There Is An Outcrop Of Clay Down By
Buana, But Though That Was Slippery, It Is Nothing To The
Slipperiness Of This Fine, Soft, Red-Brown Earth That Is The Soil
Higher Up, And Also Round Ambas Bay.
This gets churned up into a
sort of batter where there is enough water lying on it, and, when
there is not, an ice slide is an infant to it.
My men and I flounder about; thrice one of them, load and all, goes
down with a squidge and a crash into the side grass, and says
"damn!" with quite the European accent; as a rule, however, we go on
in single file, my shoes giving out a mellifluous squidge, and their
naked feet a squish, squash. The men take it very good temperedly,
and sing in between accidents; I do not feel much like singing
myself, particularly at one awful spot, which was the exception to
the rule that ground at acute angles forms the best going. This
exception was a long slippery slide down into a ravine with a long,
perfectly glassy slope up out of it.
After this we have a stretch of rocky forest, and pass by a widening
in the path which I am told is a place where men blow, i.e. rest,
and then pass through another a little further on, which is Buea's
bush market. Then through an opening in the great war-hedge of
Buea, a growing stockade some fifteen feet high, the lower part of
it wattled.
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