Over All
Was The Brooding Silence Of The Noonday Heat, Broken Only By The
Dulled Thunder Of The Surf.
After seeing these things we started down stairs, and on reaching
ground descended yet lower into a sort of stone-walled dry moat, out
of which opened clean, cool, cellar-like chambers tunnelled into the
earth.
These, I was informed, had also been constructed to keep
slaves in when they were the staple export of the Gold Coast. They
were so refreshingly cool that I lingered looking at them and their
massive doors, ere being marched up to ground level again, and down
the hill through some singularly awful stenches, mostly arising from
rubber, into the big Wesleyan church in the middle of the town. It
is a building in the terrible Africo-Gothic style, but it compares
most favourably with the cathedral at Sierra Leone, particularly
internally, wherein, indeed, it far surpasses that structure. And
then we returned to the Mission House and spent a very pleasant
evening, save for the knowledge (which amounted in me to remorse)
that, had it not been for my edification, not one of my friends
would have spent the day toiling about the town they know only too
well. The Wesleyan Mission on the Gold Coast, of which Mr. Dennis
Kemp was at that time chairman, is the largest and most influential
Protestant mission on the West Coast of Africa, and it is now, I am
glad to say, adding a technical department to its scholastic and
religious one. The Basel Mission has done a great deal of good work
in giving technical instruction to the natives, and practically
started this most important branch of their education. There is
still an almost infinite amount of this work to be done, the African
being so strangely deficient in mechanical culture; infinitely more
so, indeed, in this than in any other particular.
After leaving Cape Coast our next port was Accra which is one of the
five West Coast towns that look well from the sea. The others don't
look well from anywhere. First in order of beauty comes San Paul de
Loanda; then Cape Coast with its satellite Elmina, then Gaboon, then
Accra with its satellite Christiansborg, and lastly, Sierra Leone.
What there is of beauty in Accra is oriental in type. Seen from the
sea, Fort St. James on the left and Christiansborg Castle on the
right, both almost on shore level, give, with an outcrop of sandy
dwarf cliffs, a certain air of balance and strength to the town,
though but for these and the two old castles, Accra would be but a
poor place and a flimsy, for the rest of it is a mass of rubbishy
mud and palm-leaf huts, and corrugated iron dwellings for the
Europeans.
Corrugated iron is my abomination. I quite understand it has
points, and I do not attack from an aesthetic standpoint. It really
looks well enough when it is painted white. There is, close to
Christiansborg Castle, a patch of bungalows and offices for
officialdom and wife that from a distance in the hard bright
sunshine looks like an encampment of snow-white tents among the coco
palms, and pretty enough withal.
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