UP THE OGOWE TO LAMBARENE 
23 
dreaming ! Pictures of antediluvian scenery which 
elsewhere had seemed to be merely the creation of 
fancy, are now seen in real life. It is impossible to 
say where the river ends and the land begins, for a 
mighty network of roots, clothed with bright-flowering 
creepers, projects right into the water. Clumps of 
palms and palm trees, ordinary trees spreading out 
widely with green boughs and huge leaves, single trees 
of the pine family shooting up to a towering height in 
between them, wide fields of papyrus clumps as tall as 
a man, with big fan-like leaves, and amid all this 
luxuriant greenery the rotting stems of dead giants 
shooting up to heaven. ... In every gap in the forest 
a water mirror meets the eye ; at every bend in the 
river a new tributary shows itself. A heron flies heavily 
up and then settles on a dead tree trunk ; white birds 
and blue birds skim over the water, and high in air a 
pair of ospreys circle. Then — yes, there can be no 
mistake about it ! — ^from the branch of a palm there 
hang and swing — ^two monkey tails ! Now the owners 
of the tails are visible. We are really in Africa ! 
So it goes on hour by hour. Each new corner, each 
new bend, is like the last. Always the same forest and 
the same 'yellow water. The impression which nature 
makes on us is immeasurably deepened by the constant 
and monotonous repetition. You shut your eyes for 
an hour, and when you open them you see exactly 
what you saw before. The Ogowe is not a river but 
a river system, three or four branches, each as big as 
the Rhine, twisting themselves together, and in between 
are lakes big and little. How the black pilot finds 
his way correctly through this maze of watercourses is 
a riddle to me. With the spokes of the great wheel in 
