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There I found myself in a sort of cul de sac. I found that the rubber plantations I had come to see, were nine days journey distant. In this land where time and distance are so differently regarded than with us, a man tells you to go to Dima to see rubber. He means after getting to Dima, you must catch a steamer that leaves every two weeks and travel for five days.
I found that the plantation was four days distant, and that the boat for the plantation did not start for six days. I also had been told by the English missionaries at Dima, that I would find an American mission. When I reached Dima I learned that the American mission was at a station further up the river, which could not be reached sooner than a month.
When I told him, he said, "I'll give you three copies of the Saturday Evening Post if you will take us down to Dima. We have been stranded here for nearly three weeks and want to go home." I yelled back that they were more than welcome for I not only wanted to help out a pair of countrymen in distress but I desired some companionship on the boat.
Two days after I left Dima we were blanketed with heavy fog every morning and the air was raw and chill. On the Kasai you can have every experience of trans-Atlantic travel with the sole exception of seasickness. As I proceeded up the Kasai I found continued evidence of the advance in price of every food commodity. The omnipresent chicken that fetched a franc in 1914 now brings from five to ten.
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.
Fortunately, the "Lusanga," one of the Huileries du Congo Belge steamers, was about to start for the Kwilu River, which branches off from the Kasai, and the company was kind enough to order it to take me to Dima, which was off the prescribed itinerary of the vessel. On a brilliant morning at the end of June I set forth.
His German almost had a Potsdam flavour. He told me that he had danced before the former Kaiser and had met many members of the Teutonic nobility. Yet the thing that stood out most vividly in his memory was the taste of German beer. He sighed for it daily. Six days after leaving Kinshassa I reluctantly bade farewell to Peter and the "Lusanga" at Dima.
Alas for the voyage, oh high King of Heaven, Enjoined upon me, For that I on the red plain of bloody Cooldrevin Was present to see. How happy the son is of Dima; no sorrow For him is designed, He is having this hour, round his own Kill in Durrow, The wish of his mind.
One of the black mammies, to ward off evil from the little naked baby at her breast, offered an arm's length of blue cloth for "the White Man's fetish." My voyage up the Kasai ended at Dima, the headquarters of the Kasai Concession. I had been told that at Dima I would find a rubber plantation, and I had gone there to see it.
It is one thing to watch a big tusker doing his tricks in a circus tent, but quite another to hear him floundering through the woods, tearing off huge branches of trees as he moves along with what seems to be an incredible speed for so heavy an animal. There came the glad Sunday it was my thirteenth day at Dima when I heard the whistle of the steamboat.
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