Wish those men would leave off chattering.
Kefalla seems to know the worst about most of the people, black and
white, down in Ambas Bay, but I do not believe those last two
stories. Evidently great jokes in next room now; Kefalla has thrown
himself, still talking, in the dark, on to the top of one of the
mission teachers. The women of the village outside have been
keeping up, this hour and more, a most melancholy coo-ooing. Those
foolish creatures are evidently worrying about their husbands who
have gone down to market in Ambas Bay, and who, they think, are lost
in the bush. I have not a shadow of a doubt that those husbands who
are not home by now are safely drunk in town, or reposing on the
grand new road the kindly Government have provided for them, either
in one of the side drains, or tucked in among the lava rock.
September 21st. - Coo-ooing went on all night. I was aroused about
9.30 P.M., by uproar in adjacent hut: one husband had returned in a
bellicose condition and whacked his wives, and their squarks and
squalls, instead of acting as a warning to the other ladies,
stimulate the silly things to go on coo-ooing louder and more
entreatingly 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.
