Monday August 7, 1922

The Congo River

Awoken by a long blast on the ships system. Jumped out of bed and looked through my porthole.

[My porthole seems to me quite wondrous by now: through it I have seem so many new things, I took this photo of it out of a kind of gratitude to it!]

We were in smooth – I must say – very muddy water which was slowly flowing by – and there across the water was Congo LAND. Flat – covered with trees: a very tangle of trees and undergrowth and ivy – and here and there a little bit of sandy bank. Two or three tree-covered islands were near by.

This was the CONGO at last.

We stopped just a little way up the river and took on a pilot and then sailed up to the place where the ship discharges a quantity of coal. This makes the boat draw less water – a necessity in these shallows near the rivers mouth.

We are now at anchor quite near the left bank of the Congo River some hour and a half’s journey below Boma. All the Luggage has been brought form the hold and makes a litter on the decks. Aft there is much noise from the ship’s tackle unloading coal into a barge alongside – and hardly less noise from the Africans doing the work. These Africans were taken on board for the purpose of getting up the luggage to the decks and of discharging the coal:

They will be working all night.

This morning we underwent various formalities connected with landing and made our declarations for purposes of custom excise etc. Belgian officials seem to have no idea of method or organisation. Everything was muddled through with many times the inconveniences that need have been and with much waste of time which could easily have been avoided with a little forethought and arrangement.

However, we are through all our formalities satisfactorily and are now enjoying our surroundings. Just across the water – on the bank are palm trees falling over each other – a mass of undergrowth filling up the space between the tall trees between which run great thick strands of the tropical African ivy. Beyond we can see some hills: the particular ones we are near seem very like English ones: just the kind one sees in Somerset only rather burnt. I suspect they look familiar to others from other parts of the world just as much as to us.

We are really on Africa’s flat “edge” beyond Matadi we shall start rising up into the great inland plateau.

It has been rather a cloudy day but there was a beautiful pink colouration in the west which showed as the sun went down. After the very brief twilight – the full moon rose out of a bank of cloud in the east  along the dark bank of trees coming to the waters edge - a great round ball, bright orange in colour as it shone through a thin layer of cloud. Faintly the colour was reflected in the Congo waters as a pale, delicate path of glory, inviting us to follow its direction east, into the very heart of Africa and promising us a bright successful journey tonight into the dark continent waiting for the dawn.