Dancing blue wavelets, under the soft azure sky, plash
and cream upon the pure clean sand that projects here and there
black lines of porous ironstone waiting to become piers; and the
water-line is backed by swelling ridges, here open and green-
grassed, there spotted with islets of close and shady trees.
Mangrove, that horror of the African voyager, shines by its
absence; and the soil is not mud, but humus based on gravels or
on ruddy clays, stiff and retentive. The formation, in fact, is
everywhere that of Eyo or Yoruba, the goodly region lying west of
the lower Niger, and its fertility must result from the abundant
water supply of the equatorial belt.
The charts are fearful to look upon. The embouchure, well known
to old traders, has been scientifically surveyed in our day by
Lieutenant Alph. Fleuriot de Langle, of La Malouine (1845), and
the chart was corrected from a survey ordered by Capitaine Bouet-
Willaumez (1849); in the latter year it was again revised by M.
Charles Floix, of the French navy, and, with additions by the
officers of Her Britannic Majesty's service, it becomes our No.
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