M. du Chaillu also established the facts that the Nazareth river was the northern arm of the Delta, and that the Fernao Vaz anastomosed with the Delta’s southern arm.

The only pelagic islands off the Gaboon coast are the Brancas, Great and Little; Corisco Island, which we shall presently visit; Great and Little Elobi, called by old travellers Mosquito Islands, probably for “Moucheron,” a Dutchman who lost his ship there in 1600.  The land about the mouths of the Ogobe is a mass of mangrove swamps, like the Nigerian Delta, which high tides convert into insular ground; these, however, must be considered terra firma in its infancy.  The riverine islands of the Gaboon proper will be noticed as we ascend the bed.

Pongo-land ignores all such artificial partitions as districts or parishes; the only divisions are the countries occupied by the several tribes.

The Gaboon lies in “Africa-on-the-Line,” and a description of the year at Zanzibar Island applies to it in many points.[FN#6] The characteristic of this equatorial belt is uniformity of temperature:  whilst the Arabian and the Australian deserts often show a variation of 50deg.  Fahr. in a single day, the yearly range of the mercury at Singapore is about 10deg..  The four seasons of the temperates are utterly unknown to the heart of the tropics—­even in Hindostan the poet who would sing, for instance, the charms of spring must borrow the latter word (Buhar) from the Persian.  If the “bull” be allowed, the only rule here appears to be one of exceptions.  The traveller is always assured that this time there have been no rains, or no dries, or no tornadoes, or one or all in excess, till at last he comes to the conclusion that the Clerk of the Weather must have mislaid his ledger.  Contrary to the popular idea, which has descended to us from the classics, the climate under the Line is not of that torrid heat which a vertical sun suggests; the burning zone of the Old World begins in the northern hemisphere, where the regular rains do not extend, beyond the tenth as far as the twenty-fifth degree.  The equatorial climate is essentially temperate:  for instance, the heat of Sumatra, lying almost under the Line, rarely exceeds 24deg.  R.= 86deg.  Fahr.  In the Gaboon the thermometer ranges from 65deg. to 90deg.  Fahr., “a degree of heat,” says Dr. Ford, “less than in many salubrious localities in other parts of the world.”

Upon the Gaboon the wet seasons are synchronous with the vertical suns at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.  “The rainy season of a place within the tropics always begins when the sun has reached the zenith of that place.  Then the tradewinds, blowing regularly at other seasons, become gradually weaker, and at length cease and give way to variable winds and calms.  The trade-wind no longer brings its regular supply of cooler, drier air; the rising heats and calms favour an ascending current” (in the sea-depths, I may add, as well as on land), “which bears the damp air into the upper regions of the atmosphere, there to be cooled, and to occasion the heavy down-pour of each afternoon.  The nights and mornings are for the most part bright and clear.  When the sun moves away from the zenith, the trade-winds again begin to be felt, and bring with them the dry season of the year, during which hardly ever a cloud disturbs the serenity of the skies.