My Experiences With Kruboys Would, If Written In Full, Make An
Excellent Manual For A New-Comer, But They Are Too Lengthy For This
Chapter.
My first experience with them on a small bush journey aged
me very much; and ever since I have shirked chaperoning Kruboys
about the West African bush among ticklish-tempered native gentlemen
and their forward hussies of wives.
I have always admired men for their strength, their courage, their
enterprise, their unceasing struggle for the beyond - the something
else, but not until I had to deal with Krumen did I realise the
vastness to which this latter characteristic of theirs could attain.
One might have been excused for thinking that a man without rates
and taxes, without pockets, and without the manifold, want-creating
culture of modern European civilisation and education would
necessarily have been bounded, to some extent, in his desires. But
one would have been wrong, profoundly wrong, in so thinking, for the
Kruman yearns after, and duns for, as many things for his body as
the lamented Faustus did for his soul, and away among the apes this
interesting creature would have to go, at once, if the wanting of
little were a crucial test for the determination of the family
termed by the scientific world the Hominidae. Later, when I got to
know the Krumen well, I learnt that they desired not only the vast
majority of the articles that they saw, but did more - obtained them-
-at all events some of them, without asking me for them; such
commodities, for example, as fowls, palm wine, old tins and bottles,
and other gentlemen's wives were never safe.
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