We had no sooner taken our places than the two canoe men--each provided with a long crooked pole forked at the end--pushed off and began to propel the canoe at quite a rapid rate. In a few minutes the shore had vanished into the mist, and for the next hour we moved smoothly on with nothing to mark our progress but some chance floating stick or an occasional solitary pelican that emerged from the mist, slid across our circumscribed field of view and faded away again before we had time for mutual examination. Presently the sun began to appear through the haze like a disc of burnished copper, and then the sea breeze came down, dimming the surface of the water and driving before it row after row of little hollow ripples that slapped noisily on the flat side of the canoe. As the mist cleared there appeared before us a low-lying shore clothed with fan palms and a few lank and ragged trees, and one or two thatched roofs and a single whitewashed building could be seen half hidden among the foliage. Nearly opposite this building the canoe presently grounded in some six inches of water, and the two stalwart canoe-men, stepping overboard, proceeded to lift Pereira and me bodily out of our chairs and carry us through the shallows, depositing us at length on dry land. “Well, Englefield,” observed Pereira, stretching himself and stamping on the dry mud, “here we are in your promised land, and here comes Aochi with the chop box. Breakfast, Aochi, one time. We’ll have our food first, and then I’ll see about my business while you take a walk in the garden of Eden.” We breakfasted in the mouldy-looking “hall” of the decaying mission house, on the inevitable spatchcock and plantain fritters (“pranteen flitters” Aochi called them) from the green box, and then Pereira betook himself to the village, leaving me to roam about in the bush. It was not a lovely spot, I was compelled to admit, but it was new to me and a change from Quittáh. There were bushes and trees and fan palms and actual solid earth of a curious pink colour--a great relief after the eternal loose grey sand. And there were great snails with shells striped like a zebra’s skin, and curious vole-like animals, and large birds that uttered sounds like the whirring of an invalid chime clock, and great ant-hills: in short, there were multitudes of things that I had never seen before, so that I spent a couple of hours very pleasantly poking about among the bushes. Making my way back towards the village I stopped to examine a large and incredibly corpulent baobab tree from whose branches the velvet-covered fruit hung down on long straight stalks. I was about to move on when I perceived among the bushes a low mud wall, and looking over it found that it formed one side of a square enclosure. “This,” I thought, “must be the old mission garden,” and forthwith I resolved to explore it in case any of the fruit trees should be still bearing.