DJIDJIMA.
Noticing my astonishment, one of the beauties of the place made the following naïve remark to me, which I thought was really rather sensible: “Why should we wear clothes? Are we so badly made that we need hide ourselves? All in good time, when we are old like our mothers, we will make up for the loss of our physical advantages by well-made clothes, but not till then.”
Many are the women on this earth of ours who could not say as much!
A little mollified by what my young friend said, I still felt perfectly furious at the sullen hostility and evident prejudice against us we now constantly met with, which delayed our journey in a manner so dangerous. Rightly or wrongly, I saw the hand of the English or of their agents in it all. Fortunately, however, the river is easy of navigation as far as Djidjima, a village picturesquely situated on an island, opposite to which we anchored at four o’clock.
In the evening we went to the village, and I asked for a guide for the next day, without much hope of getting one. I tried to win the people over to my side by distributing a great many little presents. We were invited to be present at a tam-tam, at which three dancers performed, wearing leggings from which were suspended little bits of iron resembling castanets, that made a deafening noise as they struck against each other. The dancers, moreover, were very clumsy in their attitudes.
No guide the next morning, but more men from Igga to stare at us. The accounts that Amadu gives us of the difficulties of navigation before us are heartrending, and as a matter of fact a little further down, the river began to divide again into a great many arms. We therefore anchored, and Digui went on in a canoe to reconnoitre.
Whilst he was away exploring we saw some eighty or a hundred canoes going up an arm on our right, the tam-tam beating ceaselessly. On inquiry we were told that it was only a water convoy on the way to Rupia, where a very big market was about to be held. All the way along the canoes stop to take up traders and their goods, very much as the small steamers do on the Seine, or the omnibuses in the streets of Paris. A canoe presently separated from the rest and came towards us, its occupants saying very amiably that seeing we had stopped, they had come to ascertain whether we were in any difficulty, and to offer to guide us.
There is no doubt there is a good God for honest folk, I very nearly added, and against the English. Be it remarked, for the reader to draw his own moral, that everywhere the inhabitants of the little villages, in a word the poor, helped us. The perpetual difficulties we had to contend with in this part of our journey only arose in the big centres.
