Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/418

 and its sky overhung with gray threatening-looking cloud, is one that extends from just below Cameroons to Angola, i.e., to the edge of the Kalahari desert, where wet seasons are not; it strikes the person coming south from the Bights, where the dry season is the hot season and the wet the cooler, as most strange and peculiar. One of the many difficulties of travelling down the West African coast is that you are certain to get your season wrong somewhere. It is not so bad for me as it is for some people, because I rather prefer the wet and am reconciled to the climate. Now a person with a predilection for dry seasons has an awful life of it, and I must in justice remark that this predilection is the sane one to possess. I know an American gentleman, who lowed he'd do West Africa," but ultimately lowed West Africa had done him," who got so bothered by the different times different seasons were going on in different parts of the Coast that he characterised the entire West African climate as "a fried eel." Why fried I do not know. We do not fry in the Coast climate, we stew,—and I consider the statement harsh. Of course we have got the worst climate in the world and we are proud of it. Some day I will write a work in ten volumes that will be an ABC of the whole affair, and be what my German friends would call the essential pocket-book for West African travellers, and it will let them know what to expect, when, where, and how; but meantime I may note that both wet and dry seasons have their points. If you want to go far up a river, without having ample opportunities of studying the various ways in which your craft can get wrecked on sandbanks, you must go in the full wet. Of course this ends in your returning, or attempting to return in the dry, and as when you have penetrated the interior any distance you usually start on your return journey full tilt, pursued by rapacious and ferocious cannibals, the fact that you stick on sandbanks on an average three times in a mile, gives you considerable worry. If you wish to penetrate the interior on foot, you must choose the dry season because of those swamps—a good bottomless swamp is impassable in the wet. In the dry it bears a crust over it, which, with suitable precautions, can be crossed, while the shallow swamps can be waded. And all the rivers are