Black Sheep; Adventures in West Africa (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: January 20. The Lipperts are here, ? I go to the beach with Dr. Lippert on Friday next. They tell me that the road has been cut through the greater part of the forest, where before there was a thread of a path. You should have seen a small agitated man who appeared this afternoon with a tale of his wife and her death by Ngi, which is a form of magic. He wore a cloth from his waist down, and a shirt; he was not conspicuously a savage in aspect, but oh, the dreadful dark heart of him as he told ? with the utmost animation touched with some sort of sinister pride, a kind of complacency that took account of what distinction there may be in such direct dealings with the powers of darkness ? the tale of the poor woman's end. Dreadful little man! West Africa, Sunday, January 29. We left Lolodorf for our conference at the beach at midnight on Thursday. There was a veiled moon, ? a very diffused light, ? so that the path was perfectly plain and not checkered. Nights are so wonderful! This one, on the wan path, with the dark forest rising from it on either side, the sighing of the forest, the breathing of it, the heavy, melancholy drippings of it,? you cannot know what it was like. And then the occasional overflow of the moonlight escaping the clouds and lying a spilt, opalescent glory on the road; the huddle of Jbrown huts by the way giving out odors of wood fire and showing firelight from all the cracks; and everywhere by the road, in the open spaces before the houses, at the foot of the great cottonwood trees, the little fires built by the carriers, ? little fires showing violet lights and crimson, and pallid blue, ? hundreds of little jewel fires, and about them the ground black with sleeping men. So the carriers sleep; they cast aside their burdens and their loin-cloth, "and s...