Volume Ii Part 5 (2/2)
This bend was in former days the terminus of canoe travel up stream. Grisly tales of mishap are told; and even now a musketry salute is fired when boats pa.s.s without accident. Beyond Diamond Rock is a well-wooded, stony cove, ”Salan Kunkati:” Captain Tuckey makes this the name of the Diamond Rock, and translates it ”the strong feather.” Quartz, before in lines and bands, now appears in ma.s.ses: the ”Coal Rock,” which the chart places near Insala (Bechope Point) on the northern bank, was probably submerged. High cliffs towered above us, and fragments which must have weighed twenty tons had slipped into the water; one of them bore an adansonia, growing head downwards.
The next feature was Npunga Bay, low and leek-green, between the blue-brown water, here some 700 yards broad, and the yellow sun- burnt trough-sides. A little further on, at 2 P.M., the canoe-men halted beyond a sandy point with two large ”Bondeiro” trees, and declared their part of the bargain to have been fulfilled.
”Bonderro” is a corruption of the Lusitanianized imbundeiro, the calabash, or adansonia (digitata?): the other baobab is called nkondo, probably the Aliconda and Elicandy of Battel and old travellers, who describe the water-tanks hollowed in its huge trunk, and the cloth made from the bark fibre. Thus the ”Condo Sonio” of the Chart should be ”Nkondo Sonho,” the latter a proper name. It is seldom that we find trees turned to all the uses of which they are capable: the Congo people despise the nutritious and slightly laxative flour of the ”monkey bread,” and the young leaves are not used as pickles; the bast is not valued for cloth and ropes, nor are the boles cut into cisterns.
As will be seen, we ought to have insisted upon being paddled to Kala cliff and bight, the Mayumba Bay of the Chart, where the bed trends west-east, and shows the lowest rapids: the First Congo Expedition went up even higher. At Nkongo ka Lunga, the point marked by two calabashes, we inquired for the Nokki Congo, of which we had heard at Chisalla, and which still exists upon the chart,--districts and villages being often confounded. All laughed, and declared that the ”port-town” had long been sold off, the same had been the case, even in Tuckey's day, with the next settlement, ”Condo Sonio” (the Baobab of Sonho), formerly the great up-stream mart, where the slave-traders transacted their business. All the population was now transferred inland and, like our predecessors, we were promised a two hours' climb over the rough, steep highland which lay in front. Then we understood that ”Nokki” was the name of a canton, not of a settlement. Its south-eastern limits may have contained the ”City of Norchie, the best situated of any place hitherto seen in Ethiopia,” where Father Merolla (p. 280) baptized 126 souls,--and this is rendered probable by the crucifixes and coleworts which were found by the First Congo Expedition.
Here, then, at 97.50 miles from the sea, ended our clan's cruize.
We could only disembark upon the clean sand, surrounded by cool shade and blocks of gneiss, the favourite halting-place, as the husks of ground-nuts show. Nchama Chamvu was at once sent off with a present of gin and a verbal report of arrival to Nessudikira Nchinu, (King), of Banza Nkaye, whilst we made ready for a night's lodging a la belle etoile. The mesenger returned, bringing a goat, and the good news that porters would be sent early next morning. We slept well in the cool and dewless air, with little trouble from mosquitoes. The voice of the cataract in its ”sublime same-soundingness” alone broke the silence, and the scenery suggested to us, as to the first Britishers, that we might be bivouacking among the ”blue misty hills of Morven.”
September 8.--Shortly after sunrise appeared Gidi Mavunga, father to the ”king,” accompanied by five ”princes,” in the usual black coats, and some forty slaves, armed with pistols, blunderbusses, and guns of French and Yankee build. Our visitors wore the official berretta, European s.h.i.+rts, that contrasted with coral necklaces and rings of zinc, bra.s.s, and copper, and handsome waistcoats, fronted by the well-tanned spoil of some ”bush”
animal, generally a wild cat, hanging like a Scotch sporran--this is and has long been the distinctive sign of a ”gentleman.”
According to John Barbot (Supplement, Churchill, v. 471), all men in Loango were bound to wear a furskin over their clothes, viz., of an otter, a tame cat, or a cat-o'-mountain; a ”great wood or wild cat, or an angali (civet-cat). Besides which, they had very fine speckled spelts, called ? enkeny,' which might be worn only by the king and his peculiar favourites.”
On the great man's mat was placed a large silver-handled dagger, shaped somewhat like a fish-slicer; and the handsome hammocks of bright-dyed cottons brought down for our use shamed our humble s.h.i.+p's canvas. The visitors showed all that African calinerie, which, as fatal experience told me, would vanish for ever, changing velvet paw to armed claws, at the first question of cloth or rum. Meanwhile, we had only to visit their village ”upon the head of Gidi Mavunga.”
About 9 A.M. we attacked a true Via Dolorosa, the normal road of the Lower Congo. The steep ascent of dry, clayey soil was strewed with schist and resplendent silvery gneiss; quartz appeared in every variety, crystallized and amorphous, transparent white, opaque, dusky, and rusty. Tuckey's mica slate appears to be mostly schist or gneiss: I saw only one piece of true slate which had been brought from the upper bed. Merolla's talc is mostly mica.
Followed an equally rough descent to a water set in fetid mud, its iridescence declaring the presence of iron; oozing out of the ground, it discharges during rains into the river: and, throughout the dry season, it keeps its little valley green with trees and shrubs. I observed what appeared to be the Esere or Calabar bean (Physostigma venenosum), whose hairy pod is very distasteful to the travelling skin: it was a ”Mucuna urens.”
Another scramble upon a highly inclined hogsback, where weather- worn brown-black granite, protruded bone-like from the clay flesh, placed us at the outlying village of Kinbembu, with its line of palms; here the aneroid showed 1,322 feet. After a short rest, the hammock men resumed work over a rough plateau: the rises were scattered with brush-wood, and the falls were choked with the richest vegetation. Every hill discharged its own rivulet bubbling over the rock, and the waters were mostly chalybeate.
Presently appeared a kind of barrac.o.o.n, a large square of thick cane-work and thatch about eight feet high, the Fetish house of the ”Jinkimba” or circ.u.mcised boys, who received us with unearthly yells. After a march of an hour and three quarters,'covering five indirect and three direct miles in a south-eastern rhumb, we reached Banza Nkaye, the royal village, where the sympiesometer showed 1430 feet. Our bearers yelled ”Abububu!” showing that we had reached our destination, and the villagers answered with a cry of ”Abia-a-a!” The entrance was triumphal: we left the river with a tail of fifty-six which had swelled to 150 ragged followers.
After a short delay we proceeded to the ”palace,” which was distinguished from afar by a long projecting gable, forming a cool verandah. Descending some three hundred feet, we pa.s.sed a familiar sight in Africa, where ”arboribus suus horror inest.” A tree-trunk bore three pegged skulls somewhat white with age; eight years ago they were taken off certain wizards who had bewitched their enemies. A labyrinthine entrance of transparent cane-work served to prevent indecent haste, and presently we found ourselves in presence of the Mfumo, who of course takes the t.i.tle of ”Le Rei.” Nessudikira was a ”blanc-bec,” aged twenty or twenty-one, who till lately had been a trading lad at Boma--now he must not look upon the sea. He appeared habited in the usual guy style: a gaudy fancy helmet, a white s.h.i.+rt with limp Byronic collar, a broad-cloth frock coat, a purple velvet gold-fringed loin-wrap: a theatrical dagger whose handle and sheath bore cut- gla.s.s emeralds and rubies, stuck in the waist-belt; bra.s.s anklets depended over naked feet, and the usual beadle's cloak covered the whole. Truly a change for the worse since Tuckey's day, when a ”savage magnificence” showed itself in the display of lions'
and leopards' skins; when no women were allowed to be present, and when the boys could only clap hands: now the verandah is surrounded by a squatting crowd and resounds with endless chatter and scream.
Nessudikira, whose eyes by way of grandeur never wandered from the floor, shook hands with us without rising from his chair, somewhat after the fas.h.i.+on of certain women in civilized society, who would be dignified, and who are not. His father, Gidi Mavunga, knelt before him on the ground, a mat being forbidden in the presence: he made the ”batta-palmas” before he addressed his ”filho de pistola,” as he called him, in opposition to filho de fazenda. The ”king” had lately been crowned in virtue of his mother being a uterine sister of his predecessor. Here the goods and dignity of the father revert after death to his eldest maternal brother; to his eldest nephew, that is, the eldest son of the eldest uterine sister, and, all others failing, to the first born of the nearest maternal relative. This subjection of sire to son is, however, mainly ceremonious: in private life the king wears a cotton pagne, and his ”governor” a.s.serts his birth- right even by wigging royalty.
We disposed ourselves upon seamen's chests covered with red baize, fronting the semi-circle of frock-coated ”gentlemen” and half-naked dependants and slaves. Proceedings began with the ”mata-b.i.+.c.ho” de rigueur, the inevitable preliminary and conclusion of all life-business between birth and burial. The Congo traveller will hear ”Nganna! mata b.i.+.c.ho” (Master! kill the worm, i.e., give me a dram), till the words seem, like ”Bakhs.h.i.+sh” further east, to poison his ears. This excuse for a drink arose, or is said to have arisen, from some epidemic which could be cured only by spirits, and the same is the tradition in the New World (”Highlands of the Brazil,” i. chap. 38). Similarly the Fulas of the Windward coast, who as strict Moslem will not drink fermented liquors, hold a cup of rum to be the sovereignest thing in the world for taenia. The entozoon of course gives rise to a variety of stale and melancholy jokes about the early bird, the worm that dieth not, and so forth.
A greybeard of our gin was incontinently opened and a tumbler in a basin was filled to overflowing; even when buying ground-nuts, the measure must be heaped up. The gla.s.s was pa.s.sed round to the ”great gentlemen,” who drank it African fas.h.i.+on, expanding the cheeks, rinsing the mouth so that no portion of the gums may lose their share, and swallowing the draught with an affectedly wry face. The basin then went to the ”little gentlemen” below the salt, they have the ”vinum garrulum,” and they scrambled as well as screamed for a sup of the precious liquor. I need hardly quote Caliban and his proposed genuflections.
I had been warned by all the traders of the lower river that Banza Nokki would be to me the far-famed point of which it was said,
”Quern pa.s.sar o Cabo de Nam Ou tornara, ou n o,”
and prepared accordingly. Old s.h.i.+mbal, the linguist, had declared that a year would be required by the suspicious ”bush-men” to palaver over the knotty question of a stranger coming only to ”make mukanda,” that is to see and describe the country. M.
p.i.s.sot was forbidden by etiquette to recognize his old employe (honours change manners here as in Europe), yet he set about the work doughtily. My wishes were expounded, and every possible promise of hammocks and porters, guides and interpreters, was made by the hosts. The royal helmet was then removed, and a handsome burnous was drawn over the king's shoulders, the hood covering the berretta in most grotesque guise. After which the commander and M. p.i.s.sot set out for the return march, leaving me with my factotum Selim and the youth Nchama Chamvu. To the question ”Quid muliere levius?” the scandalous Latin writer answers ”Nihil,” for which I would suggest ”Niger.” At the supreme moment the interpreter, who had been deaf to the charmer's voice (offering fifty dollars) for the last three days, succ.u.mbed to the ”truant fever.” He knew something of Portuguese; and, having been employed by the French factory, he had scoured the land far and wide in search of ”emigrants.” He began well; cooked a fowl, boiled some eggs, and made tea; after which he cleared out a hut that was declared tres logeable, and found a native couch resembling the Egyptian kafas.
We slept in a new climate: at night the sky was misty, and the mercury fell to 60 (F.). There was a dead silence; neither beast nor bird nor sound of water was heard amongst the hills; only at times high winds in gusts swept over the highlands with a bullying noise, and disappeared, leaving everything still as the grave. I felt once more ”at home in the wilderness”--such, indeed, it appeared after Boma, where the c.o.c.kney-taint yet lingered.
Chapter X.
Notes on the Nzadi or Congo River.
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