Bright Blue, Flannelly-Looking Flowers Stud The Grass In
Sheltered Places And A Very Pretty Large Green Orchid Is Plentiful.
Above Us Is A Bright Blue Sky With White Cloud Rushing Hurriedly
Across It To The N.E. And A Fierce Sun.
When I am about half-way
up, I think of those boys, and, wanting rest, sit down by an
inviting-looking rock grotto, with a patch of the yellow flowered
shrub growing on its top.
Inside it grow little ferns and mosses,
all damp; but alas! no water pool, and very badly I want water by
this time.
Below me a belt of white cloud had now formed, so that I could see
neither the foot-hillocks nor the forest, and presently out of this
mist came Xenia toiling up, carrying my black bag. "Where them
Black boy live?" said I. "Black boy say him foot be tire too much,"
said Xenia, as he threw himself down in the little shade the rock
could give. I took a cupful of sour claret out of the bottle in the
bag, and told Xenia to come on up as soon as he was rested, and
meanwhile to yell to the others down below and tell them to come on.
Xenia did, but sadly observed, "softly softly still hurts the
snail," and I left him and went on up the mountain.
When I had got to the top of the rock under which I had sheltered
from the blazing sun, the mist opened a little, and I saw my men
looking like so many little dolls. They were still sitting on the
hillock where I had left them. Buea showed from this elevation
well. The guard house and the mission house, like little houses in
a picture, and the make of the ground on which Buea station stands,
came out distinctly as a ledge or terrace, extending for miles
N.N.E. and S.S.W. This ledge is a strange-looking piece of country,
covered with low bush, out of which rise great, isolated, white-
stemmed cotton trees. Below, and beyond this is a denser band of
high forest, and again below this stretches the vast mangrove-swamp
fringing the estuary of the Cameroons, Mungo, and Bimbia rivers. It
is a very noble view, giving one an example of the peculiar beauty
one oft-times gets in this West African scenery, namely colossal
sweeps of colour. The mangrove-swamps looked to-day like a vast
damson-coloured carpet threaded with silver where the waterways ran.
It reminded me of a scene I saw once near Cabinda, when on climbing
to the top of a hill I suddenly found myself looking down on a sheet
of violet pink more than a mile long and half a mile wide. This was
caused by a climbing plant having taken possession of a valley full
of trees, whose tops it had reached and then spread and interlaced
itself over them, to burst into profuse glorious laburnum-shaped
bunches of flowers.
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