Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/429

 and the grandmother of other strapping young women mixed up among them. I must really try and find out which is which. Until I do so perhaps it will be diplomatic to regard them all as her daughters. Mrs. Ibea insists, in the kindliest way possible, on my taking possession of her own room. Mr. Ibea is away, she says, on an evangelising visit to the mainland at Cape St. John (the northern extremity of Corisco Bay), intending to call at Eloby Island; so he may not be here for some days, and she promptly gives me tea and alligator pears, both exceedingly welcome.

The views from the windows of my clean and comfortable room are very beautiful. The house stands on a high promontory called Alondo Point, the turning point of the south and west sides of the island, and almost overhangs the sea. A reef of rock runs out at the foot of the cliff for about a mile, on which the sea breaks constantly. The great rollers of the South Atlantic, meeting here their first check since they left Cape Horn and the Americas, fly up in sheets of foam with a never-ending thunder. I go to bed early, thankfully observing that the gay mosquito curtain is entirely "for dandy"—decorative and not defensive.

The obtaining of specimens of fish from the lakes in the centre of the island being my main object in visiting Corisco, I set to work by starting immediately after breakfast to the bay that we came to last night, and which I will call Nassau Bay in future. I go along the same variegated path I came by yesterday. Eveke has slept at the village in the Bay among his relatives so as to keep an eye, he says, on the Lafayette. When I find him, he says that only women can catch the lake fish, and that they always catch them in certain baskets, and as these have to be made they cannot be ready to-day. Having heard Corisco is famous for shells, and having seen nothing on any of the many beaches on the southern side of the island more conchologically charming than half a dozen dilapidated whelks, I ask where the main deposits of shells are. Eveke says there is any quantity of them on the other little islands, Laval to the south, and Baña to the S.E. in Corisco Bay. To his horror I say I will go to those islands now, and we get our scattered crew together and