Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, vol 1 | Page 5

Richard Burton
The next point is the Hotel and
Restaurant Fischer--pronounced Fi-cherre, belonging to an energetic
German-Swiss widow, who during six years' exile had amassed some
65,000 francs. In an evil hour she sent a thieving servant before the
"commissaire de police;" the negress escaped punishment, but the
verandah with its appurtenances caught fire, and everything, even the
unpacked billiard-table, was burnt to ashes. Still, Madame the Brave
never lost heart. She applied herself valiantly as a white ant to repairing
her broken home, and, wonderful to relate in this land of no labour,
ruled by the maxim "festina lente," all had been restored within six
months. We shall dine at her table d'hôte.
Our guide led up and along the river bank, where there is almost a
kilometre of road facing six or seven kilometres of nature's
highway--the stream. The swampy jungle is not cleared off from about
the Comptoir, and presently the perfume of the fat, rank weeds; and the
wretched bridges, a few planks spanning black and fetid mud, drove us
northwards or inland, towards the neat house and grounds of the
"Commandant Particulier." The outside walls, built in grades with the
porous, dark-red, laterite-like stone dredged from the river, are
whitewashed with burnt coralline and look clean; whilst the house, one
of the best in the place, is French, that is to say, pretty. Near it is a
cluster of native huts, mostly with walls of corded bamboo, some
dabbed with clay and lime, and all roofed with the ever shabby-looking
palm-leaf; none are as neat as those of the "bushmen" in the interior,
where they are regularly and carefully made like baskets or panniers.
The people appeared friendly; the men touched their hats, and the

women dropped unmistakably significant curtsies.
After admiring the picturesque bush and the natural avenues behind Le
Plateau, we diverged towards the local Père-la-Chaise. The new
cemetery, surrounded by a tall stone wall and approached by a large
locked gate, contains only four tombs; the old burial ground opposite is
unwalled, open, and painfully crowded; the trees have run wild, the
crosses cumber the ground, the gravestones are tilted up and down; in
fact the foul Golgotha of Santos, São Paulo, the Brazil, is not more
ragged, shabby, and neglected. We were shown the last resting-place of
M. du Chaillu pere, agent to Messrs. Oppenheim, the old Parisian
house: he died here in 1856.
Resuming our way parallel with, but distant from the river, we passed a
bran-new military storehouse, bright with whitewash. Outside the
compound lay the lines of the "Zouaves," some forty negroes whom
Goree has supplied to the Gaboon; they were accompanied by a number
of intelligent mechanics, who loudly complained of having been
kidnapped, coolie-fashion. We then debouched upon Fort Aumale;
from the anchorage it appears a whitewashed square, whose feet are
dipped in bright green vegetation, and its head wears a dingy brown
roof-thatch. A nearer view shows a pair of semi-detached houses, built
upon arches, and separated by a thoroughfare; the cleaner of the two is
a hospital; the dingier, which is decorated with the brown- green stains,
the normal complexion of tropical masonry, lodges the station
Commandant and the medical officers. Fronting the former and by the
side of an avenue that runs towards the sea is an unfinished magazine
of stone, and to the right, as you front the sun, lies the garden of the
"Commandant du Comptoir," choked with tropical weeds. Altogether
there is a scattered look about the metropolis of the "Gabon," which
numbers one foot of house to a thousand of "compound."
Suddenly a bonnet like a pair of white gulls wings and a blue serge
gown fled from us, despite the weight of years, like a young gazelle;
the wearer was a sister of charity, one of five bonnes sœurs. Their
bungalow is roomy and comfortable, near a little chapel and a largish
school, whence issue towards sunset the well-known sounds of the

Angelus. At some distance down stream and on the right or northern
bank lies a convent, and a house superintended by the original
establisher of the mission in 1844, the bishop, Mgr. Bessieux, who died
in 1872, aged 70. There are extensive plantations, but the people are too
lazy to take example from them.
Before we hear the loud cry à table, we may shortly describe the
civilized career of the Gaboon. In 1842, when French and English
rivalry, burning hot on both sides of the Channel, extended deep into
the tropics and spurned the equator, and when every naval officer, high
and low, went mad about concluding treaties and conquering territory
on paper, France was persuaded to set up a naval station in Gorilla-land.
The northern and the southern shore each had a king, whose consent,
after a careless
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