Here, then, at 97.50 miles from the sea, ended our clan’s cruize.  We could only disembark upon the clean sand, surrounded by cool shade and blocks of gneiss, the favourite halting-place, as the husks of ground-nuts show.  Nchama Chamvu was at once sent off with a present of gin and a verbal report of arrival to Nessudikira Nchinu, (King), of Banza Nkaye, whilst we made ready for a night’s lodging a la belle etoile.  The mesenger returned, bringing a goat, and the good news that porters would be sent early next morning.  We slept well in the cool and dewless air, with little trouble from mosquitoes.  The voice of the cataract in its “sublime same-soundingness” alone broke the silence, and the scenery suggested to us, as to the first Britishers, that we might be bivouacking among the “blue misty hills of Morven.”

September 8.—­Shortly after sunrise appeared Gidi Mavunga, father to the “king,” accompanied by five “princes,” in the usual black coats, and some forty slaves, armed with pistols, blunderbusses, and guns of French and Yankee build.  Our visitors wore the official berretta, European shirts, that contrasted with coral necklaces and rings of zinc, brass, and copper, and handsome waistcoats, fronted by the well-tanned spoil of some “bush” animal, generally a wild cat, hanging like a Scotch sporran—­this is and has long been the distinctive sign of a “gentleman.”  According to John Barbot (Supplement, Churchill, v. 471), all men in Loango were bound to wear a furskin over their clothes, viz., of an otter, a tame cat, or a cat-o’-mountain; a “great wood or wild cat, or an angali (civet-cat).  Besides which, they had very fine speckled spelts, called ’ enkeny,’ which might be worn only by the king and his peculiar favourites.”

On the great man’s mat was placed a large silver-handled dagger, shaped somewhat like a fish-slicer; and the handsome hammocks of bright-dyed cottons brought down for our use shamed our humble ship’s canvas.  The visitors showed all that African calinerie, which, as fatal experience told me, would vanish for ever, changing velvet paw to armed claws, at the first question of cloth or rum.  Meanwhile, we had only to visit their village “upon the head of Gidi Mavunga.”

About 9 A.M. we attacked a true Via Dolorosa, the normal road of the Lower Congo.  The steep ascent of dry, clayey soil was strewed with schist and resplendent silvery gneiss; quartz appeared in every variety, crystallized and amorphous, transparent white, opaque, dusky, and rusty.  Tuckey’s mica slate appears to be mostly schist or gneiss:  I saw only one piece of true slate which had been brought from the upper bed.  Merolla’s talc is mostly mica.

Followed an equally rough descent to a water set in fetid mud, its iridescence declaring the presence of iron; oozing out of the ground, it discharges during rains into the river:  and, throughout the dry season, it keeps its little valley green with trees and shrubs.  I observed what appeared to be the Esere or Calabar bean (Physostigma venenosum), whose hairy pod is very distasteful to the travelling skin:  it was a “Mucuna urens.”