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Updated: June 18, 2025
I don't know where the preciousness comes in, but it's a thing of great value." "How did you get hold of it?" "Well, I suppose if you want to be told flatly, I scoffed it. You see, it was in charge of a passenger boy, who brought it aboard the M'poso at Matadi. He landed across by canoe from Vivi, and wanted steamer passage down to Boma by the M'poso.
Matadi is soon after in sight. It is built on the south side of the Congo valley, for, as a glance at the map will explain, the State owns both banks at this point, but further up, the river becomes the frontier with the French Congo.
Nelson had worked for an Englishman at Elizabethville and acquired his cognomen. I have not the slightest doubt that he now masquerades under mine. Be that as it may, Nelson was a model servant and he remained with me until that September day when I boarded the Belgium-bound boat at Matadi. Nelson reminded me more of the Georgia Negro than any other one that I saw in the Congo.
Matadi is an ancient if the word may be used in connection with the Congo at all settlement, constructed at the point where navigation on the river is interrupted by cataracts and rapids for some two hundred miles until smooth water is reached again at Stanley Pool.
Outside the café Matadi lay smothered and sweltering in a black, living darkness, and, save for the rush of the river, in a silence that continued unbroken across a jungle as wide as Europe.
There is a population of several hundred white people and many thousands of natives. The Banque du Congo Belge has its principal establishment here and there are scores of well-stocked mercantile establishments. With the exception of Matadi and Thysville it has the one livable hotel in the Congo.
At home, death had been a contingency so remote that he had put it aside as something he need not consider until he was a grandfather. At Matadi, at every moment of the day, in each trifling act, he found death must be faced, conciliated, conquered. At home he might ask himself, "If I eat this will it give me indigestion?" At Matadi he asked, "If I drink this will I die?"
This speech being translated by Lobo, there ensued a long palaver, the result of which was that Matadi declined to go on board the schooner, but had no objection to come off alongside and inspect them from a distance, provided that we would first return and hoist up our own boat.
The people who have lived here for years agree about it in no one fact, so, it is a go-as-you-please for any one so far as accurate information is concerned, and I am as likely to be right as any one else. It has been a pleasant trip and for us will not be over until some days, for at Matadi, which is up the river, we will probably live on the steamer as the shore does not sound attractive.
Therefore, if I recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape Lopez, Boma, Matadi, Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other apocalyptic places, I should be merely plagiarising or infringing copyright, or what-not; and in any case I should be introducing matter entirely irrelevant to this chronicle.
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