The Banks Of The Ogowe Just Above Lembarene Island Are Low; With The
Forest Only Broken By Village Clearings And Seeming To Press In On
Those, Ready To Absorb Them Should The Inhabitants Cease Their War
Against It.
The blue Ntyankala mountains of Achango land show away
to the E.S.E. in a range.
Behind us, gradually sinking in the
distance, is the high land on Lembarene Island.
Soon we run up alongside a big street of a village with four high
houses rising a story above the rest, which are strictly ground
floor; it has also five or six little low open thatched huts along
the street in front. {96} These may be fetish huts, or, as the
captain of the Sparrow would say, "again they mayn't." For I have
seen similar huts in the villages round Libreville, which were store
places for roof mats, of which the natives carefully keep a store
dry and ready for emergencies in the way of tornadoes, or to sell.
We stop abreast of this village. Inhabitants in scores rush out and
form an excited row along the vertical bank edge, several of the
more excited individuals falling over it into the water.
Yells from our passengers on the lower deck. Yells from inhabitants
on shore. Yells of vite, vite from the Captain. Dogs bark, horns
bray, some exhilarated individual thumps the village drum, canoes
fly out from the bank towards us. Fearful scrimmage heard going on
all the time on the deck below. As soon as the canoes are
alongside, our passengers from the lower deck, with their bundles
and their dogs, pour over the side into them. Canoes rock wildly
and wobble off rapidly towards the bank, frightening the passengers
because they have got their best clothes on, and fear that the
Eclaireur will start and upset them altogether with her wash.
On reaching the bank, the new arrivals disappear into brown clouds
of wives and relations, and the dogs into fighting clusters of
resident dogs. Happy, happy day! For those men who have gone
ashore have been away on hire to the government and factories for a
year, and are safe home in the bosoms of their families again, and
not only they themselves, but all the goods they have got in pay.
The remaining passengers below still yell to their departed friends;
I know not what they say, but I expect it's the Fan equivalent for
"Mind you write. Take care of yourself. Yes, I'll come and see you
soon," etc., etc. While all this is going on, the Eclaireur quietly
slides down river, with the current, broadside on as if she smelt
her stable at Lembarene. This I find is her constant habit whenever
the captain, the engineer, and the man at the wheel are all busy in
a row along the rail, shouting overside, which occurs whenever we
have passengers to land. Her iniquity being detected when the last
canoe load has left for the shore, she is spun round and sent up
river again at full speed.
We go on up stream; now and again stopping at little villages to
land passengers or at little sub-factories to discharge cargo, until
evening closes in, when we anchor and tie up at O'Saomokita, where
there is a sub-factory of Messrs. Woermann's, in charge of which is
a white man, the only white man between Lembarene and Njole. He
comes on board and looks only a boy, but is really aged twenty. He
is a Frenchman, and was at Hatton and Cookson's first, then he
joined Woermann's, who have put him in charge of this place. The
isolation for a white man must be terrible; sometimes two months
will go by without his seeing another white face but that in his
looking-glass, and when he does see another, it is only by a
fleeting visit such as we now pay him, and to make the most of this,
he stays on board to dinner.
June 23rd. - Start off steaming up river early in the morning time.
Land ahead showing mountainous. Rather suddenly the banks grow
higher. Here and there in the forest are patches which look like
regular hand-made plantations, which they are not, but only patches
of egombie-gombie trees, showing that at this place was once a
native town. Whenever land is cleared along here, this tree springs
up all over the ground. It grows very rapidly, and has great leaves
something like a sycamore leaf, only much larger. These leaves
growing in a cluster at the top of the straight stem give an
umbrella-like appearance to the affair; so the natives call them and
an umbrella by the same name, but whether they think the umbrella is
like the tree or the tree is like the umbrella, I can't make out. I
am always getting myself mixed over this kind of thing in my
attempts "to contemplate phenomena from a scientific standpoint," as
Cambridge ordered me to do. I'll give the habit up. "You can't do
that sort of thing out here - It's the climate," and I will content
myself with stating the fact, that when a native comes into a store
and wants an umbrella, he asks for an egombie-gombie.
The uniformity of the height of the individual trees in one of these
patches is striking, and it arises from their all starting fair. I
cannot make out other things about them to my satisfaction, for you
very rarely see one of them in the wild bush, and then it does not
bear a fruit that the natives collect and use, and then chuck away
the stones round their domicile. Anyhow, there they are all one
height, and all one colour, and apparently allowing no other
vegetation to make any headway among them. But I found when I
carefully investigated egombie-gombie patches that there were a few
of the great, slower-growing forest trees coming up amongst them,
and in time when these attain a sufficient height, their shade kills
off the egombie-gombie, and the patch goes back into the great
forest from which it came.
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