The glassy surface of the water was broken here and there by certain black forms floating like logs half hidden beneath the wave.
These were crocodiles.

The river was the Ogowe, and the man who cursed it was Victor Durnovo, employe of the Loango Trading Association, whose business it was at that season to travel into the interior of Africa to buy, barter, or steal ivory for his masters.
He was a small-faced man, with a squarely aquiline nose and a black moustache, which hung like a valance over his mouth.

From the growth of that curtain-like moustache Victor Durnovo's worldly prosperity might have been said to date.

No one seeing his mouth had before that time been prevailed upon to trust him.

Nature has a way of hanging out signs and then covering them up, so that the casual fail to see.