|
August 5. —" I have drawn pictures of difierent kinds of houses I have seen near the Congo and of some of the things my father is taking home for the museum."¹ September 24 Along the lower river; a Congo trading post. — " We are now on the Congo, on one of the larger river steamers. We have a comfortable cabin on the boat. The steamer burns wood, just as the smaller ones do, and gets fuel at the wood stations along the shore. Yesterday most of the natives of the village at which we stopped came to help carry wood onto the boat. There is one native boatman on board who speaks English, French, and German, besides the languages of several native tribes. "We waited for a steamer two days at one of the trading towns along the river. Fifteen white people live at this trading post. They have built frame houses and houses of brick like those at home. They also have buildings in which they store the rubber, oil palm kernels, and ivory elephant tusks, all of which they buy from the natives, and the cloth, salt, and other things that they sell to them in return. Every Saturday is market day for the negro natives of this village. Manioc, corn, fruit. and other foods are spread out on leaves on the ground in the market place, where crowds of .natives gather to do their buying and selling. They are very noisy as they talk together about prices and the news of the week. Some of them dress in brightly colored cotton cloth that they have bought from the white people. "We have come downstream through a part of the river where in places it is six miles from one bank to the other. There were forests along the banks and on many islands in the river. It has rained nearly every day. Now we are in a narrower part, where the water is deep and flows swiftly. The banks are steep and rocky. Not far away we can see mountains. In the mornings it is chilly, even though at noon it is hot. At noon the sun is never far from overhead. Four days ago at noon, we saw it straight above us, in our zenith. Tomorrow we shall reach another very wide part of the river. It is called Stanley Pool, after Stanley, the great explorer of the Congo." October 3: The end of the journey. — "Just before we reached Stanley Pool, we heard a whir overhead and were surprised to see a big airplane above us. We learned that airplanes now carry passengers and mail between Stanley Pool and a town about four hundred miles upstream. Below Stanley Pool are the great falls of the Congo. The boats going downstream from the upper Congo must stop above the falls. A railroad has been built around these falls. Part of the way the train runs very near the river. At one place we could see to our left only a great wall of rock. To the right, we could see the foaming river, far beneath us. "Below the falls, we took an ocean steamer bound for home. As we went on down the river, there were lower and lower hills along the banks and then we saw only low grassy plains, swamps, and woods along the shores. Long after we passed the mouth of the river, we still could see the difference between the color of the green water of the sea and the brown water from the great, muddy Congo." Congo pictures. — In Figure 91, the men are making palm oil. How is one man pressing the oil from the fruit? Of what is the trough made? In Figure 92, what fuel does the engine burn? Why does it use this kind of fuel? Write down the numbers of all the other pictures in Figures 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, and 96 in which you can find people working with materials which they have obtained from the forests. Be sure you can tell in each case just what things you think have come from the forests Name all the things in these pictures which you think show that much rain fath in the Congo region. What things that you have read about ir the diary can you find in these pictures? From the List of Illustrations, perhaps you can find something about these pictures that you have not discovered for yourself. Questions about the diary. — I. The drawings in Figure 88 will help you answer these questions about the peopl of the Congo and their work. 1. What articles for the museum, if any:
are made of wood?
II. The dates in the diary and the sentences about the sun will help you answer these questions: 1. In January, where did the boy traveling in the Congo region see the sun at noon?
(P. 55, use your back button to return here)
You see, then, that Kanda’s shadow behaves as Mingi’s does, and not as Abdullah’s does in Egypt. (Pp. 50-51., use your back button to return here) III. Did the diary make you think about the following things, too? 1. The water of the Congo is brown because it is carrying down to the sea a great deal of mud and sand, together with decayed bits of plants, but it has not built a delta.
IV. Can you tell now several ways in which the banana trees shown in Figure 81 are useful to the natives of the village? Try now to answer the questions on page 54 (use back button to return here) about why the people near the Congo live as they do. Your trip down the Congo. — Name now a list of things you might see as you go down the Congo. Perhaps you would like to play the game "Suggest" with this list. (P. 19. use your back button to return here) Find the signs for the falls near the mouth of the Congo on the map in Figure 80. The railroad runs along the southern bank round these falls. The sign for the Congo River should now make you think of the people and the scenes along its banks. A Congo exercise. Write the unfinished sentence numbered i in the first of the following lists. In the second list find the rest of this sentence and write it after the first part. Your sentence then will read, "People of the Congo region build houses with sloping roofs so that the rain will run off quickly, for it rains a great deal in this region." Then write the second unfinished sentence, find the rest of it in the second list, and write it after the first part. Do this with all the other unfinished sentences in the list. List I. 1. People of the Congo region build houses with sloping roofs so that ...........
List II. ............... the sun is always almost overhead at noon, and it is hotter where the sun is almost directly overhead at noon than where it is low in the sky at noon.
Review games and puzzles. — 1. An alphabet race: By this time you should know at least twenty names of regions, rivers, cities, countries, and bodies of water that you have seen in your journeys be tween Bagdad and the mouth of the Congo. Start at a given signal and see who will be first to make a list of twenty of these names, all spelled correctly, and arranged in alphabetical order. The first time you play this game, you may use your books in making the list. Later, you should play the game without using your books. 2. Spelling with initials: Write in a column the names of a sea, a country, and a gulf so that the initial letters spell "map." Write in another column the names of a canal, a river, and a country, so that the initial letters spell "sea." 3. Building pyramids: Build a pyramid of letters arranged as the dots are in the diagram below.
Try to build a pyramid with words which describe some of the kinds of places you have seen, such as peninsula, sea, cataract, delta, strait, country, and city. Which of you can make the highest pyramid? Adding to the map. — The sea into which the Congo River flows is the Atlantic Ocean. The sea into which the Nile River flows is, as you have seen, the Mediterranean Sea. Your next trip is a journey by boat from the mouth of the Congo to the Mediterranean Sea. Another part must be added to your world map before you can follow the route of this voyage on it. You will find this part added in Figure 97.
¹ These drawings are copied in Figure 88. In Figure 89, you can see houses which the boy would have found in another village in the Congo region, and a jar, a basket, and a wooden mortar which his father might have secured there for the museum. Of what are the roofs of these huts made?
|