162 A JOURNEY UP THE RIVER CONGO. 
carrying babies, will get far ahead, and station themselves ~ 
on some little promontory, thence hailing our approach 
with deafening screams and laughter. . The villages are 
very prettily situated amid majestic groves of oil-palms 
and bright green bananas, with a background of San 2 
purple forest. 
The neatly-made houses, often quite yellow in colour 
from the sun-burnt grass with which they are thatched, 
overhang the river on the edge of a slight plateau, ‘and 
form a pretty contrast against the dark-green vegetation. 
Numbers of grey parrots are here, and they seem to rather 
seek than avoid the society of man, for in every village 
they flock to the oil-palms, where they squawk and whistle 
all day long. 
Now the Congo begins to open out into truly splendid 
breadth. Right “before us is a clear horizon of water and 
sky, only broken by one wooded islet that stands right in 
the middle of the stream. ‘The river is as broad or broader 
here than Stanley Pool. A traveller viewing the Congo 
from this direction, and knowing nothing of what was 
before him, might well believe he was entering upon some 
ereat lake or inland sea. 
The day is magnificent; and towards the close of a 
tranquil afternoon, when the sky assumes a faint golden 
tone, the great smooth sheet of water of the same rich 
colour, stretches away towards the horizon, where it melts 
indistinguishably into the warm sky. Save one or two 
ripples that look like blue scratches on its surface, there 
is nothing to disturb its glowing calm, and the very 
hippopotami, who but a short while before were playing, 
splashing and snorting so obstreperously, seem awed 
into quietude by the perfect alr of peace that envelopes 
everything. The foliage of the great forest trees that 
tower above the shore, where the tiniest of wavelets are 
lapping the golden sand, is unmoved by the slightest 
breeze, and the few salmon-coloured clouds that have 
mounted the horizon are arrested in their flight, and hang 
motionless in the mellow sky. It is a harmony in the 
palest pink and the palest gold, to which the Zanzibaris 
