ste_ was a
lonely, fever-ridden white, whose only interest in our arrival was
his hope that we might spare him quinine. I think we gave away as
many grains of quinine as we received logs of wood. Empty-handed we
would turn from the wood post and steam a mile or so farther up the
river, where we would run into a bank, and a boy with a steel hawser
would leap overboard and tie up the boat to the roots of a tree.
Then all the boys would disappear into the jungle and attack the
primeval forest. Each was supplied with a machete and was expected
to furnish a _bras_ of wood. A _bras_ is a number of sticks about as
long and as thick as your arm, placed in a pile about three feet
high and about three feet wide. To fix this measure the head boy
drove poles into the bank three feet apart, and from pole to pole at
the same distance from the ground stretched a strip of bark. When
each boy had filled one of these openings all the wood was carried
on board, and we would unhitch the _Deliverance_, and she would
proceed to burn up the fuel we had just collected. It took the
twenty boys about four hours to cut the wood, and the _Deliverance_
the same amount of time to burn it. It was distinctly a
hand-to-mouth existence. As I have pointed out, when it is too dark
to see the currents, the Congo captains never attempt to travel. So
each night at sunset Captain Jensen ran into the bank, and as soon
as the plank was out all the black passengers and the crew passed
down it and spent the night on shore. In five minutes the women
would have the fires lighted and the men would be cutting grass
for bedding and running up little shelters of palm boughs and
hanging up linen strips that were both tents and mosquito nets.

[Illustration: The Native Wife of a _Chef de Poste_.]

In the moonlight the natives with their camp-fires and torches made
most wonderful pictures. Sometimes for their sleeping place the
captain would select a glade in the jungle, or where a stream had
cut a little opening in the forest, or a sandy island, with tall
rushes on either side and the hot African moon shining on the white
sand and turning the palms to silver, or they would pitch camp in a
buffalo wallow, where the grass and mud had been trampled into a
clay floor by the hoofs of hundreds of wild animals. But the fact
that they were to sleep where at sunrise and at sunset came
buffaloes, elephants, and panthers, disturbed the women not at all,
and as they bent, laughi