The negroes showed their usual art.  Paddling westward they rounded the high red and white South Point, where a projecting reef broke the rollers.  We waited for some twenty minutes for a lull; at the auspicious moment every throat was strained by a screaming shout, and the black backs bent doughtily to their work.  We were raised like infants in the nurse’s arms; the good craft was flung forward with the seething mass, and as she touched shore we sprang out, whilst our conveyance was beached by a crowd of stragglers.  The dreaded bar is as usual double:  in the heaviest weather boats make for a solitary palm-tree at the bottom of the sandy bay.  Some of the dug-outs are in pairs like the Brazilian Ajoujo; the sides are lashed together or fastened by thwarts, and both are made to bend a little too much inwards.

It was dark when we climbed up the stiff Jacob’s ladder along the landward side of the white Kinsembo bluff.  There are three ramps:  the outermost is fit only for unshod feet; the central is better for those who can squeeze through the rocky crevices, and the furthest is tolerably easy; but it can be reached only by canoeing across the stream.  Mr. Hunter of Messrs. Tobin’s house received us in the usual factory of the South Coast, a ground-floor of wicker-work, windowless, and thatched after native fashion.  The chief agent, who shall be nameless, was drunk arid disorderly:  it is astonishing that men of business can trust their money to such irresponsible beings; he had come out to Blackland a teetotaller, and presently his condition became a living lecture upon geographical morality.

The night gave us a fine study of the Kinsembo mosquito, a large brown dipter, celebrated even upon this coast.  A barrel of water will act as nursery; at times the plagues are said to extinguish a lantern, and to lie an inch deep at the bottom.  I would back them against a man’s life after two nights of full exposure:  the Brazilian “Marimbondo” is not worse.  At 7 A.M. on the next day we descended the easiest of the ramps, which are common upon this coast, and were paddled over the Kinsembo River.  Eleven miles off, it issues from masses of high ground, and at this season it spreads out like the Ambriz in broad stagnant sheets, bordered with reeds and grass supplying fish and crabs, wild ducks and mosquitoes.  Presently, when the Cacimbo ends in stormy rains and horrid rollers, its increased volume and impetus will burst the sand-strip which confines it, and the washed-away material will recruit the terrible bar.

Leaving the ferry, wre mounted the “tipoias,” which Englishmen call “hammocks” after the Caribs of Jamaica, and I found a strange contrast between the men of Kinsembo and of Sao Paulo.  The former are admirable bearers, like their brethren of Ambrizette, famed as the cream of the coast:  four of them carried us at the rate of at least six miles an hour; apparently they cannot go slowly, and they are untireable as black ants.  Like the Bahian cadeira-men, they use shoulder-pads, and forked sticks to act as levers when shifting; the bamboo-pole has ivory pegs, to prevent the hammock-clews slipping, and the sensation is somewhat that of being tossed in a blanket.