Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/460

 arm, and wind it lazily round and round some grand column of a tree-stem, to the height of ten or twenty feet from the ground, spread out its top like a plume and then fall back again to the mist-river from which it came. It has weird ways, this mist of the West Coast. I have often, when no one has been near to form opinions of my frivolity, played with it, scooping it up in my hands and letting it fall again, or swished it about with a branch, when it lay at a decent level of three or four feet from the ground. When it comes higher and utterly befogs you, you don't feel much inclination to play with it. The worst of it is, you never quite know how high it is coming. I have seen it rise out of Bimbia flats and cover the Great Cameroon as though it said, "Ah you are Grand Mungo, but I am grander—I am Death."

I drop off to sleep now and then, only to be aroused either by the Lafayette having dragged her anchor and got off skylarking with a lot of rough rocks so that she must be rescued and re-anchored, or by ejaculations from under the sail because of that ram. The tent amidships would afford a series of fine studies for any one who wanted to illustrate anything à la Doré; it looks like a great grave-cloth spread over a tumbled heap of corpses, which vaguely show their outlines through its heavy white folds. When my crew do a good writhe they are particularly fine. My attention gets riveted on them because one of them has an abominable quavering, hysterical, falsetto snore, which, as I want to go to sleep myself, rouses in my mind a desire to slay the performer, for that snore cuts through the sound of the surf on to my nerves like a knife. Three times during the night I arose, and grasping the stump of a plantain bunch and walking along the thwarts, hovered, like a revengeful fiend, over the shrouded sleepers, hesitating for a few minutes to locate the seat of the disorder, for I used all suitable care and precaution to avoid hitting the innocent, but this is difficult, for the snore seems to come from underneath the upper layer, whose heads show through the sail like plums through a pie-crust, so I am regretfully compelled to take swipes at the excrescence nearest the source of the nuisance. This remedy is only a temporary one, but during the lull it