Than ever, so that their husbands might come home and
whack them too, I suppose, and whenever the unmitigated hardness of
my plank rouses me I hear them still coo-ooing.
No watchman is required to wake you in the morning on the top of a
Cameroon foot-hill by 5.30, because about 4 A.M. the dank chill that
comes before the dawn does so most effectively. One old chief
turned up early out of the mist and dashed me a bottle of palm wine;
he says he wants to dash me a fowl, but I decline, and accept two
eggs, and give him four heads of tobacco.
The whole place is swathed in thick white mist through which my
audience arrive. But I am firm with them, and shut up the doors and
windows and disregard their bangings on them while I am dressing, or
rather re-dressing. The mission teachers get in with my tea, and
sit and smoke and spit while I have my breakfast. Give me cannibal
Fans!
It is pouring with rain again now, and we go down the steep hillock
to the path we came along yesterday, keep it until we come to where
the old path cuts it, and then turn up to the right following the
old path's course and leave Buana without a pang of regret. Our
road goes N.E. Oh, the mud of it! Not the clearish cascades of
yesterday but sticky, slippery mud, intensely sticky, and intensely
slippery. The narrow path which is filled by this, is V-shaped
underneath from wear, and I soon find the safest way is right
through the deepest mud in the middle.
The white mist shuts off all details beyond ten yards in any
direction. All we can see, as we first turn up the path, is a patch
of kokos of tremendous size on our right. After this comes weedy
plantation, and stretches of sword grass hanging across the road.
The country is even more unlevel than that we came over yesterday.
On we go, patiently doing our mud pulling through the valleys;
toiling up a hillside among lumps of rock and stretches of forest,
for we are now beyond Buana's plantations; and skirting the summit
of the hill only to descend into another valley. Evidently this is
a succession of foot-hills of the great mountain and we are not on
its true face yet. As we go on they become more and more abrupt in
form, the valleys mere narrow ravines. In the wet season (this is
only the tornado season) each of these valleys is occupied by a
raging torrent from the look of the confused water-worn boulders.
Now among the rocks there are only isolated pools, for the weather
for a fortnight before I left Victoria had been fairly dry, and this
rich porous soil soaks up an immense amount of water. It strikes me
as strange that when we are either going up or down the hills, the
ground is less muddy than when we are skirting their summits, but it
must be because on the inclines the rush of water clears the soil
away down to the bed rock. There is an outcrop of clay down by
Buana, but though that was slippery, it is nothing to the
slipperiness of this fine, soft, red-brown earth that is the soil
higher up, and also round Ambas Bay. This gets churned up into a
sort of batter where there is enough water lying on it, and, when
there is not, an ice slide is an infant to it.
My men and I flounder about; thrice one of them, load and all, goes
down with a squidge and a crash into the side grass, and says
"damn!" with quite the European accent; as a rule, however, we go on
in single file, my shoes giving out a mellifluous squidge, and their
naked feet a squish, squash. The men take it very good temperedly,
and sing in between accidents; I do not feel much like singing
myself, particularly at one awful spot, which was the exception to
the rule that ground at acute angles forms the best going. This
exception was a long slippery slide down into a ravine with a long,
perfectly glassy slope up out of it.
After this we have a stretch of rocky forest, and pass by a widening
in the path which I am told is a place where men blow, i.e. rest,
and then pass through another a little further on, which is Buea's
bush market. Then through an opening in the great war-hedge of
Buea, a growing stockade some fifteen feet high, the lower part of
it wattled.
At the sides of the path here grow banks of bergamot and balsam,
returning good for evil and smiling sweetly as we crush them. Thank
goodness we are in forest now, and we seem to have done with the
sword-grass. The rocks are covered with moss and ferns, and the
mist curling and wandering about among the stems is very lovely.
In our next ravine there is a succession of pools, part of a
mountain torrent of greater magnitude evidently than those we have
passed, and in these pools there are things swimming. Spend more
time catching them, with the assistance of Bum. I do not value
Kefalla's advice, ample though it is, as being of any real value in
the affair. Bag some water-spiders and two small fish. The heat is
less oppressive than yesterday. All yesterday one was being
alternately smothered in the valley and chilled on the hill-tops.
To-day it is a more level temperature, about 70 degrees, I fancy.
The soil up here, about 2,500 feet above sea-level, though rock-
laden is exceedingly rich, and the higher we go there is more
bergamot, native indigo, with its underleaf dark blue, and lovely
coleuses with red markings on their upper leaves, and crimson
linings.
