The Sandbanks Stretch Across The
River Here Nearly Awash, So All Our Cargo Of Yams Has To Be Thrown
Overboard On To The Sand, From Which They Can Be Collected By Being
Waded Out To.
The canoe, thus lightened, is able to go on a little
further, but we are soon hard and fast
Again, and the crew have to
jump out and shove her off about once every five minutes, and then
to look lively about jumping back into her again, as she shoots over
the cliffs of the sandbanks.
When we reach Arevooma, I find it is a very prettily situated town,
on the left-hand bank of the river - clean and well kept, and
composed of houses built on the Igalwa and M'pongwe plan with walls
of split bamboo and a palm thatch roof. I own I did not much care
for these Ajumbas on starting, but they are evidently going to be
kind and pleasant companions. One of them is a gentlemanly-looking
man, who wears a gray shirt; another looks like a genial Irishman
who has accidentally got black, very black; he is distinguished by
wearing a singlet; another is a thin, elderly man, notably silent;
and the remaining one is a strapping, big fellow, as black as a
wolf's mouth, of gigantic muscular development, and wearing
quantities of fetish charms hung about him. The two first mentioned
are Christians; the other two pagans, and I will refer to them by
their characteristic points, for their honourable names are awfully
alike when you do hear them, and, as is usual with Africans, rarely
used in conversation.
Gray Shirt places his house at my disposal, and both he and his
exceedingly pretty wife do their utmost to make me comfortable. The
house lies at the west end of the town. It is one room inside, but
has, I believe, a separate cooking shed. In the verandah in front
is placed a table, an ivory bundle chair and a gourd of water, and I
am also treated to a calico tablecloth, and most thoughtfully
screened off from the public gaze with more calico so that I can
have my tea in privacy. After this meal, to my surprise Ndaka turns
up. Certainly he is one of the very ugliest men - black or white - I
have ever seen, and I fancy one of the best. He is now on a holiday
from Kangwe, seeing to the settlement of his dead brother's affairs.
The dead brother was a great man in Arevooma and a pagan, but Ndaka,
the Christian Bible-reader, seems to get on perfectly with the
family and is holding tonight a meeting outside his brother's house
and comes with a lantern to fetch me to attend it. Of course I have
to go, headache or no headache.
Most of the town was there, mainly as spectators. Ndaka and my two
Christian boatmen manage the service between them, and what with the
hymns and the mosquitoes the experience is slightly awful.
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