Sometimes These
Curtains Are Decorated With Large Bell-Shaped, Bright-Coloured
Flowers, Sometimes With Delicate Sprays Of White Blossoms.
This
forest is beyond all my expectations of tropical luxuriance and
beauty, and it is a thing of another
World to the forest of the
Upper Calabar, which, beautiful as it is, is a sad dowdy to this.
There you certainly get a great sense of grimness and vastness; here
you have an equal grimness and vastness with the addition of superb
colour. This forest is a Cleopatra to which Calabar is but a
Quaker. Not only does this forest depend on flowers for its
illumination, for there are many kinds of trees having their young
shoots, crimson, brown-pink, and creamy yellow: added to this there
is also the relieving aspect of the prevailing fashion among West
African trees, of wearing the trunk white with here and there upon
it splashes of pale pink lichen, and vermilion-red fungus, which
alone is sufficient to prevent the great mass of vegetation from
being a monotony in green.
All day long we steam past ever-varying scenes of loveliness whose
component parts are ever the same, yet the effect ever different.
Doubtless it is wrong to call it a symphony, yet I know no other
word to describe the scenery of the Ogowe. It is as full of life
and beauty and passion as any symphony Beethoven ever wrote: the
parts changing, interweaving, and returning. There are leit motifs
here in it, too. See the papyrus ahead; and you know when you get
abreast of it you will find the great forest sweeping away in a bay-
like curve behind it against the dull gray sky, the splendid columns
of its cotton and red woods looking like a facade of some limitless
inchoate temple. Then again there is that stretch of sword-grass,
looking as if it grew firmly on to the bottom, so steady does it
stand; but as the Move goes by, her wash sets it undulating in waves
across its broad acres of extent, showing it is only riding at
anchor; and you know after a grass patch you will soon see a red
dwarf clay cliff, with a village perched on its top, and the
inhabitants thereof in their blue and red cloths standing by to
shout and wave to the Move, or legging it like lamp-lighters from
the back streets and the plantation to the river frontage, to be in
time to do so, and through all these changing phases there is always
the strain of the vast wild forest, and the swift, deep, silent
river.
At almost every village that we pass - and they are frequent after
the Fallaba - there is an ostentatious display of firewood deposited
either on the bank, or on piles driven into the mud in front of it,
mutely saying in their uncivilised way, "Try our noted chunks: best
value for money" - (that is to say, tobacco, etc.), to the Move or
any other little steamer that may happen to come along hungry for
fuel.
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