Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, West -- Description and travel; Congo River -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Africa, West
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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