S.B,
B

CHAPTER I

ON THE WAY TO OBAN

The Ekoi people are divided into two unequal parts by the boundary that separates the Cameroons from Southern Nigeria. Their land is most easily reached by way of the Kwa River, which flows into the Cross River a few miles from the latter’s mouth. For some distance before this junction, the Kwa is too wide to allow for a good photograph; it is not until nearing the beach where the main Calabar-Oban road runs that one can be taken.

The banks are fringed first with mangrove and screw pine, then, further on, by palm trees. When the part is reached that the Ekoi proudly call “our own water,” the river narrows and becomes more beautiful. At its edge grow giant arums, green on the outer sheath but cream splashed with purple inside. Behind these grow trees of every variety of shape and color, from mimosas with their delicate mauve or cream balls and feathery foliage, to the huge trumpet-shaped flowers of the Gardenia physophylla, the heavily scented, purple-splashed blooms of the Kalbreyeri, or the great Berlinia, whose white flowers shine with a pearl-like luster from among its dim, dark leaves.

Here and there, at a bend, one comes across beaches of clear white sand glistening with mica, where crocodiles lie sunning themselves. On the only occasion when I went down the river, after having spent all my ammunition during a long “bush tour,” the Fate that presides over such matters arranged an interesting scene. On the branch of a great tree, which hung directly over the water, lay a creature such as I have never seen before or since. In shape, it was like a medium-sized crocodile, but with a flat snout like that of a pig, and with