So Your Wives
Just Pick Up The Stools And The Knives And The Cooking-Pots, And The
Box, And The Children Toddle Off With The Calabashes.
You have, of
course, the gun to carry, for sleeping or waking a Fan never parts
with his gun, and so there you are "finish," as M. Pichault would
say, and before your new bark house is up, there grows the egombie-
gombie, where your house once stood.
Now and again, for lack of
immediate neighbouring villages to quarrel with, one end of a
village will quarrel with the other end. The weaker end then goes
off and builds itself another village, keeping an eye lifting for
any member of the stronger end who may come conveniently into its
neighbourhood to be killed and eaten. Meanwhile, the egombie-gombie
grows over the houses of the empty end, pretending it's a plantation
belonging to the remaining half. I once heard a new-comer hold
forth eloquently as to how those Fans were maligned. "They say,"
said he, with a fine wave of his arm towards such a patch, "that
these people do not till the soil - that they are not industrious -
that the few plantations they do make are ill-kept - that they are
only a set of wandering hunters and cannibals. Look there at those
magnificent plantations!" I did look, but I did not alter my
opinion of the Fans, for I know my old friend egombie-gombie when I
see him.
This morning the French official seems sad and melancholy.
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