Suddenly, Right Up Out Of The Sea, Rises The
Great Mountain To Its 13,760 Feet, While Close At Hand, To Westward,
Towers The Lovely Island Mass Of Fernando Po To 10,190 Feet.
But
every time you pass it by its beauty grows on you with greater and
greater force, though it is never twice the same.
Sometimes it is
wreathed with indigo-black tornado clouds, sometimes crested with
snow, sometimes softly gorgeous with gold, green, and rose-coloured
vapours tinted by the setting sun, sometimes completely swathed in
dense cloud so that you cannot see it at all; but when you once know
it is there it is all the same, and you bow down and worship.
There are only two distinct peaks to this glorious thing that
geologists brutally call the volcanic intrusive mass of the Cameroon
Mountains, viz., Big Cameroon and Little Cameroon. The latter,
Mungo Mah Etindeh, has not yet been scaled, although it is only
5,820 feet. One reason for this is doubtless that the few people in
fever-stricken, over-worked West Africa who are able to go up
mountains, naturally try for the adjacent Big Cameroon; the other
reason is that Mungo Mah Etindeh, to which Burton refers as "the
awful form of Little Cameroon," is mostly sheer cliff, and is from
foot to summit clothed in an almost impenetrable forest. Behind
these two mountains of volcanic origin, which cover an area on an
isolated base of between 700 and 800 square miles in extent, there
are distinctly visible from the coast two chains of mountains, or I
should think one chain deflected, the so-called Rumby and Omon
ranges. These are no relations of Mungo, being of very different
structure and conformation; the geological specimens I have brought
from them and from the Cameroons being identified by geologists as
respectively schistose grit and vesicular lava.
After spending a few pleasant days in Cameroon River in the society
of Frau Plehn, my poor friend Mrs. Duggan having, I regret to say,
departed for England on the death of her husband, I went round to
Victoria, Ambas Bay, on the Niger, and in spite of being advised
solemnly by Captain Davies to "chuck it as it was not a picnic," I
started to attempt the Peak of Cameroons as follows.
September 20th, 1895. - Left Victoria at 7.30, weather fine. Herr
von Lucke, though sadly convinced, by a series of experiments he has
been carrying on ever since I landed, and I expect before, that you
cannot be in three places at one time, is still trying to do so; or
more properly speaking he starts an experiment series for four
places, man-like, instead of getting ill as I should under the
circumstances, and he kindly comes with me as far as the bridge
across the lovely cascading Lukole River, and then goes back at
about seven miles an hour to look after Victoria and his sick
subordinates in detail.
I, with my crew, keep on up the grand new road the Government is
making, which when finished is to go from Ambas Bay to Buea, 3,000
feet up on the mountain's side.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 274 of 371
Words from 143595 to 144127
of 194943