Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, vol 2 | Page 2

did not
prevent her making some four feet of water a day. So we rolled
leisurely along the well-known Gaboon shore, and faintly sighted from
afar Capes Lopez and St. Catherine, and the fringing ranges of
Mayumba-land, a blue line of heights based upon gently rising banks,
ruddy and white, probably of shaly clay. The seventh day (August 5)
placed us off the well-known "red hills" of Loango-land.
The country looks high and bold after the desperate flatness of the
Bights, and we note with pleasure that we have left behind us the
"impervious luxuriance of vegetation which crowns the lowlands,
covers the sides of the rises, and caps their summits." During the rains
after October the grass, now showing yellow stubble upon the ruddy,
rusty plain, becomes a cane fence, ten to twelve feet tall; but instead of
matted, felted jungle, knitted together by creepers of cable size, we
have scattered clumps of dark, lofty, and broad-topped trees. A nearer
view shows great cliffs, weather-worked into ravines and basins, ribs
and ridges, towers and pinnacles. Above them is a joyful open land,

apparently disposed in two successive dorsa or steps, with bright green
tiers and terraces between, and these are pitted with the crater-like sinks
locally called "holes," so frequent in the Gaboon country. Southwards
the beauty of eternal verdure will end, and the land will become drier,
and therefore better fitted for Europeans, the nearer it approaches
Mossamedes Bay. South of "Little Fish," again, a barren tract of white
sand will show the "Last Tree," an inhospitable region, waterless, and
bulwarked by a raging sea.
Loango is a "pool harbour," like the ancient Portus Lemanus (Hythe), a
spit of shingle, whose bay, north-east and south-west, forms an inner
lagoon, bounded landwards by conspicuous and weather-tarnished red
cliffs. This "lingula" rests upon a base of terra firma whose
westernmost projection is Indian Point. From the latter runs northwards
the "infamous" Indian Bar, compared by old sailors with a lengthened
Bill of Portland; a reef some three miles long, which the waves assault
with prodigious fury; a terror to slavers, especially in our autumn, when
the squalls and storms begin. The light sandy soil of the mainland rests
upon compact clay, and malaria rises only where the little drains, which
should feed the lagoon, evaporate in swamps. Here and there are
clumps of tall cocoas, a capot, pullom or wild cotton-tree, and a neat
village upon prairie land, where stone is rare as on the Pampas.
Southwards the dry tract falls into low and wooded ground.
The natural basin, entered by the north-east, is upwards of a mile in
length, and the narrow, ever-shifting mouth is garnished with rocks, the
sea breaking right across. Gunboats have floated over during the rains,
but at dead low water in the dry season we would not risk the gig.
Guided by a hut upon the beach fronting French Factory and under lee
of the breakers off Indian Bar, I landed near a tree-motte, in a covelet
smoothed by a succession of sandpits. The land sharks flocked down to
drag the boat over the breakwater of shingle. They appeared small and
effeminate after the burly negroes of the Bights, and their black but not
comely persons were clad in red and white raiment. It is a tribe of
bumboat men, speaking a few words of English, French, and
Portuguese, and dealing in mats and pumpkins, parrots, and poultry,
cages, and Fetish dolls called "idols."

Half a mile of good sandy path led to the English Factory, built upon a
hill giving a charming view. To the south-east, and some three miles
inland from the centre of the bay, we were shown "Looboo Wood," a
thick motte conspicuously crowning a ridge, and forming a first-rate
landmark. Its shades once sheltered the nyáre, locally called buffalo,
the gorilla, and perhaps the more monstrous "impungu" (mpongo).
Eastward of the Factory appears Chomfuku, the village of Jim Potter,
with a tree-clad sink, compared by old voyagers with "the large
chalkpit on Portsdown Hill," and still much affected by picnickers. At
Loanghili, or Loanguilli, south of Looboo Wood, and upon the right
bank of a streamlet which trickles to the sea, is the cemetery, where the
kings are buried in gun-boxes.
The Ma-Loango (for mwani, "lord" of Loango), the great despot who
ruled as far as the Congo River, who used to eat in one house, drink in
another, and put to death man or beast that saw him feeding, is a thing
of the past. Yet five miles to the eastward (here held to be a day's
march) King Monoyambi governs "big Loango town," whose modern
native name, I was told, is Mangamwár. He shows his power chiefly by
forbidding strangers to enter the interior.
The Factory (Messrs. Hatton and