Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/127

 attend to the matter, but presumably their time is taken up with complicated climates like England's.

While your eyes are drinking in the characteristics of Bonny scenery you notice a peculiar smell—an intensification of that smell you noticed when nearing Bonny, in the evening, out at sea. That's the breath of the malarial mud, laden with fever, and the chances are you will be down to-morrow. If it is near evening time now, you can watch it becoming incarnate, creeping and crawling and gliding out from the side creeks and between the mangrove-roots, laying itself upon the river, stretching and rolling in a kind of grim play, and finally crawling up the side of the ship to come on board and leave its cloak of moisture that grows green mildew in a few hours over all. Noise you will not be much troubled with there is only that rain, a sound I have known make men who are sick with fever well-nigh mad, and now and again the depressing cry of the curlews which abound here. This combination is such that after six or eight hours of it you will be thankful to hear your shipmates start to work the winch. I take it you are hard up when you relish a winch. And you I will say—let your previous experience of the world be what it may—Good Heavens, what a place!

Five times have I been now in Bonny River and I like it. You always do get to like it if you live long enough to allow the strange fascination of the place to get a hold on you; but when I first entered it, on a ship commanded by Captain Murray in '93, in the wet season, i.e. in August, in spite of the confidence I had by this time acquired in his skill and knowledge of the West Coast, a sense of horror seized on me as I gazed upon the scene, and I said to the old coaster who then had charge of my education, "Good Heavens! what an awful accident. We've gone and picked up the Styx." He was evidently hurt and said, "Bonny was a nice place when you got used to it," and went on to discourse on the last epidemic here, when nine men out of the resident eleven died in about ten days from yellow fever. I went ashore that evening to have tea with Captain Boler, and was told many more details about this particular epidemic, to say nothing of other epidemics. In one which the captain experienced, at the