Writing Home To His Mother, Think I, As I Go On
Putting A New Braid Round The Bottom Of A Worn Skirt.
Almost
immediately after follows the sound of a little click from the next
cabin, and then apparently one of the denizens of the infernal
regions has got its tail smashed in a door and the heavy hot
afternoon air is reft by an inchoate howl of agony.
I drop my
needlework and take to the deck; but it is after all only that shy
retiring young man practising secretly on his clarionet.
The Captain is drowsily looking down the river. But repose is not
long allowed to that active spirit; he sees something in the water -
what? "Hippopotame," he ejaculates. Now both he and the Engineer
frequently do this thing, and then fly off to their guns - bang,
bang, finish; but this time he does not dash for his gun, nor does
the Engineer, who flies out of his cabin at the sound of the war
shout "Hippopotame." In vain I look across the broad river with its
stretches of yellow sandbanks, where the "hippopotame" should be,
but I can see nothing but four black stumps sticking up in the water
away to the right. Meanwhile the Captain and the Engineer are
flying about getting off a crew of blacks into the canoe we are
towing alongside. This being done the Captain explains to me that
on the voyage up "the Engineer had fired at, and hit a hippopotamus,
and without doubt this was its body floating." We are now close
enough even for me to recognise the four stumps as the deceased's
legs, and soon the canoe is alongside them and makes fast to one,
and then starts to paddle back, hippo and all, to the Eclaireur.
But no such thing; let them paddle and shout as hard as they like,
the hippo's weight simply anchors them.
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