I Put Out Into the Darkness

As soon as the daylight appeared, I put my head out of the tilt-opening to take a look at the weather. But I very quickly drew it in again; for within a yard of my face was the massive and unlovely snout of a hippopotamus.

Recovering somewhat from the start he had given me I cautiously peered out again. The huge brute was standing in the shallow water, gazing at the canoe with a fat, stolid smile of conscious superiority that I found highly offensive, and I wished he would go away. Such, however, did not seem to be his intention; he had never seen a canoe like this before, and apparently he was making the most of the experience, for he stood motionless, with his absurd little eyes fixed on me, breathing softly like a blacksmith’s bellows, with an exasperating air of contentment.

If I hoisted my anchor, the canoe would drift right on to him, and a sudden movement on his part would be enough to send me to the bottom. It was excessively awkward, for I was anxious to start, and equally anxious to get away from his immediate neighbourhood. I thought of trying the effect of a sudden shout, but I could not tell how he would take it, and he was so very large. Presently he yawned, offering for my inspection a most remarkable collection of very yellow teeth, and I hoped he was becoming bored; but when he closed his cavernous mouth, he resumed his consideration of the canoe with unabated interest.

As he was apparently a fixture, I set about extricating myself from my unpleasant position. Putting the helm hard over and lashing it, I began to slowly haul in the cable until the canoe swung round across the current, clear of the hippopotamus. Then I dropped the sinker and pulled up the anchor, and immediately my bark began to move obliquely down stream and out into the main current.

The hippopotamus gazed regretfully at the retreating canoe, and when it had passed some distance, to my dismay, he walked into the deeper water and began to swim slowly after it. It was not long before he came abreast and passed, when he turned his head up-stream and floated down with his eyes fixed on the canoe, from which he maintained a distance of a few yards. Clearly his intentions were not hostile; but, although prompted apparently by mere curiosity, his proceedings caused me considerable uneasiness, and I continued to watch him so closely that I had drifted into a new danger without observing it.

Half-way down the reach that I had just entered, a long canoe was putting off from the bank, and the eight or nine men in her had evidently noticed my canoe, for they were standing up, staring in my direction and pointing, while they shouted to some people on the shore. As I came nearer I could see quite a considerable crowd on the bank, and it was manifest that my vessel and its strange companion were the objects of keen curiosity, for the people on the bank as well as those in the canoe gazed steadily at the approaching phenomenon. The hippopotamus floated on, stern foremost, all unconscious of the spectators, while I, crouching inside the tilt (although the rain had ceased), was concealed from view; but, as the native canoe was being poled up on the shallow side of the river, apparently with the object of intercepting my vessel, I thought it time to make my appearance. I therefore tied on my wig (the horns of which rendered it highly inconvenient inside the tilt), and as the canoe pushed off to meet me, I thrust my head out through the opening.

The first person who saw me was a man in the bow of the dug-out, and he announced his discovery by upsetting three of his companions in a frantic attempt to get to the other end of the craft, and finally falling on top of them yelling like a maniac.

For a short time, the dug-out was a scene of wild confusion, every man endeavouring to seize a pole or paddle; but she soon reached the bank and was empty in a twinkling, and when I drifted past the landing-place not a soul was in sight.

At the first outburst of noise, the hippopotamus had dived, and I now saw him near the top of the reach going up stream at a speed that filled me with envy.

The remainder of the day passed with little incident. When the rain fell, I set up the tilt and lowered the drag, and when it was fine I lowered the tilt and paddled. Once I had to unload the canoe to take her down some rapids, but this caused only a trifling delay; and by the time I let go my anchor for the night in the shelter of a sandbank, I reckoned I had travelled over sixty miles since daybreak.

The next two days saw a repetition of the experiences I have recorded above. One or two unloadings and restowings, one actual portage of a couple of hundred yards, a little paddling, and a great deal of drifting in the heavy rain, would be the principal items in my log. I saw surprisingly few people, a fact that was probably accounted for by the almost incessant rain—for the African is not more partial to getting wet than other people; nor was I troubled any more by animals until the latter half of the fifth day, when the crocodiles began to be unpleasantly numerous and of portentous size. Even these reptiles did not actually molest me, but they were very disagreeable objects to look at, under the circumstances, as they lay on the bank with their enormous jaws agape, while the little spur-winged plover ran round them and peered into the yawning cavities in search of leeches.

I turned in that night with much less feeling of security than I had hitherto experienced, for I felt that if one of these immense brutes should take it into his ugly head to climb on to the canoe, he would either capsize it or scratch a hole through the skin. But nothing untoward happened in the night, and I woke in the morning in high spirits and full of hope.

Indeed, the greater, and by far the most perilous, part of my voyage was over, for the great width of the river, as well as the time I had been on my journey, told me that the coast could not be far off; and once on the coast, was I not in the protected territory of His Britannic Majesty? In a land of incorruptible police and district commissioners without spot or wrinkle?

Up to the present there had been no opportunity for using the sail, for the river had been so shut in by the forest that the air was nearly motionless; but now the great width of the stream allowed a light breeze to steal up from the south. This was a head wind, it is true, but with my leeboards down and the swift current running to windward I could afford to sail very close, and if I gained little in speed, it was more amusing to sail than to drift. So I stepped the mast, bent the halyard on to the yard and hoisted the sail. Even in that gentle breeze the grey, wrinkled sail gave quite an encouraging pull on the sheet; and when I let down one leeboard and sailed the canoe pretty full across the river, I was delighted to see the way in which the floating rubbish slipped past her side.

Having made this trial of her speed, I put her as close to the wind as she would go, and tacked to and fro across the river; and thus made nearly as much headway as if I had been working with the paddle.

The weather was very pleasant on this morning—the sixth of my solitary voyage; showery, but bright and sunny in the intervals, and as I sat lazily grasping the tiller, I could not but note with admiration the beauty of the scene. On either bank the rich, soft foliage crowded down to the very water’s edge, an impenetrable mass of living green, while the slender trunks and branches of the great trees, snow-white in the sunlight, soaring away above the lesser vegetation, spread abroad their leafy canopies. Fantastic lianas drooped in strange festoons from tree to tree, orchids blossomed on the boughs, ferns nestled in the undergrowth, and at the margin of the river, its form faithfully repeated in the still water under the bank, the oil-palm lifted its plumy head with indescribable loveliness and grace.

It was wonderfully beautiful, this exuberant life and warm luxuriance of the forest; but I was tired of it—tired of its silence and gloom, its steamy, humid air, its vastness and its loneliness; and I longed for the hum of human life, the bustle and clamour of men at work, and the familiar voice of the sea.

Meditating thus, I tacked my little bark across and across, down the wide reaches by wooded promontories and shady bays, for a couple of hours. And then, as if in obedience to my unspoken wishes, there came a change in the scene. The lofty forest began to recede from the river, and at the water’s edge there appeared scattered clumps of bushes of a colourless sagy green. At first they were few and wide apart, but soon they drew together, creeping out into the shallows and hiding the banks, while the forest retreated farther and farther, until it vanished behind their summits.

Then all the beauty of the river was gone, and I looked upon a bare expanse of yellow water, bounded on each side by a low wall of sage-green foliage, monotonous and ugly, but yet to me most welcome.