The Water Has Simply Streamed
Down It, And Formed A Nice Little Pool In A Rocky Hollow Where I
Keep
My feet, and I am chilled to the innermost bone, so have to
scramble up and drag my box to
The side of Kefalla and Xenia's fire,
feeling sure I have contracted a fatal chill this time. I scrape
the ashes out of the fire into a heap, and put my sodden boots into
them, and they hiss merrily, and I resolve not to go to sleep again.
5 A.M. - Have been to sleep twice, and have fallen off my box bodily
into the fire in my wet blankets, and should for sure have put it
out like a bucket of cold water had not Xenia and Kefalla been
roused up by the smother I occasioned and rescued me - or the fire.
It is not raining now, but it is bitter cold and Cook is getting my
tea. I give the boys a lot of hot tea with a big handful of sugar
in, and they then get their own food hot.
CHAPTER XX. THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS - (continued).
Setting forth how the Voyager attains the summit of Mungo Mah Lobeh,
and descends therefrom to Victoria, to which is added some remarks
on the natural history of the West Coast porter, and the native
methods of making fire.
September 26th. - The weather is undecided and so am I, for I feel
doubtful about going on in this weather, but I do not like to give
up the peak after going through so much for it. The boys being dry
and warm with the fires have forgotten their troubles. However, I
settle in my mind to keep on, and ask for volunteers to come with
me, and Bum, the head man, and Xenia announce their willingness. I
put two tins of meat and a bottle of Herr Liebert's beer into the
little wooden box, and insist on both men taking a blanket apiece,
much to their disgust, and before six o'clock we are off over the
crater plain. It is a broken bit of country with rock mounds
sparsely overgrown with tufts of grass, and here and there are
patches of boggy land, not real bog, but damp places where grow
little clumps of rushes, and here and there among the rocks sorely-
afflicted shrubs of broom, and the yellow-flowered shrub I have
mentioned before, and quantities of very sticky heather, feeling
when you catch hold of it as if it had been covered with syrup. One
might fancy the entire race of shrubs was dying out; for one you see
partially alive there are twenty skeletons which fall to pieces as
you brush past them.
It is downhill the first part of the way, that is to say, the trend
of the land is downhill, for be it down or up, the details of it are
rugged mounds and masses of burnt-out lava rock. It is evil going,
but perhaps not quite so evil as the lower hillocks of the great
wall where the rocks are hidden beneath long slippery grass.
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