Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/228

 skirt. Almost immediately after follows the sound of a little click from the next cabin, and then apparently one of the denizens of the internal regions has got its tail smashed in a door and the heavy hot afternoon air is reft by an inchoate howl of agony. I drop my needlework and take to the deck; but it is after all only that shy retiring young man practising secretly on his clarionet.

The captain is drowsily looking down the river. But repose is not long allowed to that active spirit; he sees something in the water—what? "Hippopotame," he ejaculates. Now both he and the engineer frequently do this thing, and then fly off to their guns—bang, bang, finish; but this time he does not dash for his gun, nor does the engineer, who flies out of his cabin at the sound of the war shout "Hippopotame." In vain I look across the broad river with its stretches of yellow sandbanks, where the "hippopotame" should be, but I can see nothing but four black stumps sticking up in the water away to the right. Meanwhile the captain and the engineer are flying about getting off a crew of blacks into the canoe we are towing alongside. This being done the captain explains to me that on the voyage up "the engineer had fired at, and hit a hippopotamus, and without doubt this was its body floating." We are now close enough even for me to recognise the four stumps as the deceased's legs, and soon the canoe is alongside them and makes fast to one, and then starts to paddle back, hippo and all, to the Éclaireur. But no such thing; let them paddle and shout as hard as they like, the hippo's weight simply anchers them. The Éclaireur by now has dropped down the river past them, and has to sweep round and run back. Recognising promptly what the trouble is, the energetic captain grabs up a broom, ties a light cord belonging to the leadline to it, and holding the broom by the end of its handle, swings it round his head and hurls it at the canoe. The arm of a merciful Providence being interposed, the broom-tomahawk does not hit the canoe, wherein, if it had, it must infallibly have killed some one, but falls short, and goes tearing off with the current, well out of reach of the canoe. The captain seeing this gross dereliction of duty by a Chargeur Réunis broom, hauls it in hand over hand and talks to it. Then he ties the other end of its