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Every now and then we see some bird or beast which we have not seen before outside of a Zoo; a grand eagle is in sight just now, no vulture this fellow; he looks twice the size of our golden eagle, and sits motionless on a piece of driftwood in the middle of a sandbank. I can only just make out his or her mate soaring against the woods on the hills behind.
For a full minute or more he stood gazing under the sharp of his hand out across the sandbank as it seemed to glide rapidly past us, its summit momentarily growing lower as the gig swept along toward the point where the dwindling spit plunged beneath the surface of the water, and, as he gazed, the expression of puzzlement and anxiety on his face rapidly intensified.
She had struck, but, contrary to all expectation, another sea lifted her and flung her completely through the breakers, when, swinging round, she grounded on a sandbank just within them, heeling over with her head to the eastward, and her deck towards the shore. Though the sea, which washed over the reef, still beat against her, she might possibly hold together for some time.
Brought up, as I understand, in a part of England which possesses not much of the picturesque, and nothing of that which the vulgar call sublime, he has learnt to see that in all nature, in the hedgerow and the sandbank, as well as in the alp peak and the ocean waste, is a world of true sublimity, a minute infinite, an ever fertile garden of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as truly as any phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye.
At Dima I had the final heart-throb of the trip. I had arranged to take the "Fumu N'Tangu," a sister ship of the "Madeleine," from this point to Kinshassa. When I arrived I found that she was stuck on a sandbank one hundred miles down the river. My whole race against time to catch the August steamer would have been futile if I could not push on to Kinshassa at once.
P.M. Warped the Ship over, and at high Water laid her ashore on the Sandbank on the South side of the River, for I was afraid to lay her broad side to the Shore where she lay before, because the ground lies upon too great a decent, and she hath already received some Damage by laying there these last Niep Tides, at least she still makes water. Friday, 6th. Ditto weather.
We were pulled up with a jerk, which sent me flying over the left wheel, doing a somersault, and finally landing head first into a lovely soft sandbank. Spluttering and staggering to my feet, I looked round for the cause of my sudden exit from the car, and there in the glare of the headlight were two French officers. Both were laughing heartily and appreciating the joke.
Never had there been such abundance along the stream that for many years had served as their annual camping-ground. They revelled in the luxury of a care-free existence. Fish teemed in the water; turtles came in hordes to visit the sandbank; and birds in countless numbers filled the air with twinkling wings and harsh screams.
Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sandbank the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy- coloured patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright flowers.
From these lock-gates, a square woodwork tunnel is formed by means of piles driven into the shore, and crossed with stout planks; and this covered water-way in some cases runs for perhaps two hundred yards right beneath the sandbank, then beneath the sand, and has its outlet some distance down the shore; while, to prevent the air blowing the tunnel up when the sea comes in, a couple of square wooden pipes descend at intervals of some fifty yards through the sand into the water-way; at high water, when the mouth is covered, and the lock-gates closed, the air comes bellowing and roaring up these pipes as every wave comes in; and at times, when the tunnel is pretty full, the water will, after chasing the air, rush out after it, and form a spray fountain; while, as the waves recede, the wind rushes back with a strange whistling sound, and a draught that draws anything down into the tunnel with a fierce rush.
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