Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/439

 when my companions have for some time settled down, quite reconciled, to sleep peacefully, I hear a crackle-crackle-like fusillade of miniature guns. Looking towards the place whence the sound comes I notice a cloud of bright blue smoke surmounting a rapidly advancing wall of crimson fire. I get up and mention this fact briefly to my drowsy companions, adding in the case of the more profound sleepers an enlightening kick, and make an exemplary bee-line to the bush in front of us. The others follow my example with a rapidity I should not have expected in their tribe, but, in spite of some very creditable and spirited sprint performances, three members of the party get scorched and spent the balance of the afternoon sittin in mud-holes, comforting themselves with the balmy black slime.

The fire swept across our bit of the prairie in the line of the breeze, and died out when it came to the green wood in a very short time; and shortly afterwards the absent ones, including Engouta, turn up. These ladies explained "some fool man been done burn" a patch on the other side to plant manioc. The whole island is busy planting now before the rains come on. Some days ago he thought the fire was out, and safe, but it wasn't, and the stiff breeze fanned it up. "People should be careful with fire," I say sententiously and they all agree with me, the scorched ones enthusiastically.

A little clamber down into the wood we are in brings us to the lakes. There is a little chain of them—they are just basins in the rock strata of varying sizes, and each has a thick lining of black mud. The water is at its lowest now, as it is the end of the dry season, and the water they contain is, I think, the accumulation of rain water from wet seasons.

As far as I can see there are no streams running into or out of them. In the wet season probably there may be both. One of them the ladies refuse to fish in, saying it was too deep possibly being a deep crack in the rock like the one you see as you pass the enclosed grounds of the Catholic Mission at Evangelanda; and I think they are prevented from evaporating, as that one does in the dry season, by being surrounded with the dense bush of this tangled little wood, which occupies the hollow of the interior of the island in which they are situated.