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Updated: August 24, 2024
I went out the other side of that river with a lighter heart than I went in, and shouted the news to the boys, and they yelled and sang as we went on our way. All along this bit of country we had seen quantities of rubber vines, and between Egaja and Esoon we came across quantities of rubber being collected. Evidently there was a big camp of rubber hunters out in the district very busy.
I meant to reach one of Hatton and Cookson's sub-factories there, but strictly between ourselves I knew no more at what town that factory was than a Kindergarten Board School child does. I did not mention this fact; and a casual observer might have thought that I had spent my youth in that factory, when I directed my inquiries to the finding out the very shortest route to it. Esoon shook its head.
Our next halting place was Esoon, which received us with the usual row, but kindly enough; and endeared itself to me by knowing the Rembwe, and not just waving the arm in the air, in any direction, and saying "Far, far plenty bad people live for that side," as the other towns had done.
Esoon gave me to understand that of all the Sodoms and Gomorrahs that town of Egaja was an easy first, and it would hardly believe we had come that way. Still Egaja had dealt with us well.
In which the Voyager sets forth the beauties of the way from Esoon to N'dorko, and gives some account of the local Swamps.
But Esoon said, such was the appalling depravity of the next town on the road, that its inhabitants lay in wait at day with loaded guns and shot on sight any one coming up the Esoon road, and that at night they tied strings with bells on across the road and shot on hearing them.
You then go through a plantation down into the little river, and up into the town one long, broad, clean-kept street. Leaving Esoon you go on up the hill through another plantation to the summit. Immediately after leaving the town we struck westwards; and when we got to the top of the next hill we had a view that showed us we were dealing with another type of country.
I chaperoned my men, while among the ladies of Esoon a forward set of minxes with the vigilance of a dragon; and decreed, like the Mikado of Japan, "that whosoever leered or winked, unless connubially linked, should forthwith be beheaded," have their pay chopped, I mean; and as they were beginning to smell their pay, they were careful; and we got through Esoon without one of them going into jail; no mean performance when you remember that every man had a past to put it mildly.
However I took less interest except, of course, as a friend, in some details regarding the criminal career of Chief Blue- hat of Egaja in the opinion of Esoon regarding the country we had survived, than in the information it had to impart regarding the country we had got to survive on our way to the Big River, which now no longer meant the Ogowe, but the Rembwe.
Esoon is not situated like the other towns, with a swamp and the forest close round it; but it is built on the side of a fairly cleared ravine among its plantain groves. When you are on the southern side of the ravine, you can see Esoon looking as if it were hung on the hillside before you.
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