I now find we have not a drop of water, either with us or in camp,
and now this hole has proved dry.
There is, says the sergeant, no
chance of getting any more water on this side of the mountain, save
down at the river at Buea.
This means failure unless tackled, and it is evidently a trick
played on me by the boys, who intentionally failed to let me know of
this want of water before leaving Buea, where it seems they have all
learnt it. I express my opinion of them in four words and send
Monrovia Boy, who I know is to be trusted, back to Buea with a
scribbled note to Herr Liebert asking him to send me up two
demijohns of water. I send cook with him as far as the camp in the
forest we have just left with orders to bring up three bottles of
soda water I have left there, and to instruct the men there that as
soon as the water arrives from Buea they are to bring it on up to
the camp I mean to make at the top of the wall.
The men are sulky, and Sasu, Peter, Kefalla, and Head man say they
will wait and come on as soon as cook brings the soda water, and I
go on, and presently see Xenia and Black boy are following me. We
get on to the intervening hillocks and commence to ascend the face
of the wall.
The angle of this wall is great, and its appearance from below is
impressive from its enormous breadth, and its abrupt rise without
bend or droop for a good 2,000 feet into the air. It is covered
with short, yellowish grass through which the burnt-up, scoriaceous
lava rock protrudes in rough masses.
I got on up the wall, which when you are on it is not so
perpendicular as it looks from below, my desire being to see what
sort of country there was on the top of it, between it and the final
peak. Sasu had reported to Herr Liebert that it was a wilderness of
rock, in which it would be impossible to fix a tent, and spoke
vaguely of caves. Here and there on the way up I come to holes,
similar to the one my men had been down for water. I suppose these
holes have been caused by gases from an under hot layer of lava
bursting up through the upper cool layer. As I get higher, the
grass becomes shorter and more sparse, and the rocks more
ostentatiously displayed. Here and there among them are sadly tried
bushes, bearing a beautiful yellow flower, like a large yellow wild
rose, only scentless. It is not a rose at all, I may remark. The
ground, where there is any basin made by the rocks, grows a great
sedum, with a grand head of whity-pink flower, also a tall herb,
with soft downy leaves silver grey in colour, and having a very
pleasant aromatic scent, and here and there patches of good honest
parsley.
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