The Words
Are Put In By The Singer On The Spur Of The Moment, And Only
Restricted In This Sense, That There Would Always Be The Domestic
Catalogue - Whatever Its Component Details Might Be - Sung To The One
Fixed Tune, The Trade Information Sung To Another, And So On.
A
good singer, in these parts, means the man who can make up the best
song - the most impressive,
Or the most amusing; I have elsewhere
mentioned pretty much the same state of things among the Ga's and
Krumen and Bubi, and in all cases the tunes are only voice tunes,
not for instrumental performance. The instrumental music consists
of that marvellously developed series of drum tunes - the attempt to
understand which has taken up much of my time, and led me into queer
company - and the many tunes played on the 'mrimba and the orchid-
root-stringed harp: they are, I believe, entirely distinct from the
song tunes. And these peaceful tunes my men were now singing were,
in their florid elaboration very different from the one they fought
the rapids to, of - So Sir - So Sur - So Sir - So Sur - Ush! So Sir,
etc.
On we go singing elaborately, thinking no evil of nature, when a
current, a quiet devil of a thing, comes round from behind a point
of the bank and catches the nose of our canoe; wringing it well, it
sends us scuttling right across the river in spite of our ferocious
swoops at the water, upsetting us among a lot of rocks with the
water boiling over them; this lot of rocks being however of the
table-top kind, and not those precious, close-set pinnacles rising
up sheer out of profound depths, between which you are so likely to
get your canoe wedged in and split. We, up to our knees in water
that nearly tears our legs off, push and shove the canoe free, and
re-embarking return singing "So Sir" across the river, to have it
out with that current. We do; and at its head find a rapid, and
notice on the mountain-side a village clearing, the first sign of
human habitation we have seen to-day.
Above this rapid we get a treat of still water, the main current of
the Ogowe flying along by the south bank. On our side there are
sandbanks with their graceful sloping backs and sudden ends, and
there is a very strange and beautiful effect produced by the flakes
and balls of foam thrown off the rushing main current into the quiet
water. These whirl among the eddies and rush backwards and forwards
as though they were still mad with wild haste, until, finding no
current to take them down, they drift away into the landlocked bays,
where they come to a standstill as if they were bewildered and lost
and were trying to remember where they were going to and whence they
had come; the foam of which they are composed is yellowish-white,
with a spongy sort of solidity about it.
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