Nothing negrotic now astonishes us, there is nought new to me in Africa.  We landed upon a natural pier of rock ledge, and, after some 400 yards of good path, we entered a neat little village, and found our crew snoring snugly asleep.  We “exhorted them,” refreshed the fire, and generously recruited exhausted nature with quinine, julienne and tea, potatoes and potted meats, pipes and cigars.  So sped my annual unlucky day, and thus was spent my first jungle-night almost exactly under the African line.

At 5 A. M. the new morning dawned, the young tide flowed, the crabs disappeared, and the gig, before high and dry on the hard mud, once more became buoyant.  Forward again!  The channel was a labyrinthine ditch, an interminable complication of over-arching roots, and of fallen trees forming gateways; the threshold was a maze of slimy stumps, stems, and forks in every stage of growth and decay, dense enough to exclude the air of heaven.  In parts there were ugly snags, and everywhere the turns were so puzzling, that I marvelled how a human being could attempt the passage by night.  The best time for ascending is half-flood, for descending half-ebb; if the water be too high, the bush chokes the way; if too low, the craft grounds.  At the Gaboon mouth the tide rises three feet; at the head of the Mbata Creek, where it arrests the sweet water rivulet, it is, of course, higher.

And now the scene improved.  The hat-palm, a brab or wild date, the spine-palm (Phoenix spinosa), and the Okumeh or cotton-tree disputed the ground with the foul Rhizophora.  Then clearings appeared.  At Ejene, the second of two landing-places evidently leading to farms, we transferred ourselves to canoes, our boat being arrested by a fallen tree.  Advancing a few yards, all disembarked upon trampled mud, and, ascending the bank, left the creek which supplies baths and drinking water to our destination.  Striking a fair pathway, we passed westward over a low wave of ground, sandy and mouldy, and traversed a fern field surrounded by a forest of secular trees; some parasite-grown from twig to root, others blanched and scathed by the fires of heaven; these roped and corded with runners and llianas, those naked and clothed in motley patches.  At 6.30 A.M., after an hour’s work, probably representing a mile, and a total of 7 h. 30 m., or six miles in a south-south-west direction from Le Plateau, we left the ugly cul de sac of a creek, and entered Mbata, which the French call “La Plantation.”

Women and children fled in terror at our approach—­and no wonder:  eyes like hunted boars, haggard faces, yellow as the sails at the Cape Verdes, and beards two days long, act very unlike cosmetics.  A house was cleared for us by Hotaloya, alias “Andrew,” of the Baraka Mission, the lord of the village, who, poor fellow! has only two wives; he is much ashamed of himself, but his excuse is, “I be boy now,” meaning about twenty-two.  After breakfast we prepared for a sleep, but the popular excitement forbade it; the villagers had heard that a white greenhorn was coming to bag and to buy gorillas, and they resolved to make hay whilst the sun shone.