The Padrao and Pinda. 71 
cord was swept away by an unusually high tide, 
and no further attempt has been made. 
We were then led down a sandy narrow line in 
the bush, striking south-east, and, after a few yards, 
we stood before two pieces of marble in a sandy 
hollow. The tropical climate, more adverse than 
that of London, had bleached and marked them 
till they looked like pitted chalk : the larger stump, 
about two feet high, was bandaged, as if after 
amputation, with cloths of many colours, and the 
other fragment lay at its feet. Tom Peter, in a 
fearful lingua-Franca, Negro-Anglo-Portuguese, 
told us that his people still venerated the place as 
part of a religious building ; it is probably the 
remnant thus alluded to by Lopes de Lima 
(iii. 1-6) : “ Behind this point (Padrao) is another 
monument of the piety of our monarchs, and of 
the holy objects which guided them to the con¬ 
quest of Guinea, a Capuchin convent intended 
to convert the negroes of Sonho ; it has long been 
deserted, and is still so. Even in a.d. 1814, D. 
Garcia V., the king of Congo, complained in a 
letter to our sovereign of the want of missionaries.” 
Possibly the ruined convent is the church which 
we shall presently visit. Striking eastward, we 
soon came to a pool in the bush sufficiently 
curious and out of place to make the natives hold 
it “ Fetish;” they declare that it is full of fish, 
but it kills all men who enter it — “all men” 
