"The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside."
Only she was a young and inefficient moon, and although we were
below the thickest of the mist band, it was dark. Finding our own
particular hole in the forest wall was about as easy as finding "one
particular rabbit hole in an unknown hay-field in the dark," and the
attempt to do so afforded us a great deal of varied exercise. I am
obliged to be guarded in my language, because my feelings now are
only down to one degree below boiling point. The rain now began to
fall, thank goodness, and I drew the thick ears of grass through my
parched lips as I stumbled along over the rugged lumps of rock
hidden under the now waist-high jungle grass.
Our camp hole was pretty easily distinguishable by daylight, for it
was on the left-hand side of one of the forest tongues, the grass
land running down like a lane between two tongues here, and just
over the entrance three conspicuously high trees showed. But we
could not see these "picking-up" points in the darkness, so I had to
keep getting Xenia to strike matches, and hold them in his hat while
I looked at the compass. Presently we came full tilt up against a
belt of trees which I knew from these compass observations was our
tongue of forest belt, and I fired a couple of revolver shots into
it, whereabouts I judged our camp to be.
This was instantly answered by a yell from human voices in chorus,
and towards that yell in a slightly amiable - a very slightly
amiable - state of mind I went.
I will draw a veil over the scene, particularly over my observations
to those men. They did not attempt to deny their desertion, but
they attempted to explain it, each one saying that it was not he but
the other boy who "got fright too much."
I closed the palaver promptly with a brief but lurid sketch of my
opinion on the situation, and ordered food, for not having had a
thing save that cup of sour claret since 6.30 A.M., and it being now
11 P.M., I felt sinkings. Then arose another beautiful situation
before me. It seems when Cook and Monrovia got back into camp this
morning Master Cook was seized with one of those attacks of a desire
to manage things that produce such awful results in the African
servant, and sent all the beef and rice down to Buea to be cooked,
because there was no water here to cook it.
