paths were the bungalows and gardens of forty white men and
two white women. Many of the gardens, as was most of Banana, were
neglected, untidy, littered with condensed-milk tins. Others, more
carefully tended, were laid out in rigid lines. With all tropical
nature to draw upon, nothing had been imagined. The most ambitious
efforts were designs in whitewashed shells and protruding beer
bottles. We could not help remembering the gardens in Japan, of the
poorest and the most ignorant coolies. Do I seem to find fault with
Banana out of all proportion to its importance? It is because
Banana, the Congo's most advanced post of civilization, is typical
of all that lies beyond.

From what I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy,
malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy,
monotonous, depressing.

But on the way to Boma and, later, when I travelled on the Upper
Congo, I thought the river more beautiful than any great river I had
ever seen. It was full of wonderful surprises. Sometimes it ran
between palm-covered banks of yellow sand as low as those of the
Mississippi or the Nile; and again, in half an hour, the banks were
rock and as heavily wooded as the mountains of Montana, or as white
and bold as the cliffs of Dover, or we passed between great hills,
covered with what looked like giant oaks, and with their peaks
hidden in the clouds. I found it like no other river, because in
some one particular it was like them all. Between Banana and Boma
the banks first screened us in with the tangled jungle of the
tropics, and then opened up great wind-swept plateaux, leading to
hills that suggested--of all places--England, and, at that,
cultivated England. The contour of the hills, the shape of the
trees, the shade of their green contrasted with the green of the
grass, were like only the cliffs above Plymouth. One did not look
for native kraals and the wild antelope, but for the square,
ivy-topped tower of the village church, the loaf-shaped hayricks,
slow-moving masses of sheep. But this that looks like a pasture
land is only coarse limestone covered with bitter, unnutritious
grass, which benefits neither beast nor man.

At sunset we anchored in the current three miles from Boma, and at
daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the
government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor,
who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper
and as a king