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My locks were not shorn for seven weeks. I had to do what little trimming there was done with a safety razor and it involved quite an acrobatic feat. Take shaving. The water in most of the Congo rivers is dirty and full of germs. More than once I lathered my face with mineral water out of a bottle. The Congo River proper is a muddy brown.
Upon learning the full details of Richards' story, Captain Vernon had come to the conclusion that the brig which destroyed the Juliet was a vessel devoted to the combined pursuits of piracy and slave-trading; that she was, in all probability, one of the three vessels reported by the Fawn as daily-expected to arrive on the coast from Cuba; and that it was more than likely her destination was the Congo.
Dr. Koenig has placed in the British Museum, beside the syenites of the Congo, the granites of Atures, taken from a series of rocks which were presented by M. Bonpland and myself to the illustrious president of the Royal Society of London. "These fragments," says Mr.
Far to the west, near Lake Chad, arose in 1520 the sultanate of Baghirmi, which reached its highest power in the seventh century. This dynasty was overthrown by the Negroid Mabas, who established Wadai to the eastward about 1640. South of Wadai lay the heathen and cannibals of the Congo valley, against which Islam never prevailed.
Equally remarkable is the mushroom growth of Elizabethville, the one wonder town of the Congo. In 1910, when the railway arrived, it was a geographical expression, a spot in the jungle dominated by the huge ant-hills that you find throughout Central Africa, some of them forty feet high. The white population numbered thirty. I found it a thriving place with over 2,000 whites and 12,000 blacks.
The outcome of the business, after an exciting situation lasting for months, was that Germany got a slice of territory from France, mostly swamps, which reaches from the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, and reported to be, by her own engineers, uninhabitable.
Campbell's experience in setting up his American gin discloses the principal need of the Congo today which is adequate transport. Between its arrival at the mouth of the Congo River and Kibombo the mass of machinery was trans-shipped exactly four times, alternately changing from rail to river.
But the chants, while few in number, are the most individual part of his production; and up to the year 1918 the most impressive. For in The Congo we have real minstrelsy. The shoulder-notes, giving detailed directions for singing, reciting, intoning, are as charming in their way as the stage-directions of J. M. Barrie.
Within five years a region as large as a fifth of Europe, and eighty times larger than Belgium, had been brought under the influence of the Committee, and in 1883 the king founded the "Association Internationale du Congo."
Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt. But that on Broadway, removed from the scene of operations in time some four to six months, and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can control the acts of his agents and his partners, remains to be proved.