Indeed, before our journey's end, I felt that we should be quite capable of managing a canoe, if ever it became necessary for us to do so.
By three in the afternoon the shores of the island we were approaching--if it really was an island, a point that I never cleared up--were well in sight, the mountain top that stood some miles inland having been visible for hours.

In fact, through my glasses, I had been able to make out its configuration almost from the beginning of the voyage.

About five we entered the mouth of a deep bay fringed on either side with forests, in which were cultivated clearings with small villages of the ordinary African stamp.

I observed from the smaller size of the trees adjacent to these clearings, that much more land had once been under cultivation here, probably within the last century, and asked Komba why this was so.
He answered in an enigmatic sentence which impressed me so much that I find I entered it verbatim in my notebook.
"When man dies, corn dies.

Man is corn, and corn is man." Under this entry I see that I wrote "Compare the saying, 'Bread is the staff of life.'" I could not get any more out of him.