On reaching what we supposed to be the summit of a mountain, we found ourselves upon a green plateau that terminated abruptly in a precipitous cliff nearly four hundred feet in height, and overhanging some rocky shelves, which sloped down to the bed of the Gabon River.
Here the King dismounted from his dromedary, and squatted his sable person on a piece of grass matting under the royal umbrella, while several of his chief men seated themselves at a respectful distance, after knocking their woolly heads upon the earth, in token of their slavish submission.
From the brow of this cliff we could see our ship at anchor in the estuary, but alas! far beyond the reach of signals. We could also see the little green Pongos, which stud the bay formed by the great sweep of the Gabon.
Afar off on the other hand towards the east, we could discern where, between groves of strange trees—the plantain, banana, and the baobab—with many a giant plant and mighty flower upon its shores, the great river of Guinea, the Rio Gabon, rolled from its distant source, in the unexplored land of Ungobai—a stream so broad and deep that a sloop of war has ascended it for more than seventy miles.
Transparent though the air was around us, a hot sunny haze shrouded those green forests through which the Gabon came rolling like a mighty flood of gold towards the west—rolling through a vast plain, covered by a leafy wilderness, where the lordly lion with his shaggy mane, the cruel panther with his stealthy step, and the ponderous elephant, roved in herds; and amid the luxuriant flowers and lovely fertility of which, the scaly cobra-capello, and a hundred kinds of dreadful reptiles, with tongues that teemed with poison, lurked; where every fruit and herb were gigantic in proportion to the mighty continent which produced them; where the crocodile squattered in the green miasmatic slime, and the hippopotami, huge, misshapen, and pre-Adamite in form, swam like the great tusky walrus of the icy regions I had left so recently.
All these natural wonders were contained in the vast plain at our feet—a plain that seemed to vibrate under the cloudless glare of the burning sun; for the heat at noon must have been somewhere about 107° in the shade, and our tender skins were blistering under it.
But the thoughts this scene inspired for a moment were soon diverted from it, by the terrors about to be enacted there.
A hideous old negro, whose barbaric ornaments announced his rank and character as a fetisher, proceeded to examine, with gipsy-like care, the various lines on the palms of our hands.
What he affected to gather therefrom we could not divine, but the lines proved fatal to three of our companions, whom, with yells of satisfaction, he thrust aside from the rest, and the work of torture and death at once began by order of the King.
Three strong and handsome young seamen had their hands tied behind them by a thick thong.