It was not long coming; the new arrivals set up the war-song, and Gidi Mavunga thought it time to make a demonstration. Drawing an old cutlass and bending almost double, he began to rush about, slashing and cutting down imaginary foes, whilst his men looked to their guns. The greenhorn would have expected a regular stand- up fight, ending in half-a-dozen deaths, but the Papagayo snatched away his father's rusty blade, and Chico Furano, seizing the warrior's head, despite the mildest of resistance, bent it almost to the ground. Thus valour succumbed to numbers. "He is a great man," whispered my interpreter, "and if they chaunt their battle-song, he must show them his bravery." The truly characteristic scene ended in our being supplied with some fourteen black pots full of flesh, fowl, beans, and manioc, together with an abundance of plantains and sugar-cane; a select dish was "put in fetish" (set aside) for Gidi Mavunga, and the friendly foes all sat down to feast. The querelle d'Allemand ended with a general but vain petition for "t'other bottle."
Fahrenheit showed 90° in the shade, as we bade adieu to the little land-bay, and made for the high rugged wall to the north- north-east separating the river valley from the inner country. On the summit we halted to enjoy the delicious sea-breeze with its ascending curve, and the delightful prospect far below. Some 1,300 feet beneath us appeared the Nzadi, narrowed to a torrent, and rushing violently down its highly inclined bed, a straight reach running east and west, in length from four and a half to five miles. As we fronted north, the Morro (cliff) Kala fell bluff towards its blue bight, the Mayumba Bay of the chart, on our left; to the right a black gate formed by twin cliffs shut out the upper stream from view. The panorama of hill-fold and projection, each bounded by deep green lines, which argued torrents during the rains; the graceful slopes sinking towards the river and indenting the bed and the little tree-clad isle, Zun gáchyá Idí (Tuckey's "Zunga Tooly Calavangoo") hugging the northern side, where the Lufu torrent adds its tribute to the waters, convinced me that the charms of Congo scenery had not been exaggerated. Yet the prospect had its element of sadness; the old ruffian, Gidi Mavunga, recounted how he had burned this place and broken that, where palm-clumps, grass-clearings, and plantations lying waste denoted the curse of Ham upon the land.
Our course now wound north-eastwards along hill-shoulders, rich in flowery plants and scented mimosa. After two hours' walking, we came suddenly upon the Morro or cliff of the river-trough, now about 1,000 feet deep. Here the prospect again shifted; the black gate opened, showing the lowest of the long line of rapids called Borongwa ya Vivi, with the natives and their canoes, like flies upon bits of straw.
On the southern bank was a small perennial influent, lined with bright green above, and with chocolate brown below, within some twenty yards of its mouth. It arises, they say, near S. Salvador, and is not navigable, although in places it bears canoes. The people call it Npozo, possibly it represents the S. Salvador River of old travellers. The distance was three direct or five indirect miles north of the stony cone, Zululu ke Sombe.
The descent was a malevoie, over slabs and boulders, loose stones and clayey ground, slippery as ice after rain. The moleques descended like chamois within twenty minutes: Selim and I, with booted feet, took double the time, but on return we ascended it in forty-five minutes. Viewed from below, the base rests upon cliffs of gneiss, with debris and quartz in masses, bands and pebbles, pure and impure, white and rusty. Upon it rises a stratum of ferruginous clay, with large hard-heads of granite, gneiss, and schist, blocks of conglomerate, and nodules of ironstone. Higher still is the bank of yellow clay, capped with shallow humus. The waving profile is backed by steep hills, with rocky sides and long ridges of ground, the site of the palm- hidden Banzas.
Reaching the base, a heap of tumbled boulders, we crossed in a canoe the mouth of the Npozo to a sandy cove in the southern bank, the terminus of river navigation. The people called it Unyenge Assiku: I cannot but suspect that this is the place where Tuckey left his boats, and which he terms "Nomaza Cove." The name is quite unknown, and suggests that the interpreters tried to explain by "No majia" (water) that here the voyage must end.
Off this baylet are three rocky islets, disposed in a triangle, slabs collected by a broken reef, and collectively known as Zunga Nuapozo; the clear-way is between them and the southern bank, which is partly provided with a backwater; the northern three quarters of the bed show something like a scour and a rapid. Zunga chya Ingololo, the northernmost and smallest, bears a single tree, and projects a bar far into the stream: the central and westernmost is a rock with a canoe passage between it and the southern and largest, Zunga chya Tuvi. The latter has three tree- clumps; and a patch of clean white sand on its western side measures the daily rise of the water, eight inches to a foot, and shows the highest level of the flood, here twelve to thirteen feet. The fishermen use it as a drying-ground for their game. They also crowd every day to two sandy covelets on the southern bank, separated by a tongue of rough boulders. Here naked urchins look on whilst their fathers work, or aid in drying the nets, or lie prone upon the sand, exposing their backs to the broiling sun. The other denizens of the place are fish-eagles, who sit en faction upon the topmost branches of withered trees. I saw only two kinds of fish, one small as a minnow, and the other approaching the size of a herring. Up stream they are said to be much larger. They are not salted, but smoked or sun-dried when the weather serves: stuffed with chillies and fried with oil, they are good eating as the Kinnam of the Gold Coast.
We prepared to bivouac under a fine shady Saffu, or wild fig, a low, thick trunk whose dark foliage, fleshy as the lime-leaf, so often hangs its tresses over the river, and whose red berries may feed man as well as monkey. The yellow flowers of hypericum, blooming around us, made me gratefully savour our escape from mangrove and pandamus. About sunset a gentle shower, the first of the season, caused the fisher-boys to dance with joy; it lasted two good hours, and then it was dispersed by a strong westerly breeze. Canoes and lights flashed before our eyes during half the night; and wild beasts, answering one another from rock to rock, hundreds of feet above us, added a savage, African feature to the goodly mise-en-scène.
Arising early next morning, I was assured that it is necessary to cross the stream in order to reach the Cataracts. Tuckey did so, but further inquiry convinced me that it is a mistake to march along the northern bank. Of course, in skirting the southern side, we should not have approached so near the stream, where bluffs and débris rendered travelling hopeless. The amiable ichthyophagi agreed for two fathoms of fancy cloth to ferry us across the river, which is here half a mile broad. The six-knot current compels canoes to run up the left shore by means of its backwater, and, when crossing, to make allowance for the drift downwards. The aneroid now showed 860 feet of absolute altitude, and about sixty-five feet above the landing-place of Banza Nokki; the distance along the stream is fourteen miles, and thus the fall will be about five feet per mile below the Borongwa ya Vivi. We could see from a level the "smaller rapids of Vivi" bursting through their black gate with angry foam, flashing white from side to side. No canoe could shoot this "Cachoeira," but I do not think that a Nile Dahabiyah or a Brazilian Ajôjô would find great difficulty. Between us and the rapids, the concavity of the southern bank forms a bight or bay. The vortices, in which Tuckey's sloop was whirled round despite oars and sails, and in whose hollow the punt entirely disappeared, "so that the depression must have been three or four feet deep," were nowhere seen at this fuller season. The aspect of the surface is that of every large deep stream with broken bottom; the water boils up in ever widening domes, as though a system of fountains sprang from below. Each centre is apparently higher than its circle; it spreads as if a rock had been thrown into it, and the outer rim throws off little eddies and whirls no larger than a thimble. The mirrory surface of the lower river thus becomes mottled with light and shade, and the reflected image of the trough-cliff is broken into the most fantastic shapes.
Fifteen minutes of hard paddling landed us at Selele, a stony point between two sandy baylets: amongst the mass of angular boulders a tree again showed the highest flood-mark to be 13 feet. Here for the first time I remarked the black glaze concerning which so much has been written.[28] The colour is a sunburnt black, tinted ferruginous red like meteoric stones, and it is generally friable, crumbling under the nails. It tastes strongly of iron, which flavours almost every spring in the country, yet the most likely places do not show this incrustation. Sometimes it looks like a matrix in which pudding- stone has been imbedded; it may be two or three lines in thickness and it does not colour the inside. At other times it hardly measures the thickness of paper, coating the gneiss slabs like plumbago. Humboldt tells us ("Personal Narrative," ii. 243, Bohn), that the "Indians" of the Atures declare the rocks to be burnt (carbonized) by the sun's rays, and I have often found the same black glaze upon the marly sandstones that alternate with calcareous formations where no stream ever reached them—for instance, on the highlands of Judea, between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea; in inner Istria, and in most countries upon the borders of the Mediterranean.