. oo A JOURNEY UP THE RIVER CONGO. 
cipitous hills, hills that were fast becoming mountains. I 
touched at Musuka, a point of departure for Sao Salvador, 
and Noki, a trading station on both sides of the river, and 
finally arrived at “ Underhill,” the site of a large Baptist 
Mission, a place known by the natives as Tundua. 
“Underhill” stands a few miles from Vivi on the opposite — 
bank, and is situated amid really picturesque scenery. 
The great river takes a broad bend opposite the station, 
and is shut in on both sides by the towering hills, so that 
it. resembles nothing so much as a beautiful mountain 
lake lying in a profound gorge, save that the whirling, 
racing current shows you on reflection, that there must 
be a great river harassed and exasperated by the many 
obstacles that incessantly beset its hurried course towards 
the sea. Caught in this great bend, the river tearing 
down from Vivi has to pass through a somewhat narrow 
passage, and then hurls the whole of its stream against an 
immense and imposing cliff that really seems a great 
mountain side shorn in half. It rises almost perpen- 
dicularly from the water, which so boils, and whirls, and — 
seethes, and eddies at its base, that this loop of the river 
has been called by the Portuguese “ Hell’s Cauldron.” The 
intense red colour of the earth, where the cliff has been 
scarped and bared by the rains, and its lurid reflections in 
the streaks of smooth water ; the dark purple-green woods 
that nestle in the sombre hollows of the hills—hills that 
seem pitilessly to enclose the scene and forbid escape— 
the unquiet water and the ghoul-like vultures, always 
soaring in black and white relief against the dark-toned 
background; all these details render the grim name’ 
singularly applicable, though the scene to which it has 
been applied has a savage beauty about it that redeems 
the gloom. 
The little mission-house was building when I first went 
there, the principal element in its construction being, as 
in most of the temporary houses on the Lower Congo, 
what the Portuguese call “bordio,’ and the English 
“bamboo,” but which really is the ‘strong shafts of the 
full-grown fronds of Phaniz spinosa, a species of dwarf 
