There Is An Uniformity In The Habits Of West Coast Rivers, From The
Volta To The Coanza, Which Is, When
You get used to it, very taking.
Excepting the Congo, the really great river comes out to sea with as
Much mystery as possible; lounging lazily along among its mangrove
swamps in a what's-it-matter-when-one-comes-out and where's-the-
hurry style, through quantities of channels inter-communicating with
each other. Each channel, at first sight as like the other as peas
in a pod, is bordered on either side by green-black walls of
mangroves, which Captain Lugard graphically described as seeming "as
if they had lost all count of the vegetable proprieties, and were
standing on stilts with their branches tucked up out of the wet,
leaving their gaunt roots exposed in midair." High-tide or low-
tide, there is little difference in the water; the river, be it
broad or narrow, deep or shallow, looks like a pathway of polished
metal; for it is as heavy weighted with stinking mud as water e'er
can be, ebb or flow, year out and year in. But the difference in
the banks, though an unending alternation between two appearances,
is weird.
At high-water you do not see the mangroves displaying their ankles
in the way that shocked Captain Lugard. They look most respectable,
their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and
there by the white line of an aerial root, coming straight down into
the water from some upper branch as straight as a plummet, in the
strange, knowing way an aerial root of a mangrove does, keeping the
hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level,
and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the
water and grasp the mud.
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