This bend was in former days the terminus of canoe travel up stream.  Grisly tales of mishap are told; and even now a musketry salute is fired when boats pass without accident.  Beyond Diamond Rock is a well-wooded, stony cove, “Salan Kunkati:”  Captain Tuckey makes this the name of the Diamond Rock, and translates it “the strong feather.”  Quartz, before in lines and bands, now appears in masses:  the “Coal Rock,” which the chart places near Insala (Bechope Point) on the northern bank, was probably submerged.  High cliffs towered above us, and fragments which must have weighed twenty tons had slipped into the water; one of them bore an adansonia, growing head downwards.

The next feature was Npunga Bay, low and leek-green, between the blue-brown water, here some 700 yards broad, and the yellow sun-burnt trough-sides.  A little further on, at 2 P.M., the canoe-men halted beyond a sandy point with two large “Bondeiro” trees, and declared their part of the bargain to have been fulfilled.  “Bonderro” is a corruption of the Lusitanianized imbundeiro, the calabash, or adansonia (digitata?):  the other baobab is called nkondo, probably the Aliconda and Elicandy of Battel and old travellers, who describe the water-tanks hollowed in its huge trunk, and the cloth made from the bark fibre.  Thus the “Condo Sonio” of the Chart should be “Nkondo Sonho,” the latter a proper name.  It is seldom that we find trees turned to all the uses of which they are capable:  the Congo people despise the nutritious and slightly laxative flour of the “monkey bread,” and the young leaves are not used as pickles; the bast is not valued for cloth and ropes, nor are the boles cut into cisterns.

As will be seen, we ought to have insisted upon being paddled to Kala cliff and bight, the Mayumba Bay of the Chart, where the bed trends west-east, and shows the lowest rapids:  the First Congo Expedition went up even higher.  At Nkongo ka Lunga, the point marked by two calabashes, we inquired for the Nokki Congo, of which we had heard at Chisalla, and which still exists upon the chart,—­districts and villages being often confounded.  All laughed, and declared that the “port-town” had long been sold off, the same had been the case, even in Tuckey’s day, with the next settlement, “Condo Sonio” (the Baobab of Sonho), formerly the great up-stream mart, where the slave-traders transacted their business.  All the population was now transferred inland and, like our predecessors, we were promised a two hours’ climb over the rough, steep highland which lay in front.  Then we understood that “Nokki” was the name of a canton, not of a settlement.  Its south-eastern limits may have contained the “City of Norchie, the best situated of any place hitherto seen in Ethiopia,” where Father Merolla (p. 280) baptized 126 souls,—­and this is rendered probable by the crucifixes and coleworts which were found by the First Congo Expedition.