And At Accra, After I Left It, And All Along The
Gold Coast, Came One Of Those Dreadful Epidemic Outbursts Sweeping
Away More Than Half The White Population In A Few Weeks.
But to return to our state journey along the Christiansborg road.
We soon reached the castle, an exceedingly roomy and solid edifice
built by the Danes, and far better fitted for the climate than our
modern dwellings, in spite of our supposed advance in tropical
hygiene.
We entered by the sentry-guarded great gate into the
courtyard; on the right hand were the rest of the guard; most of
them asleep on their mats, but a few busy saying Dhikr, etc.,
towards Mecca, like the good Mohammedans these Haussas are, others
winding themselves into their cummerbunds. On the left hand was Sir
Brandford Griffiths' hobby - a choice and select little garden, of
lovely eucharis lilies mostly in tubs, and rare and beautiful
flowers brought by him from his Barbadian home; while shading it and
the courtyard was a fine specimen of that superb thing of beauty - a
flamboyant tree - glorious with its delicate-green acacia-like leaves
and vermilion and yellow flowers, and astonishing with its vast
beans. A flight of stone stairs leads from the courtyard to the
upper part of the castle where the living rooms are, over the
extensive series of cool tunnel-like slave barracoons, now used as
store chambers. The upper rooms are high and large, and full of a
soft pleasant light and the thunder of the everlasting surf breaking
on the rocky spit on which the castle is built.
From the day the castle was built, now more than a hundred years
ago, the surf spray has been swept by the on-shore evening breeze
into every chink and cranny of the whole building, and hence the
place is mouldy - mouldy to an extent I, with all my experience in
that paradise for mould, West Africa, have never elsewhere seen.
The matting on the floors took an impression of your foot as a light
snowfall would. Beneath articles of furniture the cryptogams
attained a size more in keeping with the coal period than with the
nineteenth century.
The Gold Coast is one of the few places in West Africa that I have
never felt it my solemn duty to go and fish in. I really cannot say
why. Seen from the sea it is a pleasant looking land. The long
lines of yellow, sandy beach backed by an almost continuous line of
blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach, in other
places show in the dim distance. It is hard to think that it is so
unhealthy as it is, from just seeing it as you pass by. It has high
land and has not those great masses of mangrove-swamp one usually,
at first, associates with a bad fever district, but which prove on
acquaintance to be at any rate no worse than this well-elevated
open-forested Gold Coast land.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 22 of 371
Words from 10937 to 11441
of 194943