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The only parallels in the Congo are the various areas of the Huileries du Congo Belge. Tshikapa, which means "belt," is a Little America in every sense. It commands the junction of the Tshikapa and Kasai rivers. There are dozens of substantial brick dwellings, offices, warehouses, machine-shops and a hospital.
The Chihune flows into the Longe, and that into the Chihombo, a feeder of the Kasai. Those who know the difficulties of taking altitudes, times, and distances, and committing all of them to paper, will sympathize with me in this and many similar instances. While at Chihune, the men of a village brought wax for sale, and, on finding that we wished honey, went off and soon brought a hive.
We were now on the sources of the Loangwa of the Maravi, which enters the Zambesi at Zumbo, and were struck by the great resemblance which the boggy and sedgy streams here presented to the sources of the Leeba, an affluent of the Zambesi formerly observed in Londa, and of the Kasai, which some believe to be the principal branch of the Congo or Zaire.
"Two pigeons I sent, but these the hawks took a fisherman saw one taken by the Kasai, and my own brother, who lives in the Village of Irons, saw the other go though he flew swiftly." Hamilton's grave face set rigidly, for he smelt trouble. You do not send pleasant news by pigeons. "Speak," he said.
I followed him up and hit him or some one of us hit him and he stood up on his hind legs. But he put back to land for the third time. Captain said wait until moon came out. But though we hunted up to our waists saw none. One came quite close at dinner. Seven on the day. CONGO RIVER March 1, 1907. DEAR MOTHER: I have been up the Congo as far as the Kasai river, and up that to a place called Dima.
24TH OF FEBRUARY. On reaching unflooded lands beyond the plain, we found the villages there acknowledged the authority of the chief named Katende, and we discovered, also, to our surprise, that the almost level plain we had passed forms the watershed between the southern and northern rivers, for we had now entered a district in which the rivers flowed in a northerly direction into the Kasai or Loke, near to which we now were, while the rivers we had hitherto crossed were all running southward.
Several of the native traders here having visited the country of Luba, lying far to the north of this, and there being some visitors also from the town of Mai, which is situated far down the Kasai, I picked up some information respecting those distant parts. In going to the town of Mai the traders crossed only two large rivers, the Loajima and Chihombo.
Only the Anglo-Saxon could hold his own amid these trying circumstances. No less difficult were the natives themselves. Before the advent of the American engineers, industry was unknown in the Upper Kasai. The only organized activity was the harvesting of rubber and that was rather a haphazard performance.
With a cup of salt a black man can start an endless chain of trading that will net him a considerable assortment of articles in time. The principal natives in the Upper Kasai are the Balubas, who bear the same relation to this area as the Bangalas do to the Upper Congo. The men are big, strong, and fairly intelligent. The principal tribal mark is the absence of the two upper central incisor teeth.
When these became exhausted I was hard put for reading matter. At a post on the Kasai River the only English book I could find was Arnold Bennett's The Pretty Lady, which had fallen into the hands of an official, who was trying to learn English with it. It certainly gave him a hectic start. Then, too, there was the eternal servant problem, no less vexing in that land of servants than elsewhere.
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