Many Of
These Heaps Are Recent, While Others Have Fallen Into Decay.
Investigation Shows They Are Burial Places.
Among the debris of an
old one there are human bones, and out from one of the new ones
comes a stench and a hurrying, exceedingly busy line of ants,
demonstrating what is going on.
I own I thought these mounds were
some kind of bird's or animal's nest. They look entirely unhuman in
this desolate reach of forest. Leaving these, I go down to the
water edge of the sand, and find in it a quantity of pools of
varying breadth and expanse, but each surrounded by a rim of dark
red-brown deposit, which you can lift off the sand in a skin. On
the top of the water is a film of exquisite iridescent colours like
those on a soap bubble, only darker and brighter. In the river
alongside the sand, there are thousands of those beautiful little
fish with a black line each side of their tails. They are perfectly
tame, and I feed them with crumbs in my hand. After making every
effort to terrify the unknown object containing the food - gallant
bulls, quite two inches long, sidling up and snapping at my fingers-
-they come and feed right in the palm, so that I could have caught
them by the handful had I wished. There are also a lot of those
weird, semi-transparent, yellow, spotted little sandfish with cup-
shaped pectoral fins, which I see they use to enable them to make
their astoundingly long leaps. These fish are of a more nervous and
distrustful disposition, and hover round my hand but will not come
into it. Indeed I do not believe the other cheeky little fellows
would allow them to.
The men, having had their rest and their pipes, shout for me, and
off we go again. The Karkola {181} soon widens to about 100 feet;
it is evidently very deep here; the right bank (the east) is
forested, the left, low and shrubbed, one patch looking as if it
were being cleared for a plantation, but no village showing. A big
rock shows up on the right bank, which is a change from the clay and
sand, and soon the whole character of the landscape changes. We
come to a sharp turn in the river, from north and south to east and
west - the current very swift. The river channel dodges round
against a big bank of sword grass, and then widens out to the
breadth of the Thames at Putney. I am told that a river runs out of
it here to the west to Ouroungou country, and so I imagine this
Karkola falls ultimately into the Nazareth. We skirt the eastern
banks, which are covered with low grass with a scanty lot of trees
along the top. High land shows in the distance to the S.S.W. and
S.W., and then we suddenly turn up into a broad river or straith,
shaping our course N.N.E. On the opposite bank, on a high dwarf
cliff, is a Fan town.
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