CHAPTER XIII.

THE FALLS OF THE NCOMO.

My Steward Oshupu. - Nengě-Nenge. -Negro Hospitality. - Description of the Fans.-Discover the Falls of the Ncomo.

ON Monday, the 5th of May, I left forever this beautiful island, and the friendly hearts which it contained. After two days in my canoe I arrived in the Gaboon; and, after three more spent in copying out a vocabulary of the Fan dialect lent to me by Mr. Preston, one of the missionaries, I was ready to visit the Cannibals of the Crystal Mountains, and to search for the rapids of the Ncomo.

But, first, I had to get men. Mongilomba had given up a good place rather than go among the Fans, with whom he had previ ously formed a slight acquaintance as a trader. Almost all the Mpongwe had the same fear of them. But Robert, my new steward, remained faithful to his promise and his interests.

Robert had his enemies, like all men suddenly raised to distinction. As steward to a white man, he was envied by a score of small-souled negroes, who soon contrived that I should learn his antecedents.

"Robert," I said, one day, "I thought that your 'country name' was Cabinda?"

"Yes, sir; my 'country name' Cabinda."

"How is it that every body calls you Oshupu here? I never hear any one call you Cabinda."

(With a puzzled face), "Oshupu, sir!" (brightening), "Oh! yes -Oshupu-that one name of play my friends like to call me. I not know why they no call me Cabinda, because Cabinda my proper name for true."

"Were you ever cook at a white man's factory, Robert?"

"When a man takes another man's wife for bad things, what do you think of that man, Robert?"

"I think him bad man, sir."

"Very good; and why do you think him a bad man?"

"When white man want wife, sir, he take him: same way, suppose little dog want wife, he go town, he see other little dog; he like him; other little dog say, I like you; they say that with nose, sir. Then palaver said! But we country fashion (here Robert drew himself up) no same as that. S'pose I want wife, I go to man and say, 'I want marry your son—"

"His son!"

"No, sir-him you call-not him son-when him son be girl—”

"Daughter."

“Yes, sir, him daughter. Well, he say, Gib me plenty dash, my friend, and you can have him. So I pay plenty dash; my wife come; she go work my garden; she go cook my dinner; she go give me son that be girl, and I sell him when he get big for plenty dash too. Black man's wife same as white man's money. S'pose man take wife, he take money; he bad man too much."

"I shall ask you one more question, Robert. Why did you say the other day that Corisco was a bad place, and that you were glad to go away?"

"I can't tell you lie, sir, because you clever too much. Why I no like Corisco, those Benga boys frighten me. They say, 'You Gaboon boy, you steward to white man in we country, some day you have palaver you no like.'”

"Now, Oshupu," said I, "you were cook at Walker's factory; you were caught stealing, and he sent you to prison; when you came out, you ran off with a man's wife, and had to hide yourself in Corisco. When you were at Corisco, you had another 'wife palaver,' and it was only by the husband's forgiving you (for one dollar) that you were able to get away at all."

Oshupu was about to commence flat denial, looked at me, saw it was useless, and held his tongue.

"Now," said I, "I don't care how much you thieved before I took you, or whom you plunder after I leave you; but if any thing is stolen from me while you are my steward, or from any of my friends here, I shall take it out of your wages, and if I find that it is you, shall send you to prison as well."

"Yes, sir."

"Also," said I, in the stern voice of a moralist, "it is perfectly immaterial to me how many wife palavers you get into, but don't

suppose that I shall get you out of them. If a Bushman catches you, what does he do ?"

"Locks me up in house, sir, and puts my feet in wood. Then my friends pay plenty dash."

"What do you call plenty dash?"

"One gun," said Oshupu, in the tone of a man reading out an inventory-"one chest, three pieces satin striped, six brass rods, two mugs, one basin, one half barrel powder."

"Good!" said I, not without admiring this system of fixed damages; "and if your friends don't pay ?"

"Then they kill me," said Oshupu, composedly.

"Well," said I, with equal calmness, "you must mind what you are about; for they may kill you first, and grill you afterward, for all I care."

"Yes, sir," said the rascal, grinning.

You will perhaps be surprised that I should take with me in so responsible a position a man whom I knew to be a thief. But, in the first place, I had no choice. It was aut fur aut nullus. In the second place, I can believe that there are cooks who are indifferent to policemen, gamekeepers who do not poach, old servants who do not tyrannize, but I can not believe that there are negroes who do not steal. I except the Mohammedans; but the Christians, I regret to say, have the same bias for petty larceny. This is réckoned as no crime among them, but as one of the industrial arts, though the bungler who allows himself to be detected is punished and laughed at.

I could take my precautions against the pilfering propensities of my steward, but his amorous frailties occasioned me much uneasiness. Negroes are always at extremes. Oshupu not only broke the seventh commandment, he smashed it all to bits.

I did not object so much to the presents of my beads which he made to his paramours (though he was always the soul of liberality), as to a palaver among the Fans, which would inevitably crush my projects by robbing me of my interpreter.

Oshupu assured me repeatedly that I might calm my apprehensions upon his account; but I knew that good intentions only spice desire, and that prohibition to impetuous natures presents that kind of obstacle which invites surmounting. I took my own precautions, therefore, and, as long as we remained among the Fans, never allowed him to go out of my sight, and padlocked him every night into my own room.

Oshupu brought me four men from Cape Lopez, where Mpongwe is spoken with a provincial accent. I asked them if they would be afraid to go with me among the cannibals. They replied that they would go with me wherever I chose. Accordingly, I made out an agreement whereby they were to receive a shilling a day (in current goods), but to forfeit the whole of their wages if they refused to enter the Fan country. At the foot of this document I wrote their names, and, after they had signified before witnesses their full comprehension of its contents, I put a pen between each man's fingers, and guided it to form a cross. This being done, each man glared, awe-struck, at the work of his own hands, and went off loudly debating on the mysteries of black and white.

As I felt confident of safety among savages who had never seen a white man, I did not arm myself, taking only a huge single-barreled duck-gun (unloaded), which was to be carried behind me as an emblem of power. I had found that shooting flamingoes and pelicans caused delay, and I wished to make this trip as speedily as possible, that I might have time to visit the Camma country to the south.

I was not very sanguine of being able to discover the falls of the Gaboon. A M. Braouézzec, lieutenant de vaisseau, whom I afterward met in the Senegal, and who has drawn some excellent charts of the Gaboon and its tributaries, had made the attempt in vain; and Mr. Preston, who had resided seven months on the borders of the Fan country, and who could speak their language, had not had an opportunity during all that while of ascending the Ncomo to any distance, on account of the petty wars always raging there. I was not favored with the same facilities as these gentlemen; I could only hope to succeed by a stroke of fortune, and I resolved to put the fickle goddess to the proof.

A knowledge of tides and winds is as necessary to the traveler by canoe as a knowledge of omnibuses in London to the Londoner. We started on the 10th of May at nine o'clock A.M., with the ebb, and by midday had reached Konig Island with our paddles. This islet, as its name implies, was anciently a Dutch settlement. I was shown some big guns which had been left there, and which no one has meddled with since.

I climbed almost to the summit of this island, which is a forest mountain, and crawled into a cavern, which they told me was in

habited by a spirit. It was tunnel-shaped, of sandstone formation, the bottom grooved by a streamlet, through which I had to wade, and which soon convinced me that there was more water than spirits there. Crabs, newts, toads, and nasty unknown things ran from under my feet; spiders, stifled by the smoke of my torch, fell upon me from above; and my "country light," blazing furiously, converted the cave into a furnace. I came crawling out, with a face like a frying-pan, my shoulders covered with suffocated spiders, and found my men surprised that I had escaped from the lair of Mbwiri.

By the time that I had eaten my barbarous dinner it was two o'clock. We stepped from the ebb into the sea-breeze, which, having escorted us till eight o'clock, handed us again into the tide.

Now I could see the dim sky becoming black to the northeast, and hoisting rain-signals in the plainest manner. But I did not fear these clouds. Storms never come up against the tide. Over and over again I had observed this at Corisco. I had seen the dark clouds hovering over the main land till the tide changed, and then the storm came up with all the fury of an element which had been kept waiting.

"Now what can be the reason of this?" I exclaimed, looking upward. "Are there tidal currents in the air which coincide with those in the water? Yes, that must be it. Ah! how marvelous it is that the fury of the heavens should be shackled by a law invisible but undeviating, by a-"

Here a large drop of rain fell straight into my upturned eye, causing intense pain. At the same time I saw (with my other one) that my men had taken down the mast. And at the distance of a hundred yards I observed a streak of white water which uttered a hissing noise, and which grew nearer and larger, and was rising to a roar.

"It appears to me," I said, after the drenching shower had passed, "that tornadoes must be considered as exceptions."

It must have been long after midnight when a light gleamed on me through the thick river mist. At first it seemed far, far away, and in another moment we found that it was close beside us—a phenomenon you may have noticed with link-boys in a London fog. This was the mast-head light of a French guardship, stationed at the Thule of their possessions in Gaboon; for at this point the Gaboon receives a large tributary, which is called the Boqué; and here the main stream loses its native name of