Then He Did Believe, All In One Awful Lump,
All The Stories He Had Been Told, And Added To Their Horrors A Few
Original Conceptions Of Death And Purgatory, And A Lot Of
Transparent Semi-Formed Images Of His Own Delirium.
Fortunately
both prophecy and personal conviction alike miscarried, and the
Governor returned from the jaws of death.
But without a moment's
delay he withdrew from the Port of Clarence and went up the mountain
to Basile, which is in the neighbourhood of the highest native
village, where he built himself a house, and around it a little
village of homes for the most unfortunate set of human beings I have
ever laid eye on. They are the remnant of a set of Spanish
colonists, who had been located at some spot in the Spanish
possessions in Morocco, and finding that place unfit to support
human life, petitioned the Government to remove them and let them
try colonising elsewhere.
The Spanish Government just then had one of its occasional fits of
interest in Fernando Po, and so shipped them here, and the Governor,
a most kindly and generous man, who would have been a credit to any
country, established them and their families around him at Basile,
to share with him the advantages of the superior elevation;
advantages he profoundly believed in, and which he has always placed
at the disposal of any sick white man on the island, of whatsoever
nationality or religion. Undoubtedly the fever is not so severe at
Basile as in the lowlands, but there are here the usual drawbacks to
West African high land, namely an over supply of rain, and equally
saturating mists, to say nothing of sudden and extreme alternations
of temperature, and so the colonists still fall off, and their
children die continuously from the various entozoa which abound upon
the island.
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