start from Leopoldville.
There they fit out for voyages, some of which last three and four
months. So it is a place of importance, but, like Boma, it looks as
though the people who yesterday built it meant to-morrow to move
out. The river-front is one long dump-heap. It is a grave-yard for
rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars. The interior of the
principal storehouse for ships' supplies, directly in front of the
office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old
iron and newspapers. I should have enjoyed taking the captain of the
port by the neck and showing him the water-front and marine shops at
Calabar; the wharfs and quays of stone, the open places spread with
gravel, the whitewashed cement gutters, the spare parts of
machinery, greased and labeled in their proper shelves, even the
condemned scrap-iron in orderly piles; the whole yard as trim as a
battleship.

On the river-front at Leopoldville a grossly fat man, collarless,
coatless, purple-faced, perspiring, was rushing up and down. He was
the captain of the port. Black women had assembled to greet
returning black soldiers, and the captain was calling upon the black
sentries to drive them away. The sentries, yelling, fell upon the
women with their six-foot staves and beat them over the head and
bare shoulders, and as they fled, screaming, the captain of the port
danced in the sun shaking his fists after them and raging violently.
Next morning I was told he had tried to calm his nerves with
absinthe, which is not particularly good for nerves, and was
exceedingly unwell. I was sorry for him. The picture of discipline
afforded by the glazed-eyed official, reeling and cursing in the
open street, had been illuminating.

Although at Leopoldville the State has failed to build wharfs, the
esthetic features of the town have not been neglected, and there is
a pretty plaza called Stanley Park. In the centre of this plaza is a
pillar with, at its base, a bust of Leopold, and on the top of the
pillar a plaster-of-Paris lady, nude, and, not unlike the
Bacchante of MacMonnies. Not so much from the likeness as from
history, I deduced that the lady must be Cleo de Merode. But whether
the monument is erected to her or to Leopold, or to both of them, I
do not know.

[Illustration: The Monument in Stanley Park, Erected, not to
Stanley, but to Leopold.]

I left Leopoldville in the _Deliverance_. Some of the State boats
that make the long trip to Stanl