Just below us the river narrows between steep hills to a mile and a quarter in width, and through that funnel more than twenty thousand miles of rivers empty themselves into the “cauldron” which constantly seethes, bubbles and boils with the rush of water tearing over its rough, rocky bottom.
Chapter III
My Overland Journey Begins
The white man’s fetish--I am exchanged with others for rubber and ivory--My new companions express freely their opinions about the white men--Why the white men are on the Congo--Native suspicions and prejudices.
The morning after the steamer arrived all the goods were taken ashore, put into a huge store, and arranged in their places. Just opposite the store door was a large image, gaudily coloured and grotesquely ugly. It was a fetish[[6]] that the white man had bought of a native “medicine man,” and had placed it there in the store to frighten the natives and deter them from stealing. Of course it was no use, for the natives knew that no “medicine man” would sell a real fetish to the white man, consequently it did not overawe them, nor keep them from thieving when they had the opportunity.
I had not been in the store many days when the box in which I was packed was carried out and handed over to some natives who had brought some tusks of ivory and rubber to the white trader for sale. From what I heard it had taken them a long time to settle the price; but directly that had been agreed upon they quickly selected their goods, viz. forty pieces of assorted cloth, ten barrels of gunpowder, fifteen flintlock guns, one box of brass rods, two demijohns or large bottles of rum, five cases of gin, and some common looking-glasses, knives, beads and various other trinkets.
I was carried, with the other trade goods, to the native sleeping-quarters, and found my new owners were not tall men, but wiry, lithe, strong fellows, who, after they had bound us with ropes in long baskets, commenced their tedious overland journey to their town far in the interior. Before sunset we had crossed the hills, descended the valley, and forded by means of a canoe the Mposo river. The boys of the party collected wood and fetched water, and very soon bright cheerful fires were blazing, and the camp resounded with much chatter and laughter.
Most of the talk was about white men and their strange ways. One laughed at them for having such a silly fetish in their store. “Why, I know,” said he, “the ‘medicine man’ who made it; and he told me himself that he had put no strong charms in it, as he was not going to hurt his own people for any white man; but the foolish white man gave plenty of cloth and gunpowder for it.”
Another asked if they knew Fomu,[[7]] a white man who lived in the next district? “Well, he put a weight under his scale, and cheated us for a long time; but we found him out, and at first we would not trade with him again, until some one found a way to punish him for defrauding us.”
“What did you do?” asked another.
“Well,” answered the first, “we procured some bananas and coated them with rubber, and sold them to him as solid rubber; and it was a long time before he discovered it, and then we had to cut every lump of rubber into pieces; but I think we recovered what he stole from us.” There was a hearty and good-humoured laugh over this playing off of one trick against another.