A mission to Gelele, King of Dahome

About this book

This fertile soil, which enjoys a perpetual spring, is considered a strong prison, as the land of spectres, the seat of disease, and the mansion of death. Said of Bengal by its Moslem conquerors. A Ilha Formosa, the lovely island of Fernando Po, has, like most beauties, two different, indeed two opposite, aspects. About Christmas time she is in a state deeper than rest,— A kind of sleepy Venus seemed Dudu. Everything, in fact, appears enwrapped in the rapture of repose. As the ship glides from the rolling, blustering Bights into that wonderfully still water, men come on deck feeling they know not what; çela porte à l’amour, as the typical Frenchman remarks. The oil-like swell is too lazy to break upon the silent shore, the wind has hardly enough energy to sigh, the tallest trees nod and bend drowsily downwards, even the grass is, from idleness, averse to wave: the sluggish clouds bask in the soft light of the sky, while the veiled sun seems in no hurry to run his course. Here no one would dream, as does our modern poet, of calling nature “sternly fair.” If such be the day, conceive the cloister-like stillness of a night spent in the bosom of Clarence Cove. Briefly, Fernando Po, in the dry weather, is a Castle of Indolence, a Land of the Lotophagi, a City of the Living-Dead. But as I saw her in November, 1863, and as she had been for the six months preceding, the charmer was not to be recognised by that portrait. A change had come over her Madonna-like face—as is sometimes witnessed in the “human organism.” The rainy season had set in earlier than usual; it had opened in May, and in November it was not ended. A heavy arch of nimbus, either from the north-east or the north-west, gathered like a frown on the forehead of the dull grey firmament. Presently the storm came down, raving like a jealous wife. In a few moments it burst with a flood of tears, a sheet of “solid water,” rent and blown about by raging, roaring gusts, that seemed to hurry from every quarter in the