After All The Rain We Have Had, The Road Was Of Course Worse Than
Ever, And As We Were Going
Through the forest towards the war hedge,
I noticed a strange sound, a dull roar which made the light friable
Earth quiver under our feet, and I remembered with alarm the
accounts Herr Liebert has given me of the strange ways of rivers on
this mountain; how by Buea, about 200 metres below where you cross
it, the river goes bodily down a hole. How there is a waterfall on
the south face of the mountain that falls right into another hole,
and is never seen again, any more than the Buea River is. How there
are in certain places underground rivers, which though never seen
can be heard roaring, and felt in the quivering earth under foot in
the wet season, and so on. So I judged our present roar arose from
some such phenomenon, and with feminine nervousness began to fear
that the rotten water-logged earth we were on might give way, and
engulf the whole of us, and we should never be seen again. But when
we got down into our next ravine, the one where I got the fish and
water-spiders on our way up, things explained themselves. The bed
of this ravine was occupied by a raging torrent of great beauty, but
alarming appearance to a person desirous of getting across to the
other side of it. On our right hand was a waterfall of tons of
water thirty feet high or so. The brown water wreathed with foam
dashed down into the swirling pool we faced, and at the other edge
of the pool, striking a ridge of higher rock, it flew up in a lovely
flange some twelve feet or so high, before making another and a
deeper spring to form a second waterfall. My men shouted to me
above the roar that it was "a bad place." They never give me half
the credit I deserve for seeing danger, and they said, "Water all go
for hole down there, we fit to go too suppose we fall." "Don't
fall," I yelled which was the only good advice I could think of to
give them just then.
Each small load had to be carried across by two men along a
submerged ridge in the pool, where the water was only breast high.
I had all I could do to get through it, though assisted by my
invaluable Bakwiri staff. But no harm befell. Indeed we were all
the better for it, or at all events cleaner. We met five torrents
that had to be waded during the day; none so bad as the first but
all superbly beautiful.
When we turned our faces westwards just above the wood we had to
pass through before getting into the great road, the view of
Victoria, among its hills, and fronted by its bay, was divinely
lovely and glorious with colour. I left the boys here, as they
wanted to rest, and to hunt up water, etc., among the little cluster
of huts that are here on the right-hand side of the path, and I went
on alone down through the wood, and out on to the road, where I
found my friend, the Alsatian engineer, still flourishing and busy
with his cheery gang of woodcutters.
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