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70
AFRICAN CHARACTERISTICS
chap.

in 1677) an English ship lost three of its men; a Hollander fourteen; and, in 1678, a Portuguese, nine, of whom nothing was ever heard since."

From Cape Palmas until you are past the mouth of the Taka River (St. Andrew) the coast is low. Then comes the Cape of the Little Strand (Caboda Prazuba), now called, I think, Price's Point. To the east of this you will see ranges of dwarf red cliffs rising above the beach and gradually increasing in height until they attain their greatest in the face of Mount Bedford, where the cliff is 280 feet high. The Portuguese called these Barreira Vermelhas; the French, Kalazis Rouges; and the Dutch, Roode Kliftin, all meaning Red Cliffs. The sand at their feet is strewn with boulders, and the whole country round here looks fascinating and interesting. I regret never having had an opportunity of seeing whether those cliffs had fossils on them, for they seem to me so like those beloved red cliffs of mine in Kacongo which have. The investigation, however, of such makes of Africa is messy. Those Kacongo cliffs were of a sort of red clay that took on a greasy slipperiness when they were wet, which they frequently were on account of the little springs of water that came through their faces. When pottering about them, after having had my suspicions lulled by twenty or thirty yards of crumbly dryness, I would ever and anon come across a water spring, and down I used to go—and lose nothing by it, going home in the evening time in what the local natives would have regarded as deep mourning for a large family—red clay being their sign thereof. The fossils I found in them were horizontally deposed layers of clam shells with regular intervals, or bands, of red clay, four or five feet across; between the layers some of the shell