River Number Two is a white crescent at a river mouth on Sierra Leone's Freetown Peninsula, closed at both ends by rainforest and rock. The most valuable thing on it is the sand. Freetown is building fast, and white beach sand is building material, so along this coast lorries come for it. This beach has kept its own because the village behind it owns the whole thing. The villagers' own association has run it since 1995 — the entry, the huts, the boats, the kitchen — and the money has built a school and a clinic. The ridge standing over it is why the country has its name: a Portuguese captain charting the coast in 1462 wrote these peaks down as the Lion Mountains.
The fishing canoes are dugouts, one hollowed trunk each, painted and patched, and they go out straight through the break rather than round it. They work the rocks off the point and come back heavy in the early afternoon, which is when your lunch is decided. Whatever they bring in is grilled and carried out to wooden tables on the sand — barracuda, lobster, prawns — and because the beach faces west, dinner and the sunset arrive together at your table. Behind the sand the river pools into a lagoon, fresh, warm and barely waist-deep, and Freetown families teach their children to swim in it a few steps from an Atlantic that forgives nothing. At the end of the rains the river runs full enough for the boatmen to take you upstream, past mangrove and in under the trees, until the surf drops away behind you and a waterfall stands at the end. From August to December humpbacks pass the bay around the point, most of them in September and October. Where the sand has been sold along this coast, the sea takes about six metres of land a year instead of one, and the beaches have thinned to stone. Here it is still sand.