Twice We Had A Near Call, By Being Shot In Between
Two Pinnacle Rocks, Within Half An Inch Of Being
Fatally close to
each other for us; but after some alarming scrunching sounds, and
creaks from the canoe, we were
Shot ignominiously out down river.
Several times we got on to partially submerged table rocks, and were
unceremoniously bundled off them by the Ogowe, irritated at the
hindrance we were occasioning; but we never met the rocks of M'bo's
prophetic soul - that lurking, submerged needle, or knife-edge of a
pinnacle rock which was to rip our canoe from stem to stern, neat
and clean into two pieces.
The course we had to take coming down was different to that we took
coming up. Coming up we kept as closely as might be to the most
advisable bank, and dodged behind every rock we could, to profit by
the shelter it afforded us from the current. Coming down, fallen-
tree-fringed banks and rocks were converted from friends to foes; so
we kept with all our power in the very centre of the swiftest part
of the current in order to avoid them. The grandest part of the
whole time was coming down, below the Alemba, where the whole great
Ogowe takes a tiger-like spring for about half a mile, I should
think, before it strikes a rock reef below. As you come out from
among the rocks in the upper rapid it gives you - or I should perhaps
confine myself to saying, it gave me - a peculiar internal sensation
to see that stretch of black water, shining like a burnished sheet
of metal, sloping down before one, at such an angle.
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