D. The Silence Of The Son To The Questions Is Remarkable, Because
You Always Find People Who Have Been Among Spirits Lose Their Power
Of Asking For What They Want, For A Time, And Can Only Answer To The
Right Question.
E. The sudden way in which Raychow's son gets fired with the desire
to turn civil engineer just when
He has got a magnificent opening in
life as a doctor is merely the usual flightiness of young men, who
do not see where their true advantages lie - and the conduct of the
men in dying, after digging a canal is normal, and modern
experiences support it, for men who dig canals down in West Africa
die plentifully, be they black, white, or yellow; so you can't help
believing in those men, although it is strange a black man should
have been so enterprising as to go in for canal digging at all.
There is no other case of it extant to my knowledge, and a
remarkable fact is, that the Moondah does so nearly connect, by one
creek, with the Gaboon estuary that you can drag a boat across the
little intervening bit of land.
F. Is a sporting story that turns up a little unexpectedly,
certainly; but the Benito is within easy distance north of the
Moondah, so the geography is all right.
G. The inhabitants of Fernando Po have still an especial hatred for
the M'pongwe, and both they and the M'pongwe have this account of
the one tribe driving the other off the mainland. Then the Bubis
{295} - as the inhabitants on Fernando Po are called, from a
confusion arising in the minds of the sailors calling at Fernando
Po, between their stupidity and their word Babi = stranger, which
they use as a word of greeting - these Bubis are undoubtedly a very
early African race. Their culture, though presenting some
remarkable points, is on the whole exceedingly low. They never wear
clothes unless compelled to, and their language depends so much on
gesture that they cannot talk in it to each other in the dark.
I give this as a sample of African stories. It is far more
connected and keeps to the point in a far more business-like way
than most of them. They are of great interest when you know the
locality and the tribe they come from; but I am sure if you were to
bring home a heap of stories like this, and empty them over any
distinguished ethnologist's head, without ticketing them with the
culture of the tribe they belonged to, the conditions it lives
under, and so forth, you would stun him with the seeming inter-
contradiction of some, and utter pointlessness of the rest, and he
would give up ethnology and hurriedly devote his remaining years to
the attempt to collect a million postage stamps, so as to do
something definite before he died. Remember, you must always have
your original material - carefully noted down at the time of
occurrence - with you, so that you may say in answer to his Why?
Because of this, and this, and this.
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