Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/456

 way that sets my teeth on edge. Half her sufferings arise from her disastrous habit of falling asleep; and then her head goes flump off the seat she is leaning it against, and crack against the ribs of the boat's side; I put my leather photograph case in her usual striking place, but she dodges it in her descent seven times in ten.

The sea is running high, and all the afternoon we beat up and tack, and the Lafayette has a larky way, giving herself the airs of a duck washing itself, putting her head down and shaking the water out over her stern; a good deal of water comes on board one way and another, over one side on one tack, over the other side on the other tack, over the bows always. The man with the whiskers is a smart seaman, and the only one worth his salt, and he attends to the jib; the others sleep and eat and talk and attend to the jiggers in their feet, which they have picked up on Corisco, where they swarm.

The weather is a bit thick, so we do not sight the continent until four o'clock, and it is borne in on me that there's no Cape Esterias for us to-night. Eveke pilots us close in towards the shore, and we run among the long line of rollers, attributive to the great rock reefs that fringe it, and which run out to sea in an irregular cone shape, stretching true north and north-north-east from the blunt headland that has for its north-west extremity Akanda point and for its southern, Cape Clara. Cape Esterias runs out further seaward than Akanda, and is the real south-cast point of Corisco Bay; but from Akanda to Cape Clara (or Joinville) may be taken as the limits of the headland that separates Corisco Bay from the Gaboon Estuary: and the Moondah River mouth is here. "The sun's rim sinks, the stars rush out, at one stride comes the dark" and finds us still lolloping about in the breaking swell. Half an hour after sundown the wind drops, with that suddenness that the breeze, be it light or heavy, always drops alongshore down here, and although we could do little when we had it, as it was nearly in our teeth, we can of course do nothing without it, so we run the Lafayette on to a tongue of sand between rock reefs, that were breathing heavily, just North of Akanda point.

Well do I remember now the time I spent sitting on a