Pongo

“ So Stephen was left alone, dragging at the great orchid, till a Pongo reaching over the canoe drove a spear through his shoulder. He let go of the orchid because he must and tried to retreat. Too late! Half a dozen or more of the Pongo pushed themselves between the stern or bow of our canoe and the reeds, and waded forward to kill him. I could not help, for to tell the truth at the moment I was stuck in a mud-hole made by the hoof of a hippopotamus, while the Zulu hunters and the Mazitu were as yet too far off. ”

“ Far beyond the Pongo and across the desert dwell my people, the Kendah, in a secret land. When you wish to visit us, as you will do, journey to the north of that lake where the Pongo dwell, and stay there on the edge of the desert shooting till we come. Now mock me if you will, but do not forget, for these things shall befall in their season, though that time be far. If we meet no more for a while, still do not forget. When you have need of gold or of the ivory that is gold, then journey to the north of the lake where the Pongo dwell, and call on the names of Harût and Marût. ”

“ At length it was round, and as the head came in view all the Pongo from the Kalubi down ceased their low, weird chant and flung themselves upon their faces, those who had torches still holding them up in their right hands.
Oh! what a thing appeared! It was not a toad, but a man that moved upon all fours. The large, bald head was sunk deep between the shoulders, either through deformity or from age, for this creature was undoubtedly very old. ”

“ Those Pongoes are never taken alive, because they are so strong that ten men cannot hold one of them, but yet they take many of their young ones with poisoned arrows. The young Pongo hangeth on his mother’s belly, with his hands clasped fast about her, so that when the country people kill any of the females, they take the young one which hangeth fast upon his mother. ”

“ According to their accounts, the huge rent in the Andes, the Pongo, is about five or six m. long, and in places not more than 80 ft. wide, and is a frightful series of torrents and whirlpools interspersed with rocks. There is an ancient tradition of the savages of the vicinity that one of their gods descending the Marañon and another ascending the Amazon to communicate with him, they opened the pass called the Pongo de Manseriche. ”

“ We sat down among a few of the leading councillors, and presently Bausi came out of his hut accompanied by Brother John, and having greeted us, ordered the Pongo envoys to be admitted. They were led in at once, tall, light-coloured men with regular and Semitic features, who were clothed in white linen like Arabs, and wore circles of gold or copper upon their necks and wrists. ”

“ You can kill me if you wish, though that will avail nothing, since there are others waiting to become Kalubi in my place.”
“Am I a Pongo that I should wish to kill messengers and eat them?” asked Bausi, with sarcasm, a speech at which I noticed the Pongo envoys winced a little.
“King, you are mistaken. The Pongo only eat those whom the White God has chosen. ”

“ The Pongo venator is up with the sun, and, if not on horseback, at least he is on the traces of game; sometimes he returns home during the hours of heat, when he knows that the beasts seek the shady shelter of the deepest forests ”

“ Pongo, the name given to River Narrows by the natives, is a corruption of the word Puncu, which, in the Quichua language, signifies a door or gate. In the Pongo de Rentema huge masses of rock consisting of coarse-grained sandstone (conglomerate) , rise up like towers and form a rocky dam across the stream. I measured a base line on the flat sandy shore, and found that the Amazon River, which, further eastwards, spreads into such mighty width, is, at Tomependa, scarcely 1400 feet broad. ”

“ Pongo then for the first time showed himself, sneaking about with an escort, hiding his head in a cloth lest our "evil eyes" might bewitch him. Still he did us a good turn; for on the 16th he persuaded his men to take service with us at the enormous hire of ten necklaces of beads per man for every day's march—nearly ten times what an Arab pays. Fowls were as plentiful here as elsewhere, though the people only kept them to sell to travellers, or else for cutting them open for diving purposes, by inspection of their blood and bones. ”

“ Whether the flower with the monkey's head on it was the first god and suggested the worship of the beast itself, or vice versâ, I don't know. Indeed I know very little, just what I was told by the Mazitu and a man who called himself a Pongo chief, no more."
"What did they say?"
"The Mazitu said that the Pongo people are devils who came by the secret channels through the reeds in canoes and stole their children and women, whom they sacrificed to their gods. Sometimes, too, they made raids upon them at night, 'howling like hyenas.' The men they killed and the women and children they took away. ”

“ Having thus washed away all the stains of the combat, in a neighbouring stream, for they were all three very nice young men, and hated to be more dirty than was necessary, they proceeded on their journey.
Time will not allow me to dwell long on their subsequent adventures.
As they journeyed on, faint and weary, and sadly wanting refreshment, they met a herald loudly proclaiming, on his brazen horn, the greatest rewards to whoever would slay the Monster Pongo, who was ravaging the country. ”

“ The creature, if it had its origin in the locality, must either have been solitary in its habits or driven away from its fellows, as sometimes happens to old elephants, which then, like this gorilla, become fearfully ferocious.
That is all I can say about the brute, though of course the Pongo had their own story. According to them it was an evil spirit in the shape of an ape, which evil spirit had once inhabited the body of an early Kalubi, and had been annexed by the ape when it killed the said Kalubi. ”

“ My men were natives of various tribes scattered over an immense extent of Central Africa. Each had a certain love of the country from which he had been originally stolen by the slave-traders when a boy, before he found his way into government service. I always endeavoured to keep up this feeling, and to create emulation among the men of different tribes; thus, a native of Pongo would assume a superiority over a Dinka, although the Dinka considered himself of a higher class than a Pongo. A Noba regarded himself as superior to all others. ”

“ When the palaver ended and the tide served, a fierce tornado broke upon us, and the sky looked grisly in the critical direction, north-east. Having no wish to recross the Gaboon River during a storm blowing a head wind, I resolved to delay my departure till the morrow, and amused myself with drawing from the nude a picture of the village and village-life in Pongo-land.
The Mpongwe settlements on the Gaboon River are neatly built, but without any attempt at fortification; for the most part each contains one family, or rather a chief and his dependants. ”

“ The eccentric explorer laughed heartily.
"They all know it," he said. "The whites couldn't draw it out o' them wi' tortures, but every tribe hereabouts knows what Pongo is, or think they do. It's mostly reputation. These niggers are mighty superstitious."
"Well, we ain't goin' to leave that white pigmy business without doin' [Pg 133] anything, are we?" asked Burt. Captain Mac glanced at his uncle.
"Not if I can help it," he smiled. "How about my original proposition, Wallace? Now that ye know the yarn, will ye wait here for me while I take a crack at the pigmies?" ”

“ The people of the countrie, when they travaile in the woods, make fires when they sleepe in the night: and in the morning when they are gone, Pongo will come and sit about the fire till it goeth out, for they have no understanding to lay the wood together. They goe many together and kill many negroes that travaile in the woods. ”

“ The sandy bed was not more than 100 feet wide, a grassy depression beyond was about 400 paces across. On the borders of this we came upon some ruined huts projecting above the grass, evidently the remains of a forsaken Seriba of Bizelly’s, which, had likewise been called Damury, after the name of the Bongo community that had had their homes in the district. The Bongo had now withdrawn beyond the right bank of the river, and thus the Pongo had been left as the boundary between the populated country and the actual wilderness. ”

“ Between the Pongo and Seebehr’s Seriba we had crossed no less than twenty brooks and two rivers of considerable magnitude. Just as had been the case in the Niam-niam lands, water trickled from every crevice and found an outlet on every slope, whilst in the low-lying country of the Dyoor and Bongo, on the edge of the red swamp-ore, where chasms and watercourses are quite as abundant, no springs ever break forth during the winter months, and the half-dry beds are supplied by no other water than what has been left from the previous Khareef. ”

“ This was the epoch for the arrival of caravans from the interior; so that we were not surprised when our runners appeared, with news that Ahmah-de-Bellah, son of a noted [Pg 85] Fullah chief, was about to visit the Rio Pongo with an imposing train of followers and merchandise. The only means of communication with the interior of Africa are, for short distances, by rivers, and, for longer ones, by “paths” or “trails” leading through the dense forest and among the hills, to innumerable “towns” that stud this prolific land. ”

“ Yumma, who accompanied me, declared that it was the upper course of the river of Damoory and Dembo, consequently that it was the Pongo, and he affirmed that, in his frequent marches along its banks, he had distinctly followed it right into that district. Both the Golo and the Sehre throughout the environs called it the Djee, and as I proceeded along my way I derived fresh confirmation for Yumma’s statement about the river from the circumstance that it is also called the Djee by those Sehre who reside on the farther side, at Dehm Adlan. ”

“ They have not, however, that bandbox-like neatness which surprises the African traveller on the Camerones River.
The only domestic animals about these villages are dogs, poultry, and pigeons (fine blue rocks) : I never saw in Pongo-land the goats mentioned by M. du Chaillu. The bush, however, supplies an abundance of "beef," and, as most South Africans, they have a word, Isángú (amongst the Mpongwes) , or Ingwámbá (of the Cape Lopez people) , to express that inordinate longing and yearning for the stimulus of meat diet, caused by the damp and depressing equatorial climate, of which Dr. ”

“ The chapter is entitled, "The strange adventures of Andrew Battell, of Leigh in Essex, sent by the Portugals prisoner to Angola, who lived there and in the adjoining regions neere eighteene yeeres." And the sixth section of this chapter is headed—"Of the Provinces of Bongo, Calongo, Mayombe, Manikesocke, Motimbas: of the Ape Monster Pongo, their hunting: Idolatries ”

“ Long before the commencement of the feast an unwonted activity pervades native society. The Pongol is the social festival of the year, and must be celebrated with due honour, else an ineffaceable stain will rest on the family name. ”

“ The pigmies made not the slightest opposition, and the boys could see by his gestures that he was describing their desires.
"All right," murmured Burt as the two short guttural barks ascended from the audience, "it's all over but the shouting, Critch. S'pose we can get the stuff loaded up to-morrow?"
"We ought to," replied his chum. "We'll have to see first. Those thorns are tangled up with the tusks somethin' fierce."
Next morning the entire tribe left the village and approached the [Pg 253] sacred hut of Pongo. ”

“ The Yellalas of the Rio Congo, in the contracted part of the river from Banza Noki as far as Banza Inga, furnish, between the upper and lower levels, a much more considerable difference; but Mr. Barrow observes, that among the great number of these rapids there is one fall, which alone is thirty feet high. On the other hand, the famous pongos of the river Amazon, so dangerous to go up, the falls of Rentema, of Escurrebragas, and of Mayasi, are but a few feet in perpendicular height. ”

“ They belonged to the Mantatees or Mahowas tribe, which is divided into many kraals under various chiefs, all subject to the head chief Secocoene, who lives on the north of Lydenburg. The Pongola skirts the Swazi, or, as it is sometimes called, the Amaswasiland, a very mountainous country; the people are Zulus, their habits and mode of fighting being the same. Many of these people came to my waggon with milk, which I took in exchange for tobacco and beads. ”

“ They said that they had crossed the lake and found Rica still standing, but utterly deserted. They then wandered through the country and even explored the Motombo’s cave. There they discovered the remains of the Motombo, still crouched upon his platform, but nothing more. In one hut of a distant village, however, they came across an old and dying woman who informed them with her last breath that the Pongos, frightened by the iron tubes that vomited death and in obedience to some prophecy, “had all gone back whence they came in the beginning,” taking with them the recaptured “Holy Flower.” ”

“ One thing may not be forgotten, that is a lime [compare ‘gourd,’ p. 256] . This must be as large as money can buy, and then be carefully encased in gold leaf till it looks like one of the golden apples of antiquity. The next day is Mahâ (or great) Pongol. It is often called Sûrya Pongol. At noon the sun will cross the equator, and bring the culminating glory of the feast. So great a day must commence with appropriate ceremonial, and in this instance it is bathing. In country places the women run early in the morning to the nearest tank and plunge bodily in without undressing. ”