In A Little Bay We Pass We
See Eight Native Women, Fans Clearly, By Their Bright Brown Faces,
And Their
Loads of brass bracelets and armlets; likely enough they
had anklets too, but we could not see them, as the
Good ladies were
pottering about waist-deep in the foam-flecked water, intent on
breaking up a stockaded fish-trap. We pause and chat, and watch
them collecting the fish in baskets, and I acquire some specimens;
and then, shouting farewells when we are well away, in the proper
civil way, resume our course.
The middle of the Ogowe here is simply forested with high rocks,
looking, as they stand with their grim forms above the foam, like a
regiment of strange strong creatures breasting it, with their
straight faces up river, and their more flowing curves down, as
though they had on black mantles which were swept backwards. Across
on the other bank rose the black-forested spurs of Lomba-njaku. Our
channel was free until we had to fight round the upper end of our
bay into a long rush of strong current with bad whirlpools curving
its face; then the river widens out and quiets down and then
suddenly contracts - a rocky forested promontory running out from
each bank. There is a little village on the north bank's
promontory, and, at the end of each, huge monoliths rise from the
water, making what looks like a gateway which had once been barred
and through which the Ogowe had burst.
For the first time on this trip I felt discouraged; it seemed so
impossible that we, with our small canoe and scanty crew, could
force our way up through that gateway, when the whole Ogowe was
rushing down through it. But we clung to the bank and rocks with
hands, poles, and paddle, and did it; really the worst part was not
in the gateway but just before it, for here there is a great
whirlpool, its centre hollowed some one or two feet below its rim.
It is caused, my Kembe islander says, by a great cave opening
beneath the water. Above the gate the river broadens out again and
we see the arched opening to a large cave in the south bank; the
mountain-side is one mass of rock covered with the unbroken forest;
and the entrance to this cave is just on the upper wall of the south
bank's promontory; so, being sheltered from the current here, we
rest and examine it leisurely. The river runs into it, and you can
easily pass in at this season, but in the height of the wet season,
when the river level would be some twenty feet or more above its
present one, I doubt if you could. They told me this place is
called Boko Boko, and that the cave is a very long one, extending on
a level some way into the hill, and then ascending and coming out
near a mass of white rock that showed as a speck high up on the
mountain.
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