So When
A Village Of Fans Has Cleared All The Rubber Out Of Its District, Or
Has Made The Said
District too hot to hold it by rows with other
villages, or has got itself very properly shelled out and
Burnt for
some attack on traders or the French flag in any form, its
inhabitants clear off into another district, and build another
village; for bark and palm thatch are cheap, and house removing just
nothing; when you are an unsophisticated cannibal Fan you don't
require a pantechnicon van to stow away your one or two mushroom-
shaped stools, knives, and cooking-pots, and a calabash or so. If
you are rich, maybe you will have a box with clothes in as well, but
as a general rule all your clothes are on your back. So your wives
just pick up the stools and the knives and the cooking-pots, and the
box, and the children toddle off with the calabashes. You have, of
course, the gun to carry, for sleeping or waking a Fan never parts
with his gun, and so there you are "finish," as M. Pichault would
say, and before your new bark house is up, there grows the egombie-
gombie, where your house once stood. Now and again, for lack of
immediate neighbouring villages to quarrel with, one end of a
village will quarrel with the other end. The weaker end then goes
off and builds itself another village, keeping an eye lifting for
any member of the stronger end who may come conveniently into its
neighbourhood to be killed and eaten. Meanwhile, the egombie-gombie
grows over the houses of the empty end, pretending it's a plantation
belonging to the remaining half. I once heard a new-comer hold
forth eloquently as to how those Fans were maligned. "They say,"
said he, with a fine wave of his arm towards such a patch, "that
these people do not till the soil - that they are not industrious -
that the few plantations they do make are ill-kept - that they are
only a set of wandering hunters and cannibals. Look there at those
magnificent plantations!" I did look, but I did not alter my
opinion of the Fans, for I know my old friend egombie-gombie when I
see him.
This morning the French official seems sad and melancholy. I fancy
he has got a Monday head (Kipling), but he revives as the day goes
on. As we go on, the banks become hills and the broad river, which
has been showing sheets of sandbanks in all directions, now narrows
and shows only neat little beaches of white sand in shallow places
along the bank. The current is terrific. The Eclaireur breathes
hard, and has all she can do to fight her way up against it. Masses
of black weathered rock in great boulders show along the exposed
parts of both banks, left dry by the falling waters. Each bank is
steep, and quantities of great trees, naked and bare, are hanging
down from them, held by their roots and bush-rope entanglement from
being swept away with the rushing current, and they make a great
white fringe to the banks.
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