44 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
Fernao Vaz River ; ancl Bowdich turns the two into 
Ompoongu and Soombea. The third is Anenga-nenga, 
not Ninga-ninga, about one mile long from north to 
south, and well wooded with bush and palms ; here the 
Gaboon Mission has a neat building on piles. The 
senior native employe was at Glass Town, and his junior, 
a youth about nineteen, stood a la Napoleon in the door- 
way, evidently monarch of all he surveyed. I found 
there one of the Ndiva, the old tribe of Pongo-land, 
which by this time has probably died out. We anchored 
off Wosuku, a village of some fifty houses, forming one 
main street, disposed north-east — south-west, or nearly 
at right angles with the river. The entrance was 
guarded by a sentinel and gun, and the “ king,” Imondo, 
lay right royally on his belly. A fine plantation of 
bananas divides the settlement, and the background is 
dense bush, in which they say “ Nyare ” and deer 
abound. The Bakele supply slice}) and fowls to the 
Plateau, and their main industry consists in dressing 
plantain-fibre for thread and nets. 
We now reach the confluence of the Nkomo, or north- 
eastern, with the Mbokwe, or eastern branch, which 
anastomose to form the Gaboon ; the latter, being appa- 
rently the larger of the two, preserves the title Mpolo. 
Both still require exploration ; my friend M. Braouezzec, 
Lieutenant de Yaisseau, who made charts of the lower 
bed, utterly failed to make the sources ; and the Rev. 
Mr. Preston, who lived seven months in the interior, 
could not ascend far. Mr. W. Winwood Reade reached 
in May, 1862, the rapids of the Nkomo River, but sore 
feet prevented his climbing the mountain, which he 
estimates at 2,000 feet, or of tracing the stream to its 
fountain. Mr. R. B. N. Walker also ascended the 
Nkomo for some thirty miles, and found it still a 
large bed with two fathoms of water in the Cacimbo or 
“Middle dries.” In M. du Chaillu’s map the Upper 
Nkomo is a dotted line ; according to all authorities, 
upon the higher and the lower river his direction is too 
fiir to the north-east. The good Tippet declares that 
he once canoed three miles up the Mbokwe, and then 
