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Since Stanleyville is the head of navigation on the Congo there is ordinarily no lack of boats. I was fortunate to be able to embark on the "Comte de Flandre," the Mauretania of those inland seas and the most imposing vessel on the river for she displaced five hundred tons.
In the region immediately adjacent to Stanleyville the natives have begun to plant cotton over a considerable area. At Kongolo I saw hundreds of acres of this fleecy plant under the sole supervision of the indigenes. Stanleyville marked one of the real mileposts of my journey.
It covers roughly, and the name is no misnomer I am told, 680 miles through the jungle and skirts the principal Congo gold fields. A road has been built and motor cars are available. The railway route from Stanleyville to Mahagi, which will link the Congo and the Nile, is surveyed and would have been finished by this time but for the outbreak of the Great War.
As soon as Stanley's articles about the Congo began to appear, King Leopold, who was a shrewd business man, saw an opportunity for the expansion of his little country. Under his auspices several International Committees dedicated to African study were formed. He then sent Stanley back to the Congo in 1879, to organize a string of stations from the ocean up to Stanley Falls, now Stanleyville.
Stanleyville is not only the heart of Equatorial Africa but it is also an important administrative point. Hundreds of State officials report to the Vice-Governor General there, and on national holidays and occasions like the visit of the Colonial Minister, it can muster a gay assemblage.
Much to my regret I saw only a few of the much-described pygmies who dwelt mainly in the regions northeast of Stanleyville, where Stanley first met them. They are all under three feet in height, are light brown in colour, and wear no garments when on their native heath. They are the shyest of all the tribes I encountered.
Serene and majestic, it is often well-nigh overwhelming in its immensity. Between Stanleyville and Kinshassa there are four thousand islands, some of them thirty miles in length. As the boat picks its way through them you feel as if you were travelling through an endless tropical park of which the river provides the paths. It has been well called a "Venice of Vegetation."
Two days more of travelling on the Lower Lualaba brought us to Ponthierville, a jewel of a post with a setting of almost bewildering tropical beauty. Here we spent the night on the boat and early the following morning boarded a special train for Stanleyville, which is only six hours distant by rail. Midway we crossed the Equator.
A sorcerer in the Upper Congo region once obtained what was widely acclaimed as miraculous results from a red substance that he got out of a tin. It developed that he had stolen a can of potted beef and was using it as "medicine." Stanleyville was called the center of the old Arab slave trade.
My white fellow passengers on the "Louis Cousin" were mostly Belgians on their way home by way of Stanleyville and the Congo River, after years of service in the Colony. We all ate together in the tiny dining saloon forward with the captain, who usually provides the "chop," as it is called. I now made the acquaintance of goat as an article of food.
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