Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/172

 only a boy, but is really aged twenty. He is a Frenchman, and was at Hatton and Cookson's first, then he joined Woermann's, who have put him in charge of this place. The isolation for a white man must be terrible; sometimes two months will go by without his seeing another white face but that in his looking-glass, and when he does see another, it is only by a fleeting visit such as we now pay him, and to make the most of this, he stays on board to dinner. While waiting for dinner that night, as I am sitting at the saloon table, I see an apparition on the settee opposite. Is it fever coming on? Or does it arise from having got some brain cells permanently shaken out of their place by that gun shock this afternoon? I don't mention it to my fellow passengers, who I notice do not seem to see it, for fear of exciting their derision, but watch it furtively during dinner. It does not move nor multiply itself, nor has it any phosphorescent halo. Good signs, all these, but still it cannot be a black silk chimney-pot hat. After all, it was, and it belongs to the captain. How or why or when he got it, I do not know—neither do I exactly know what he and the passengers do with it, now I have gone to my cabin, which is next to the saloon. That the French official is the leading spirit in proceedings I am quite sure, for I know his voice wherein he is now singing tunes I have heard at the Jacots' as hymn tunes. I am convinced of this, however, that they are not hymn tunes now, because you don't dance a species of Highland fling, which from the vibrations communicated to me I know is being danced, to hymns; neither do you greet them with shouts of laughter. I wish—no, of course I don't, for it comes neither under the head of fetish, nor fishes, and morcover in the intervals, filled with violent conversation, I hear the French official, I am perfectly sure, trying to convince the others that I am an English officer in disguise on the spy; which makes me feel embarrassed, and anything but flattered. Wish to goodness I knew French, or how to flirt with that French official so as to dispel the illusion.

June 23rd.—Start off steaming up river early in the morning time. Land ahead showing mountainous. Rather suddenly the banks grow higher. Here and there in the forest are patches which look like regular hand-made plant-