Beneath Articles Of Furniture The Cryptogams
Attained A Size More In Keeping With The Coal Period Than With The
Nineteenth Century.
The Gold Coast is one of the few places in West Africa that I have
never felt it my solemn duty to go and fish in.
I really cannot say
why. Seen from the sea it is a pleasant looking land. The long
lines of yellow, sandy beach backed by an almost continuous line of
blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach, in other
places show in the dim distance. It is hard to think that it is so
unhealthy as it is, from just seeing it as you pass by. It has high
land and has not those great masses of mangrove-swamp one usually,
at first, associates with a bad fever district, but which prove on
acquaintance to be at any rate no worse than this well-elevated
open-forested Gold Coast land. There are many things to be had here
and in Lagos which tend to make life more tolerable, that you cannot
have elsewhere until you are south of the Congo. Horses, for
example, do fairly well at Accra, though some twelve miles or so
behind the town there is a belt of tsetse fly, specimens of which I
have procured and had identified at the British Museum, and it is
certain death to a horse, I am told, to take it to Aburi.
The food-supply, although bad and dear, is superior to that you get
down south.
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