ools on the way, reaching our
destination about two bells in the afternoon watch on the fifth day
after leaving Banana Creek.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

SUCCESS. THE FATE OF THE PIRATE SLAVER.

Matadi's "town" was situate, as Lobo had informed us, on the south bank
of the stream, on the sloping side of a hill that rose rather steeply
from the water's edge; the scenery of this part of the river being
totally different from that of the mouth; the change occurring
gradually, but becoming quite decided about the point where the chain of
islands is left behind on the traveller's upward way. For whereas on
the lower reaches of the Congo--that is to say, for the first forty
miles or so from its mouth--the banks of the river are low and flat, and
to a great extent mangrove-lined, beyond this point their tendency is to
become higher and steeper, in some places, indeed, quite precipitous,
until where we now were the ground sloped up from the river margin to a
height of fully four hundred feet, for the most part densely covered
with bush interspersed here and there with masses of noble forest trees.

Matadi's town was situate, as I have said, upon the sloping hillside
that constituted the south bank of the river, and consisted of some four
or five hundred buildings arranged with tolerable regularity on either
side of two broad streets or roads that crossed each other at right
angles, their point of intersection being a spacious square, in the
centre of which stood a circular structure with a high-peaked, pointed
roof of thatch, that Lobo informed me was the fetish-house. I was
greatly surprised at the neatness and skill displayed in the
construction of the buildings in this important town; for while they
were insignificant in size, as compared with the dwellings of a
civilised race, being about the size of a small two-roomed cottage, such
as may be found in almost any rural district in England, they were very
considerably larger and more carefully and substantially-built than the
huts that we had noticed in King Plenty's town, when we made our
disastrous attack upon Mendouca and his consorts. There was even a
certain attempt at ornamentation discernible in the larger structures,
many of which had what I believe is called in England a barge-board,
elaborately carved, under the projecting eaves of the roof that formed
the verandah, the wooden posts that supported those same projecting
eaves being also boldly sculptured. These pa