ly Calabar in
Southern Nigeria. In actual existence the new Calabar is eight years
younger than Boma, and in its municipal government, its
street-making, cleaning, and lighting, wharfs, barracks, prisons,
hospitals, it is a hundred years in advance. Boma is not a capital;
it is the distributing factory for a huge trading concern, and a
particularly selfish one. There is, as I have said, only one wharf,
and at that wharf, without paying the State, only State boats may
discharge cargo, so the English, Dutch, and German boats are forced
to "tie up" along the river front. There the grass is eight feet
high and breeds mosquitoes and malaria, and conceals the wary
crocodile. At night, from the deck of the steamer, all one can see
of this capital is a fringe of this high grass in the light from the
air ports, and on shore three gas-lamps. No cafes are open, no
sailors carouse, no lighted window suggests that some one is giving
a dinner, that some one is playing bridge. Darkness, gloom, silence
mark this "European watering-place."

"You ask me," demanded a Belgian lieutenant one night as we stood
together by the rail, "whether I like better the bush, where there
is no white man in a hundred miles, or to be stationed at Boma?"

He threw out his hands at the gas-lamps, rapidly he pointed at each
of them in turn.

"Voila, Boma!" he said.

From Boma we steamed six hours farther up the river to Matadi. On
the way we stopped at Noqui, the home of Portuguese traders on the
Portuguese bank, which, as one goes up-stream, lies to starboard.
Here the current runs at from four to five miles an hour, and has so
sharply cut away the bank that we are able to run as near to it with
the stern of our big ship as though she were a canoe. To one used
more to ocean than to Congo traffic it was somewhat bewildering to
see the five-thousand-ton steamer make fast to a tree, a sand-bank
looming up three fathoms off her quarter, and the blades of her
propeller, as though they were the knives of a lawn-mower, cutting
the eel-grass.

At Matadi the Congo makes one of her lightning changes. Her banks,
which have been low and woody, with, on the Portuguese side,
glimpses of boundless plateaux, become towering hills of rock. At
Matadi the cataracts and rapids begin, and for two hundred miles
continue to Stanley Pool, which is the beginning of the Upper Congo.
Leopoldville is situated on Stanley Pool, just to the right of where
the rapids start their r