Our Last "Safari" 



passed, and again at different stopping places en route I 

 obtained some beautiful pictures of feeding butterflies, which 

 attracted especial admiration when I had them screened 

 in London and Brussels. On the second day after leaving 

 Penghe, some rapids having to be negotiated, we had to 

 unload the canoes and send our gear round by land. We, 

 however, stajdng where we were, were dexterously piloted 

 through the leaping water by our expert oarsmen who accom- 

 panied the feat with their musical boating song. Other 

 rapids are met with just before reaching Avakubi but these 

 being easily negotiated we soon found ourselves across them 

 and tying up in front of the boma. 



Oil palms are not to be seen in any quantity until one 

 approaches Avakubi, but from here right down to the Congo 

 River they fill the landscape, for the Belgians have fostered 

 the oil industry by the good idea of insisting on the natives 

 planting annually a certain number of palms, and moreover, 

 planting them along all the made roads as well. As the 

 palm tree grows, the leaves are cut away or fall off, thus 

 forming an ideal lodging place for parasitic ferns and mosses, 

 each stem becoming after a time a miniature fernery, and 

 thus enhancing the already wonderful forest scenery. 



Avakubi is buried in palms and mangoes, planted there 

 in Stanley'^s time. It is quite a pleasant place, with some 

 very good brick houses, and close by a mission station of 

 the Sacred Heart. At the time of our visit the Adminis- 

 trateur, amongst the multifarious other jobs of a Belgian 

 official already noted previously in this book, was about to 

 set out to find the last resting place or rather the resting 

 place before the last, of an American prospector who had 

 died miles away in the forest (in the kind of place one would 



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