The Fans
Seemed Impressed, But Any Crowd Would Be By The Hymn-Singing Of My
Crew, Unless They Were Inmates Of Deaf And Dumb Asylums.
Then we
took our farewell, and thanked the village elaborately for its kind
invitation to spend the night there on our way home, shoved off and
paddled away in great style just to show those Fans what Igalwas
could do.
We hadn't gone 200 yards before we met a current coming round the
end of a rock reef that was too strong for us to hold our own in,
let alone progress. On to the bank I was ordered and went; it was a
low slip of rugged confused boulders and fragments of rocks,
carelessly arranged, and evidently under water in the wet season. I
scrambled along, the men yelled and shouted and hauled the canoe,
and the inhabitants of the village, seeing we were becoming amusing
again, came, legging it like lamp-lighters, after us, young and old,
male and female, to say nothing of the dogs. Some good souls helped
the men haul, while I did my best to amuse the others by diving
headlong from a large rock on to which I had elaborately climbed,
into a thick clump of willow-leaved shrubs. They applauded my
performance vociferously, and then assisted my efforts to extricate
myself, and during the rest of my scramble they kept close to me,
with keen competition for the front row, in hopes that I would do
something like it again. But I refused the encore, because, bashful
as I am, I could not but feel that my last performance was carried
out with all the superb reckless ABANDON of a Sarah Bernhardt, and a
display of art of this order should satisfy any African village for
a year at least. At last I got across the rocks on to a lovely
little beach of white sand, and stood there talking, surrounded by
my audience, until the canoe got over its difficulties and arrived
almost as scratched as I; and then we again said farewell and
paddled away, to the great grief of the natives, for they don't get
a circus up above Njole every week, poor dears.
Now there is no doubt that that chief's plantain-leaf chart was an
ingenious idea and a credit to him. There is also no doubt that the
Fan mile is a bit Irish, a matter of nine or so of those of ordinary
mortals, but I am bound to say I don't think, even allowing for
this, that he put those pieces far enough apart. On we paddled a
long way before we picked up village number one, mentioned in that
chart. On again, still longer, till we came to village number two.
Village number three hove in sight high up on a mountain side soon
after, but it was getting dark and the water worse, and the hill-
sides growing higher and higher into nobly shaped mountains,
forming, with their forest-graced steep sides, a ravine that, in the
gathering gloom, looked like an alley-way made of iron, for the
foaming Ogowe.
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