head-shaped board mounted on a rough easel and alongside it a bundle of stakes, the whole affair clearly connected with making palm oil, and identical with the contrivance I saw in the far-away Fan village on Sunday morning.
Investigate, find the boiled palm nuts are put into a pineapple fibre bag, which is hung on the board, then stakes are wedged in between the uprights of the easel, so as to squeeze the bag, one stake after another being put in to increase the pressure. The oil runs out, and off the point of the arrow-shaped board into a receptacle placed to receive it.
The next object of interest is a piece of paper stuck on a stick at the further end of the villages. The inscription is of interest though evidently recent. Find it is "No thoroughfare." There is a bamboo gateway at this end, and so I go through it and find myself to my surprise on the Woermann farm road, and down this I go, butterfly hunting. Presently I observe an old gentleman with a bundle of bamboos watching me intently. Not knowing the natives of this country yet, I feel anxious, and he, in a few minutes without taking his eyes off me, crouches in the grass. I remember my great tutor Captain Boler of Bonny's maxim: "Be afraid of an African if you can't help it, but never show it anyhow," so I walk on intending to pass him with a propitiatory M'bolo.[1] As I get abreast of him he hisses out "Look him;" he's evidently got something in the grass; Heaven send it's not a snake, but I "look him,"—a lizard! The good soul understood collecting, and meant well from the first. I give him tobacco and a selection of amiable observations, and he beams and we go on down the road together, discussing the proper time to burn grass, and the differences in the practical value, for building purposes, of the two kinds of bamboo. Then coming to a path that runs evidently in the direction of the Plateau at Libreville, and thinking it's time I was tacking homewards, I say "good bye" to my companion, and turn down the path. "You sabe 'em road?" says he in a very questioning voice: I say "yes airily, and keep on down it.
The path goes on through grass, and then makes for a hollow—wish it didn't, for hollows are horrid at times, and
- ↑ The M'pongwe greeting; meaning, "May you live long."
