but a canoe, and highly perilous work in that, I assure you, from personal experience; and when you get above them the river is not much use except for canoes, until you get to Franceville; beyond Franceville it is only available for canoes in the wet season, but you do not want the Ogowé, being in touch with the great rivers flowing transversely to it into the Congo.
Below the rapids, however, the Ogowé is a grand waterway, as waterways go on the West Coast. You can go up its main stream to Njole for over 200 miles, and up its affluent the Ngunie as far as Samba, where there are lovely falls. Above these falls and a set of rapids the Ngunie would be again available for small steamboats, but there are none there at present.
In addition to the main stream of the Ogowé, you can with the exercise of great care, and with the assistance of good fortune, navigate a small steamboat into Lake Ayzingo and Lake Z'onlange in the wet season, and also enter this main stream of the Ogowé from the ocean by two side creeks running down to Fernan Vaz. The current of the Ogowé is extremely swift, particularly above Lembarene, and the rise of the river in the Talagouga narrows, during the wet season, is from eighteen to twenty feet. This rise commences a month before the wet season gets established here, probably on account of the latter being earlier on the upper waters of the affluents that come in above Njole—the Okanda, and the Ivindo.
The region of the delta to the south is more water-eaten than to the north. The stretch of country to the north, between the delta of the Ogowé and the Gaboon, is rimmed along the seashore, and the estuary shore, by a sort of sand rampart which keeps in the overflow waters of the wet season, and forms the most impossible morass to get about in during this period. The human population of this region is sparse, and what there is resides in villages on the abruptly shaped bubble-like hills that rise isolated here and there. This region is very little explored; the main stream of the Ogowé, entered either from Nazareth Bay or from Fernan Vaz, being the highway to and from the interior, and the unhealthiness and absence of trade in this great swampy forest belt offer
