In Addition To This Unpleasantness You Are Liable -
Until You Realise The Danger From Experience, Or Have Native Advice
On
The point - to get tide-trapped away in the swamps, the water
falling round you when you are away in
Some deep pool or lagoon, and
you find you cannot get back to the main river. Of course if you
really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about
Posterity, and Posterity's Science, you will jump over into the
black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the
terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care
you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum.
But if you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me,
you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again; most of your
attention is directed to dealing with an "at home" to crocodiles and
mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime round you.
What little time you have over you will employ in wondering why you
came to West Africa, and why, after having reached this point of
folly, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose,
by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove
swamps.
Still, even if your own peculiar tastes and avocations do not take
you in small dug-out canoes into the heart of the swamps, you can
observe the difference in the local scenery made by the flowing of
the tide when you are on a vessel stuck on a sand-bank, in the Rio
del Rey for example.
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