The rivers of the great mangrove-swamp from the Sombreiro to the Rio
del Rey are now known pretty surely not to be branches of the Niger,
but the upper regions of this part of the Bight are much neglected
by English explorers.
I believe the great swamp region of the Bight
of Biafra is the greatest in the world, and that in its immensity
and gloom it has a grandeur equal to that of the Himalayas.
Take any man, educated or not, and place him on Bonny or Forcados
River in the wet season on a Sunday - Bonny for choice. Forcados is
good. You'll keep Forcados scenery "indelibly limned on the tablets
of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page," after you
have spent even a week waiting for the Lagos branch-boat on its inky
waters. But Bonny! Well, come inside the bar and anchor off the
factories: seaward there is the foam of the bar gleaming and wicked
white against a leaden sky and what there is left of Breaker Island.
In every other direction you will see the apparently endless walls
of mangrove, unvarying in colour, unvarying in form, unvarying in
height, save from perspective. Beneath and between you and them lie
the rotting mud waters of Bonny River, and away up and down river,
miles of rotting mud waters fringed with walls of rotting mud
mangrove-swamp. The only break in them - one can hardly call it a
relief to the scenery - are the gaunt black ribs of the old hulks,
once used as trading stations, which lie exposed at low water near
the shore, protruding like the skeletons of great unclean beasts who
have died because Bonny water was too strong even for them.
Raised on piles from the mud shore you will see the white-painted
factories and their great store-houses for oil; each factory likely
enough with its flag at half-mast, which does not enliven the
scenery either, for you know it is because somebody is "dead again."
Throughout and over all is the torrential downpour of the wet-season
rain, coming down night and day with its dull roar. I have known it
rain six mortal weeks in Bonny River, just for all the world as if
it were done by machinery, and the interval that came then was only
a few wet days, where-after it settled itself down to work again in
the good West Coast waterspout pour for more weeks.
While your eyes are drinking in the characteristics of Bonny scenery
you notice a peculiar smell - an intensification of that smell you
noticed when nearing Bonny, in the evening, out at sea. That's the
breath of the malarial mud, laden with fever, and the chances are
you will be down to-morrow. If it is near evening time now, you can
watch it becoming incarnate, creeping and crawling and gliding out
from the side creeks and between the mangrove-roots, laying itself
upon the river, stretching and rolling in a kind of grim play, and
finally crawling up the side of the ship to come on board and leave
its cloak of moisture that grows green mildew in a few hours over
all.
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