Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/423

 foundered, and so the only thing was to pole the logs off. Some of those logs, by the by, had queer ways with them. One, on being poked on the end as it floated towards, us opened its front section and bit the pole with such a grip that the man using it let go all one time. Yes, I dare say it was a crocodile—still African vegetation is a queer thing.

You would naturally think that, in spite of sandbanks with cliff-edges down stream, of sections of the continent floating round, and of logs liable to bite and not liable to bite, you had at least one thing left to rely on—the bank. But that bank may be all right, and again, as the captain of the late ss. Sparrow would say, it mayn't. A friend of mine, for example, who got stuck in a launch up a river-creek on a sandbank, got a hawser out, and winding it round some mangroves on the bank, proceeded "to have her off in no time" with the steam winch. She did not budge an inch, but the African continent did: the whole bit of bank came away, and down on the boat came the trees with a swish, burying everything and everybody in branches and foliage. As he said, we were "like the babes in the wood after robins had been along, on a big scale"; and he also stated, as we climbed up on top of our arboreal superstructure, that "Africa was a rotten continent."