Up This Lane I Went To The Very Top Of The Mountain Wall, And Then,
To My Surprise, Found Myself
Facing a great, hillocky, rock-
encumbered plain, across the other side of which rose the mass of
the peak itself,
Not as a single cone, but as a wall surmounted by
several, three being evidently the highest among them.
I started along the ridge of my wall, and went to its highest part,
that to the S.W., intending to see what I could of the view towards
the sea, and then to choose a place for camping in for the night.
When I reached the S.W. end, looking westwards I saw the South
Atlantic down below, like a plain of frosted silver. Out of it,
barely twenty miles away, rose Fernando Po to its 10,190 feet with
that majestic grace peculiar to a volcanic island. Immediately
below me, some 10,000 feet or so, lay Victoria with the forested
foot-hills of Mungo Mah Lobeh encircling it as a diadem, and Ambas
Bay gemmed with rocky islands lying before it. On my left away S.E.
was the glorious stretch of the Cameroon estuary, with a line of
white cloud lying very neatly along the course of Cameroon River.
In one of the chasms of the mountain wall that I had come up - in the
one furthest to the north - there was a thunderstorm brewing,
seemingly hanging on to, or streaming out of the mountain side, a
soft billowy mass of dense cream-coloured cloud, with flashes of
golden lightnings playing about in it with soft growls of thunder.
Surely Mungo Mah Lobeh himself, of all the thousands he annually
turns out, never made one more lovely than this. Soon the white
mists rose from the mangrove-swamp, and grew rose-colour in the
light of the setting sun, as they swept upwards over the now purple
high forests. In the heavens, to the north, there was a rainbow,
vivid in colour, one arch of it going behind the peak, the other
sinking into the mist sea below, and this mist sea rose and rose
towards me, turning from pale rose-colour to lavender, and where the
shadow of Mungo lay across it, to a dull leaden grey. It was soon
at my feet, blotting the under-world out, and soon came flowing over
the wall top at its lowest parts, stretching in great spreading
rivers over the crater plain, and then these coalescing everything
was shut out save the two summits: that of Cameroon close to me,
and that of Clarence away on Fernando Po. These two stood out
alone, like great island masses made of iron rising from a formless,
silken sea.
The space around seemed boundless, and there was in it neither sound
nor colour, nor anything with form, save those two terrific things.
It was like a vision, and it held me spell-bound, as I stood
shivering on the rocks with the white mist round my knees until into
my wool-gathering mind came the memory of those anything but sublime
men of mine; and I turned and scuttled off along the rocks like an
agitated ant left alone in a dead Universe.
I soon found the place where I had come up into the crater plain and
went down over the wall, descending with twice the rapidity, but ten
times the scratches and grazes, of the ascent.
I picked up the place where I had left Xenia, but no Xenia was
there, nor came there any answer to my bush call for him, so on I
went down towards the place where, hours ago, I had left the men.
The mist was denser down below, but to my joy it was warmer than on
the summit of the wind-swept wall.
I had nearly reached the foot of this wall and made my mind up to
turn in for the night under a rock, when I heard a melancholy croak
away in the mist to the left. I went towards it and found Xenia
lost on his own account, and distinctly quaint in manner, and then I
recollected that I had been warned Xenia is slightly crazy. Nice
situation this: a madman on a mountain in the mist. Xenia, I
found, had no longer got my black bag, but in its place a lid of a
saucepan and an empty lantern. To put it mildly, this is not the
sort of outfit the R.G.S. Hints to Travellers would recommend for
African exploration. Xenia reported that he gave the bag to Black
boy, who shortly afterwards disappeared, and that he had neither
seen him nor any of the others since, and didn't expect to this side
of Srahmandazi. In a homicidal state of mind, I made tracks for the
missing ones followed by Xenia. I thought mayhap they had grown on
to the rocks they had sat upon so long, but presently, just before
it became quite dark, we picked up the place we had left them in and
found there only an empty soda-water bottle. Xenia poured out a
muddled mass of observations to the effect that "they got fright too
much about them water palaver."
I did not linger to raise a monument to them, but I said I wished
they were in a condition to require one, and we went on over our
hillocks with more confidence now that we knew we had stuck well to
our unmarked track.
"The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside."
Only she was a young and inefficient moon, and although we were
below the thickest of the mist band, it was dark. Finding our own
particular hole in the forest wall was about as easy as finding "one
particular rabbit hole in an unknown hay-field in the dark," and the
attempt to do so afforded us a great deal of varied exercise.
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