Throughout the
day sexes and ages keep apart. The nude boys perch upon stones or worn-out
canoes. Their elders affect the shade, men on one side of the village and
women on the other. All the settlements are backed by cocoa-trees in lines
and clumps. Those who view Africa biliously compare them with hearse-plumes;
I find in them a peculiar individuality and likeness to humankind. There
is the chubby babe, six feet high; the fast-growing 'hobbedehoy;' the
adult, bending away from you like a man, or, woman-like, inclining towards
you; there is the bald, shrunken senior; and, lastly, appears death, lean
and cold and dry.
Between sea and settlement stand the canoes, flat-bottomed and tip-tilted
like Turkish slippers; where the land is low and floods are high, each is
mounted upon four posts. Fronting and outside the village stands a
wall-less roof of flat matting, the palaver-house. The settlement is
surrounded by a palisade of fronds stripped from the bamboo-palm and
strengthened by posts; the latter put forth green shoots as soon as stuck
in the ground, and recall memories of Robinson Crusoe. The general
entrance has a threshold two to two and a half feet high.
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