The
way their young fronds come up with a graceful curl, like the top of
a bishop's staff, is a poem; but being at present fractious, I will
observe that they are covered with horrid spines, as most young
vegetables are in Africa. But talking about spines, I should remark
that nothing save that precious climbing palm - I never like to say
what I feel about climbing palms, because one once saved my life -
equals the strong bush rope which abounds here. It is covered with
short, strong, curved thorns. It creeps along concealed by
decorative vegetation, and you get your legs twined in it, and of
course injured. It festoons itself from tree to tree, and when your
mind is set on other things, catches you under the chin, and gives
you the appearance of having made a determined but ineffectual
attempt to cut your throat with a saw. It whisks your hat off and
grabs your clothes, and commits other iniquities too numerous to
catalogue here. Years and years that bush rope will wait for a
man's blood, and when he comes within reach it will have it.
We are well down now among the tree-stems grown over with rich soft
green moss and delicate filmy-ferns. I should think that for a
botanist these south-eastern slopes of Mungo Mah Lobeh would be the
happiest hunting grounds in all West Africa.
The vegetation here is at the point of its supreme luxuriance, owing
to the richness of the soil; the leaves of trees and plants I
recognise as having seen elsewhere are here far larger, and the
undergrowth particularly is more rich and varied, far and away.
Ferns seem to find here a veritable paradise. Everything, in fact,
is growing at its best.
We come to another fallen tree over another hole; this tree we
recognise as an old acquaintance near Buea, and I feel disgusted,
for I had put on a clean blouse, and washed my hands in a tea-cupful
of water in a cooking pot before leaving the forest camp, so as to
look presentable on reaching Buea, and not give Herr Liebert the
same trouble he had to recognise the white from the black members of
the party that he said he had with the members of the first
expedition to the peak; and all I have got to show for my exertion
that is clean or anything like dry is one cuff over which I have
been carrying a shawl.
We double round a corner by the stockade of the station's
plantation, and are at the top of the mud glissade - the new
Government path, I should say - that leads down into the barrack-
yard.
