Even today, when air and road travel has made Africa so readily accessible to Europeans and Americans, there are innumerable aspects of African life which tend to take one by surprise. The unfamiliar lies hidden everywhere, and the presence of Western culture seems merely to emphasize this unfamiliarity. Basically, the essence of our reac¬tion to the strange, the unfamiliar, is a sense of fear. Every country contains landscapes that arouse unease—whether it be some remote Alpine valley, the wild lavender fields of Upper Province, or a lonely Norwegian fjord at twilight. But in my own experience West Africa contains more weird and eerie regions—rain-forest, mangroveswamp, parched plains of red earth—than any other place that I have seen. It is not only in the foreigner that these landscapes evoke fear. A large part of all old African religions is devoted to soothing the unknown and the unseen—evil spirits which live in a particular tree or a particular rock, a thousand varieties of ghosts and witches, the ever-present spirits of dead ancestors or relatives. I have myself been kept awake at night in Calabar by a friend from Lagos who was con¬vinced that the witches of the east were out to get him, or that he was about to be kidnapped and eaten. During four and a half hours in a canoe along the creeks of the Niger della, gliding over the still and colorless water beneath an equally still and colorless but burning sky, I, too, have experienced a sense of fear, or at least a sense of awe. Ex¬cept for the ticking of the little outboard engine the silence was complete. On either hand stretched the silver-white swamps of mangrove, seeming, with their awkward exposed roots, to be standing knee-deep in the water. Where the creek narrowed you could peer deep into these thickets of mangroves—vistas secret, interminable and somehow meaningless. There was no sign of life except for the shrill screech of some unseen bird.
I was on my way to the ancient slaving port of Bonny, which we reached in late afternoon. Scrambling up some derelict stone steps (slithery with slime and which had managed to detach themselves from the landing-stage so that you had to jump a two-foot gap to reach wet land), 1 found myself in an area of black mud and tumbled blocks of stone.
1.There are features of Western culture which are present in West Africa（ ）.
2.A lot of the old African religion has to do with （ ）
3.The author was kept awake by（ ）.
4.“ Mangrove” means（ ）
