Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/417

 Then comes the wet season, not here like the wet season in the Rivers, one grim, torrential waterfall; but daily heavy sheets of rain diversified with intervals of bright sunshine and accompanied by heavy steamy heat; with the Ogowé coming down daily muddier and muddier, floating along on its swift current bits of bank with the trees still growing on them, and surrounded by tangled masses of grass and drift-wood, forming the well-known floating islands which mariners often meet with miles out to sea off this coast.

Every day the river rises up the banks, flowing over their lowest parts into the low reaches of the forest, and threatening with destruction the clay or mud-cliffs with the villages perched on them; and often carrying this threat out, and tearing down parts of the clay bank, swamping and sweeping away the frail houses and ruining the plantations of plantains close by.

Between the Kama country and the Ouroungou country the channel of the Ogowé is, fortunately, broad, and there are opportunities for the swollen waters to flow easily away into the low-lying uninhabited parts of the forest. Were it not so those clay cliffs would have worse times of it than they now do, and villages would be more precarious residential sites than is now the case. In the Talagouga gorge, where the current is more fierce—the waters being hemmed in to a narrower channel, and the banks made of the hard rocks of the Sierra del Cristal—the rise of the waters twenty and thirty feet above the dry-season level does not work the destruction that occurs in the clay bank region.

The long wet season commences in September and lasts till the end of January, its greatest intensity being in November and December. In February comes the short dry, then the short wet till May. From May till September is the long dry. The seasons, however, are not to be depended on with that calm reliance you may place in their wetness or dryness on the Gold Coast or in the Rivers. The long dry is fairly worthy of its name, the long wet also.

The peculiarity of the dry season being the coolest season,