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. The frequency of these patches arises
from the nomadic habits of the chief tribe in these regions, the
Fans. They rarely occupy one site for a village for any
considerable time on account - firstly, of their wasteful method of
collecting rubber by cutting down the vine, which soon stamps it out
of a district; and, secondly, from their quarrelsome ways.
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