I Have
Known Of Several Natives Losing Their Lives In This Way; Some Native
Villages Are Approachable From The Main
River by a short cut, as it
were, through the mangrove swamps, and the inhabitants of such
villages will now
And then go across this way with small canoes
instead of by the constant channel to the village, which is almost
always winding. In addition to this unpleasantness you are liable -
until you realise the danger from experience, or have native advice
on the point - to get tide-trapped away in the swamps, the water
falling round you when you are away in some deep pool or lagoon, and
you find you cannot get back to the main river. Of course if you
really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about
Posterity, and Posterity's Science, you will jump over into the
black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the
terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care
you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum.
But if you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me,
you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again; most of your
attention is directed to dealing with an "at home" to crocodiles and
mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime round you.
What little time you have over you will employ in wondering why you
came to West Africa, and why, after having reached this point of
folly, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose,
by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove
swamps.
Still, even if your own peculiar tastes and avocations do not take
you in small dug-out canoes into the heart of the swamps, you can
observe the difference in the local scenery made by the flowing of
the tide when you are on a vessel stuck on a sand-bank, in the Rio
del Rey for example. Moreover, as you will have little else to
attend to, save mosquitoes and mangrove flies, when in such a
situation, you may as well pursue the study. At the ebb gradually
the foliage of the lower branches of the mangroves grows wet and
muddy, until there is a great black band about three feet deep above
the surface of the water in all directions; gradually a network of
gray-white roots rises up, and below this again, gradually, a slope
of smooth and lead-grey slime. The effect is not in the least as if
the water had fallen, but as if the mangroves had, with one accord,
risen up out of it, and into it again they seem silently to sink
when the flood comes. But by this more safe, if still unpleasant,
method of observing mangrove-swamps, you miss seeing in full the
make of them, for away in their fastnesses the mangroves raise their
branches far above the reach of tide line, and the great gray roots
of the older trees are always sticking up in mid-air.
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