Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/178

---

am, and what I am doing in the middle of his coffee plantation, for his it clearly is, as appears from his obsequious body-guard of blacks, highly interested in me also. We gaze at each other, and smile some more, but stiffly, and he stands bareheaded in the sun in an awful way. It's murder I'm committing, hard all! He, as is fitting for his superior sex, displays intelligence first and says, "Interpreter," waving his hand to the south. I say "Yes," in my best Fan, an enthusiastic, intelligent grunt which any one must understand. He leads the way back towards those geese-perhaps, by the by, that is why he wears those divided skirts—and we enter a beautifully neatly built bamboo house, and sit down opposite to each other at a table and wait for the interpreter who is being fetched. The house is low on the ground and of native construction, but most beautifully kept, and arranged with an air of artistic feeling quite as unexpected as the rest of my surroundings. I notice upon the walls sets of pictures of terrific incidents in Algerian campaigns, and a copy of that superb head of M. de Brazza in Arab headgear. Soon the black minions who have been sent to find one of the plantation hands who is supposed to know French and English, return with the "interpreter." That young man is a fraud. He does not know English—not even coast English—and all he has got under his precious wool is an abysmal ignorance darkened by terror; and so, after one or two futile attempts and some frantic scratching at both those regions which an African seems to regard as the seats of intellectual inspiration, he bolts out of the door. Situation terrible! My host and I smile wildly at each other, and both wonder in our respective languages what, in the words of Mr. Squeers as mentioned in the classics—we "shall do in this 'ere most awful go. We are both going mad with the strain of the situation, when in walks the engineer's brother from the Éclaireur. He seems intensely surprised to find me sitting in his friend the planter's parlour after my grim and retiring conduct on the Éclaireur on my voyage up. But the planter tells him all, sousing him in torrents of words, full of the violence of an outbreak of pent-up emotion. I do not understand what he says, but I catch "très inexplicable" and things like that. The calm brother of the engineer sits down at the table, and I