This land of Loango was an easy voyage from Angola, with no terrible river-mouths to enter as on the last one. Upon the appointed day I did go down to the port at São Paulo de Loanda and I found the same ship as before ready for me, the Infanta Beatrix, and much the same crew. This was comforting. Already on board were Faleiro the master and other men I had come to know, whose names I remember well after these many years, and they were Andrade and Pires and Cabral and Oliveira, who did clap me on the back and give me good grinning smiles and freely offer me the harsh thin wine that they keep in leather sacks. These men had seen me do brave service piloting them into the maw of the Zaire, and now all prejudices owing to my being English were forgot among them. They called me “Andres” or more often “Piloto,” that is the Portugal way of saying pilot, and I got from them no further stares or hard glowering looks. The only time I held myself apart from them was when they were at their devotions, for I would not take the Mass or sing their Latin songs, or venerate the crucifix and image of the Madonna and other holy idols that they had brought on board. Instead at such times I went off quietly and knelt and talked to God in good plain English words, unburdening my soul and sometimes saying what words I could recall of the offices of matins or evensong. The sailors took no offense at this, for they no more expected me to transform into a Papist than they would expect a blackamoor to begin turning white of skin.
So we sailed up the coast with good breezes past the awful Zaire and to a point called Cabo do Palmar, where Loango commences. Here there are many palm-trees, giving the place its name. Five leagues beyond it is the port of Kabinda, which many ships use to water and refresh themselves. The terrain is one of woods and thickets. And seven leagues northwards of that place is the River Kakongo, a very pleasant place and fruitful. This is a strong river whose waters discolor the sea for seven miles, though that is nothing to what the Zaire achieves. At its mouth is the town of Chiloango: here is great stock of elephanto teeth, and a boat of ten tons may go up the river.
I tell you these places because I was the first Englishman to behold them. At four leagues from Kakongo is the river of Luiza Loango. Its depth where it meets the sea is only two feet, owing to a sand-bar, but once your vessel is within, it finds a fair waterway for over an hundred miles. Ten miles upriver is the town of Kaia, one of the four great seats or lordships of the kingdom of Loango. I did not go there on this voyage. And two leagues northward along the coast is a sandy bay, where a ship may ride within a musket-shot of the shore in four or five fathoms. Here is the port of Loango, the capital city of this kingdom.
“Come, Piloto,” said Pedro Faleiro as we cast down our anchor and made ready to go ashore. “You will accompany us to the city, which I think you will find different from such places as you may already have seen.”
“Tell him about the king and the bell,” said our boatswain, Manoel de Andrade.
Faleiro laughed. “Aye! The king and the bell! Listen well, Andres, for it could cost you your life to be careless in this.”
And he said that it was forbidden in this land to behold the king taking food or drink, on pain of death. When the king drinks, the bearer who carries the royal cup of palm-wine also holds a bell in his hand, and when he gives the cup to the king, he turns his face away and rings the bell. And then all that be there fall down upon their faces, and do not rise until the king has drunk. “Which is very dangerous for any stranger that knows not the fashions,” said Faleiro, “for if anyone sees the king drink he is straightaway killed, whosoever he may be.”
“Whosoever?” I asked.
“Aye. There was a boy of twelve years, which was the king’s son. This boy chanced to come into the chamber when his father was in drinking, and beheld him. Presently the king commanded the boy should be dressed in fine apparel, and given food and drink. This was done; and afterward the king commanded that he should be cut in quarters and carried about the city, with proclamation that he saw the king drink.”
“It is not so!” I cried.
“You would give me the lie?” said Faleiro, looking angered.
“Nay, nay, good Pedro,” I said, touching his arm. “I mean only that my mind will not accept such horror.”
“Accept it, and accept it well. For if we are so lucky as to be granted audience with this king, listen ye sharp for the bell. We are not exempt from the rule.”
“Would they cut one of us in quarters, then?”
“We are few and they are many. I know not whether they would attack us, and if they did, we have our muskets and they have none. But we ought not put it to the test.”
“And so we must grovel on our faces when the king is in his cups?” I asked.
“Turning away the face is sufficient, for us,” answered Faleiro.
Andrade said, “It is the same when the king eats, but there it carries less risk, for the king has an eating-house that he enters alone, and the door is shut behind him, and he knocks before he comes out. Yet even so, sometimes a fool will stumble into this house and spy unwitting on the king, and for this he always perishes.”
I felt a shivering, despite all the heat of the day. “This sounds devilish to me, or mad.”
“It is their belief,” said Manoel de Andrade, “that the king will shortly die, if ever he is seen at his food or drink. And so he protects himself. For if he slays the one who sees, then his own life is spared, they do think.”
“Ah!” I cried. “Now I understand, and in sooth it makes goodly sense!”
But I was speaking with deep irony—which my Portugal companions did not notice, I suppose, for they gave me odd looks, as though to say the English must be as mad as the Loangans. I did not trouble to explain myself. Indeed it did make a sort of sense, that if one believes a certain thing, then it follows naturally that one must take proper action to ward off its evil. The trick is in believing. To the Papist the actual and real blood of Christ is in the chalice from which they sip, and I think the King of Loango would have difficulties believing the truth of that. By God, I do!
Hearing such tales as these, I was in a taut and most sensitive mood as we went toward Loango. We entered the city on foot, leaving a small band of men to guard the ship. And entering that place was for me like entering a land of dreams, a place where phantoms did walk abroad in open daylight. The strangeness of those first moments there was something I could taste in my mouth, as if I had taken some piece of metal against my tongue, and I can remember that taste of strangeness to this day.
Yet the strangest thing about that strangeness is how swift it passes. I have entered many places as alien from my native land as Loango, and each time I have felt as though I am passing into another world, where light and sound and all else have different qualities. But yet I adapt and assimilate most speedily. Is that,some special aspect of my own character, I wonder, or is it universal? The former, I think. There are those who never adapt to anything unfamiliar, and go through life speaking only their native tongue and eating only their native foods, and if they are exposed to other foods or climes they sicken quickly and die. Yet I do adapt. I never came to like the heat of these African lands, which is severe: the heavy wet air hangs about you like a woolen cloak that may not be shed. But since there is no escape from the heat, it becomes unremarkable. One lives with the heat the way one lives with the ache of an old wound, and takes no notice of it. And wherever I found myself, I incorporated into myself whatever I could not shrug away. I spoke the language of those about me, be it Portugal or Kongo or Jaqqa. I ate— God save me!—the things they ate. I breathed their air. Thus it was that Loango, which I entered as if I were entering the domain of Belial or Moloch, lost its strangeness early for me, and came before long to seem most comfortable, and pleasing, as though it were some cozy town along the Thames. And in after years, when I needed refuge, I took my refuge there and found it much to my liking. I think this is a curious quality of my soul, but I make no apology for it. For if I had not had it, I trow, I would have gone to feed the worms many years ago.