands and the true south bank.
The day soon grew dull, and looked threatening, after the delusive
manner of the dry season. The climbing plants are finer here than I
have ever before seen them. They form great veils and curtains
between and over the trees, often hanging so straight and flat, in
stretches of twenty to forty feet or so wide, and thirty to sixty or
seventy feet high, that it seems incredible that no human hand has
trained or clipped them into their perfect forms. Sometimes these
curtains are decorated with large bell-shaped, bright-coloured
flowers, sometimes with delicate sprays of white blossoms. This
forest is beyond all my expectations of tropical luxuriance and
beauty, and it is a thing of another world to the forest of the
Upper Calabar, which, beautiful as it is, is a sad dowdy to this.
There you certainly get a great sense of grimness and vastness; here
you have an equal grimness and vastness with the addition of superb
colour.
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