"Plenty Too Much," Says He; And
It Occurs To Me That The Corn-Fields Are Growing Golden Green Away
In
England; and soon there rises up in my mental vision a picture
that fascinated my youth in the Fliegende Blatter,
Representing
"Friedrich Gerstaeker auf der Reise." That gallant man is depicted
tramping on a serpent, new to M. Boulenger, while he attempts to
club, with the butt end of his gun, a most lively savage who,
accompanied by a bison, is attacking him in front. A terrific and
obviously enthusiastic crocodile is grabbing the tail of the
explorer's coat, and the explorer says "Hurrah! das gibt wieder
einen prachtigen Artikel fur Die Allgemeine Zeitung." I do not know
where in the world Gerstaeker was at the time, but I should fancy
hereabouts. My vigorous and lively conscience also reminds me that
the last words a most distinguished and valued scientific friend had
said to me before I left home was, "Always take measurements, Miss
Kingsley, and always take them from the adult male." I know I have
neglected opportunities of carrying this commission out on both
those banks, but I do not feel like going back. Besides, the men
would not like it, and I have mislaid my yard measure.
The extent of water, dotted with sandbanks and islands in all
directions, here is great, and seems to be fringed uniformly by low
swampy land, beyond which, to the north, rounded lumps of hills show
blue. On one of the islands is a little white house which I am told
was once occupied by a black trader for John Holt. It looks a
desolate place for any man to live in, and the way the crocodiles
and hippo must have come up on the garden ground in the evening time
could not have enhanced its charms to the average cautious man. My
men say, "No man live for that place now." The factory, I believe,
has been, for some trade reason, abandoned. Behind it is a great
clump of dark-coloured trees. The rest of the island is now covered
with hippo grass looking like a beautifully kept lawn. We lie up
for a short rest at another island, also a weird spot in its way,
for it is covered with a grove of only one kind of tree, which has a
twisted, contorted, gray-white trunk and dull, lifeless-looking,
green, hard foliage.
I learn that these good people, to make topographical confusion
worse confounded, call a river by one name when you are going up it,
and by another when you are coming down; just as if you called the
Thames the London when you were going up, and the Greenwich when you
were coming down. The banks all round this lake or broad, seem all
light-coloured sand and clay. We pass out of it into a channel.
Current flowing north. As we are entering the channel between banks
of grass-overgrown sand, a superb white crane is seen standing on
the sand edge to the left.
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