Part II.

The Cataracts of the Congo.

Chapter I.

From Fernando Po to Loango Bay.—­the German Expedition.

During the hot season of 1863, “Nanny Po,” as the civilized African calls this “lofty and beautiful island,” had become a charnel-house, a “dark and dismal tomb of Europeans.”  The yellow fever of the last year, which wiped out in two months one-third of the white colony—­more exactly, 78 out of 250—­had not reappeared, but the conditions for its re-appearance were highly favourable.  The earth was all water, the vegetation all slime, the air half steam, and the difference between wet and dry bulbs almost nil.  Thoroughly dispirited for the first time, I was meditating how to escape, when H. M. Steamship “Torch” steamed into Clarence Cove, and Commander Smith hospitably offered me a passage down south.  To hear was to accept.  Two days afterwards (July 29, 1863) I bade a temporary “adios” to the enemy.

The bitterness of death remained behind as we passed out of the baneful Bights.  Wind and wave were dead against us, yet I greatly enjoyed the gradual emerging of the sun through his shroud of “smokes;” the increasing consciousness that a moon and stars really exist; the soft blue haze of the sky, and the coolness of 73deg.  F. at 6 A.M. in the captain’s cabin.  I had also time to enjoy these charms.  The “Torch” was not provided with “despatch-boilers:”  she was profoundly worm-eaten, and a yard of copper, occasionally clapped on, did not prevent her making some four feet of water a day.  So we rolled leisurely along the well-known Gaboon shore, and faintly sighted from afar Capes Lopez and St. Catherine, and the fringing ranges of Mayumba-land, a blue line of heights based upon gently rising banks, ruddy and white, probably of shaly clay.  The seventh day (August 5) placed us off the well-known “red hills” of Loango-land.

The country looks high and bold after the desperate flatness of the Bights, and we note with pleasure that we have left behind us the “impervious luxuriance of vegetation which crowns the lowlands, covers the sides of the rises, and caps their summits.”  During the rains after October the grass, now showing yellow stubble upon the ruddy, rusty plain, becomes a cane fence, ten to twelve feet tall; but instead of matted, felted jungle, knitted together by creepers of cable size, we have scattered clumps of dark, lofty, and broad-topped trees.  A nearer view shows great cliffs, weather-worked into ravines and basins, ribs and ridges, towers and pinnacles.  Above them is a joyful open land, apparently disposed in two successive dorsa or steps, with bright green tiers and terraces between, and these are pitted with the crater-like sinks locally called “holes,” so frequent in the Gaboon country.  Southwards the beauty of eternal verdure will end, and the land will become drier, and therefore better fitted for Europeans, the nearer it approaches Mossamedes Bay.  South of “Little Fish,” again, a barren tract of white sand will show the “Last Tree,” an inhospitable region, waterless, and bulwarked by a raging sea.