The following day we landed in canoes, for the bar was rough, and I had been charitably warned not to put my arm or hand into the water.  Only a few days previously an unlucky French sailor, who had wanted to get back his hat, which had fallen into the water, had had an arm seized and taken off by a shark.  I did as I was bid; we plunged into the surf, and got through without any drawbacks.  Just as I reached the shore a tremendous fusillade began.  It was a reception after the local fashion, which had been prepared for me:  over three thousand dancing natives doing a sort of Arab fantasia on foot.  They wore shell necklaces and bracelets on their arms and legs.  Some had caps made of wild beasts’ skins, or circlets of turkey’s feathers on their heads; others again had gold horns on their foreheads.  Everybody was shouting and writhing about and firing off guns; the elders of the tribe pressed round me with dancing attendants behind them, who held huge coloured parasols over their heads.  The women exerted themselves as much as the men, performing the most extravagant and peculiar dances to the sound of twenty or thirty tomtoms, or great drums, six feet long.  The whole thing made the most extraordinary clatter and uproar.  When we got near the fort, the crowd executed a sham assault on it, the big gun in the citadel was fired, and I made my triumphal entry between two rows of soldiers in red Danish uniforms.  Nothing could have been more picturesque.

The governor gave us a splendid lunch, in the European style, in a big room in the fort.  The only thing that was African about it was the waiting, which certainly did not lack local colour; for it was done by a score of young negresses, selected for the irreproachable beauty of their forms, which no veil, not even the very tiniest, concealed.  There they stood, plate in hand, and napkin under arm, without the smallest shyness, seeing indeed they wore the dress(!) of the country.  Imagine the bronze caryatidae round the new Paris Opera House come down off their pedestals, and handing round the dishes at a big Parisian dinner-party!  All these young ladies’ coquetry had gone to the dressing of their woolly hair, which was clipped, like garden shrubs, into the most fanciful shapes, and to the fineness of their skins, which were as soft and shiny as satin.  This resulted from the daily baths they were in the habit of taking, rubbing themselves also with fine sand.  But, unluckily, the rubbing could not get rid of the negro scent.  I have never been able myself to endure the odour of negroes of either sex; but I have known people whom it quite intoxicated, and who were always trying to get reappointed to Senegal, so as to get back to it, in spite of having had their health shattered by African fevers.  It is said, too, to attract sharks, and that if a white man bathes with a negro where they swarm, the negro is always seized first.  I have no personal experience of this fact.