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And a Registration Office is much wanted at head-quarters; otherwise we may expect endless litigation and the advent of the London attorney. Moreover, the people are fast learning foreign ideas. The eventful evening ended with a ball, which demanded another distribution of gin. The dance was a compound affair. The Krumen had their own.
I have always admired men for their strength, their courage, their enterprise, their unceasing struggle for the beyond the something else, but not until I had to deal with Krumen did I realise the vastness to which this latter characteristic of theirs could attain.
Ingratitude is a crime laid very frequently to the score of all Africans, but I think unfairly; certainly I have never had to complain of it, and the Krumen often show gratitude for good treatment in a grand way.
Needless to say, this makes our friend turn his attention to needlework during his return voyage and many a time I have seen the main deck looking as if it had been taken possession of by a demoniacal Dorcas working party. Strangely little is known of the laws and language of these Krumen, considering how close the association is between them and the whites.
A good singer, in these parts, means the man who can make up the best song the most impressive, or the most amusing; I have elsewhere mentioned pretty much the same state of things among the Ga's and Krumen and Bubi, and in all cases the tunes are only voice tunes, not for instrumental performance.
The moonlit sea, shimmering and breaking on the darkened shore, the black forest and the hills silhouetted against the star-powdered purple sky, and, at my feet, the engine-room stoke-hole, lit with the rose-coloured glow from its furnace, showing by the great wood fire the two nearly naked Krumen stokers, shining like polished bronze in their perspiration, as they throw in on to the fire the billets of red wood that look like freshly-cut chunks of flesh.
But I am not in the least surprised that the poor Krumen took the Portuguese logo and amanha for Eternity itself, for I have frequently done so. The greatest length of the island lies N.E. and S.W., and amounts to thirty-three miles; the mean breadth is seventeen miles.
A boat with four Krumen was easily found; but our friends warned us that the ascensus would be easy and the descensus the reverse; the latter has sometimes taken a day and a night. The Gambia River here opens its mouth directly to the north; and, after a great elbow, assumes its normal east-west course.
But the Krumen, boatmen and carriers, were also lodged in the little settlement, and these people always make night hideous with their songs and squabbles, their howling voices, and hyæna-like bursts of laughter. It is very difficult to 'love one's neighbour as oneself' when he appears in this form under these circumstances.
Later, when I got to know the Krumen well, I learnt that they desired not only the vast majority of the articles that they saw, but did more obtained them- -at all events some of them, without asking me for them; such commodities, for example, as fowls, palm wine, old tins and bottles, and other gentlemen's wives were never safe.
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