LIFE ON THE CHOSEN SITE 
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but that is often not high enough to connect all the 
ponds, and if the timber has to stay there till the next 
autumn flood it is assuredly lost. 
Occasionally, once perhaps in ten years, even the 
autumn flood does not rise high enough, and then the 
season’s work is wholly lost on many timber-working 
sites. This happened last autumn (1913), and many 
middle-sized and small trading firms are reported to 
have been nearly ruined. The male populations of 
many villages, too, after labouring for months, did not 
earn enough to cover their debts for the rice and tinned 
foods that they had had to buy. 
At last the timber is in the river, moored to the 
jungle on the bank with ropes of creepers, and the white 
trader comes to buy what the negroes of the different 
villages have to offer him. And here caution is neces- 
sary. Is the timber really of the kind desired, or have 
the negroes smuggled in among it pieces of some other 
tree with a similar bark and similar veining which stood 
at the water’s edge ? Is it all freshly cut, or are there 
some last year’s logs, or even some of the year before 
last, which have had their ends sawn off to make them 
look new ? The inventive skill of the negroes with a 
view to cheating in timber borders on the incredible ! 
Let the newcomer be on his guard ! For example : In 
Libreville Bay a young English merchant was to buy 
for his firm some ebony, a heavy wood, which comes 
into the market in short logs. The Englishman 
reported with satisfaction that he had secured some 
huge pieces of magnificent ebony, but no sooner had his 
first purchase reached England than he received a 
telegram saying that what he had bought and 
despatched for ebony was nothing of the kind ; that 
