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Travels in West Africa

<h2>CHAPTER XX.  THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS - (continued).</h2> Setting forth how the Voyager attains the summit of Mungo Mah Lobeh, and descends therefrom to Victoria, to which is added some remarks on the natural history of the West Coast porter, and the native methods of making fire. September 26th. - The weather is undecided and so am I, for I feel doubtful about going on in this weather, but I do not like to give up the peak after going through so much for it.  The boys being dry and warm with the fires have forgotten their troubles.  However, I settle in my mind to keep on, and ask for volunteers to come with me, and Bum, the head man, and Xenia announce their willingness.  I put two tins of meat and a bottle of Herr Liebert’s beer into the little wooden box, and insist on both men taking a blanket apiece, much to their disgust, and before six o’clock we are off over the crater plain.  It is a broken bit of country with rock mounds sparsely overgrown with tufts of grass, and here and there are patches of boggy land, not real bog, but damp places where grow little clumps of rushes, and here and there among the rocks sorely-afflicted shrubs of broom, and the yellow-flowered shrub I have mentioned before, and quantities of very sticky heather, feeling when you catch hold of it as if it had been covered with syrup.  One might fancy the entire race of shrubs was dying out; for one you see partially alive there are twenty skeletons which fall to pieces as you brush past them. It is downhill the first part of the way, that is to say, the trend of the land is downhill, for be it down or up, the details of it are rugged mounds and masses of burnt-out lava rock.  It is evil going, but perhaps not quite so evil as the lower hillocks of the great wall where the rocks are hidden beneath long slippery grass.  We wind our way in between the mounds, or clamber over them, or scramble along their sides impartially.  The general level is then flat, and then comes a rise towards the peak wall, so we steer N.N.E. until we strike the face of the peak, and then commence a stiff rough climb. We keep as straight as we can, but get driven at an angle by the strange ribs of rock which come straight down.  These are most tiresome to deal with, getting worse the higher we go, and so rotten and weather-eaten are they that they crumble into dust and fragments under our feet.  Head man gets half a dozen falls, and when we are about three parts of the way up Xenia gives in.  The cold and the climbing are too much for him, so I make him wrap himself up in his blanket, which he is glad enough of now, and shelter in a depression under one of the many rock ridges, and Head man and I go on.  When we are some 600 feet higher the iron-grey mist comes curling and waving round the rocks above us, like some savage monster defending them from intruders, and I again debate whether I was justified in risking the men, for it is a risk for them at this low temperature, with the evil weather I know, and they do not know, is coming on.  But still we have food and blankets with us enough for them, and the camp in the plain below they can reach all right, if the worst comes to the worst; and for myself - well - that’s my own affair, and no one will be a ha’porth the worse if I am dead in an hour.  So I hitch myself on to the rocks, and take bearings, particularly bearings of Xenia’s position, who, I should say, has got a tin of meat and a flask of rum with him, and then turn and face the threatening mist.  It rises and falls, and sends out arm-like streams towards us, and then Bum, the head man, decides to fail for the third time to reach the peak, and I leave him wrapped in his blanket with the bag of provisions, and go on alone into the wild, grey, shifting, whirling mist above, and soon find myself at the head of a rock ridge in a narrowish depression, walled by massive black walls which show fitfully but firmly through the mist. I can see three distinctly high cones before me, and then the mist, finding it cannot drive me back easily, proceeds to desperate methods, and lashes out with a burst of bitter wind, and a sheet of blinding, stinging rain.  I make my way up through it towards a peak which I soon see through a tear in the mist is not the highest, so I angle off and go up the one to the left, and after a desperate fight reach the cairn - only, alas! to find a hurricane raging and a fog in full possession, and not a ten yards’ view to be had in any direction.  Near the cairn on the ground are several bottles, some of which the energetic German officers, I suppose, had emptied in honour of their achievement, an achievement I bow down before, for their pluck and strength had taken them here in a shorter time by far than mine.  I do not meddle with anything, save to take a few specimens and to put a few more rocks on the cairn, and to put in among them my card, merely as a civility to Mungo, a civility his Majesty will soon turn into pulp.  Not that it matters - what is done is done. The weather grows worse every minute, and no sign of any clearing shows in the indigo sky or the wind-reft mist.  The rain lashes so fiercely I cannot turn my face to it and breathe, the wind is all I can do to stand up against. Verily I am no mountaineer, for there is in me no exultation, but only a deep disgust because the weather has robbed me of my main object in coming here, namely to get a good view and an idea of the way the unexplored mountain range behind Calabar trends.  I took my chance and it failed, so there’s nothing to complain about. Comforting myself with these reflections, I start down to find Bum, and do so neatly, and then together we scramble down carefully among the rotten black rocks, intent on finding Xenia.  The scene is very grand.  At one minute we can see nothing save the black rocks and cinders under foot; the next the wind-torn mist separates now in one direction, now in another, showing us always the same wild scene of great black cliffs, rising in jagged peaks and walls around and above us.  I think this walled cauldron we had just left is really the highest crater on Mungo. {439} We soon become anxious about Xenia, for this is a fearfully easy place to lose a man in such weather, but just as we get below the thickest part of the pall of mist, I observe a doll-sized figure, standing on one leg taking on or off its trousers - our lost Xenia, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and we go down direct to him. When we reach him we halt, and I give the two men one of the tins of meat, and take another and the bottle of beer myself, and then make a hasty sketch of the great crater plain below us.  At the further edge of the plain a great white cloud is coming up from below, which argues badly for our trip down the great wall to the forest camp, which I am anxious to reach before nightfall after our experience of the accommodation afforded by our camp in the crater plain last night. While I am sitting waiting for the men to finish their meal, I feel a chill at my back, as if some cold thing had settled there, and turning round, see the mist from the summit above coming in a wall down towards us.  These mists up here, as far as my experience goes, are always preceded by a strange breath of ice-cold air - not necessarily a wind. Bum then draws my attention to a strange funnel-shaped thing coming down from the clouds to the north.  A big waterspout, I presume: it seems to be moving rapidly N.E., and I profoundly hope it will hold that course, for we have quite as much as we can manage with the ordinary rain-water supply on this mountain, without having waterspouts to deal with. We start off down the mountain as rapidly as we can.  Xenia is very done up, and Head man comes perilously near breaking his neck by frequent falls among the rocks; my unlucky boots are cut through and through by the latter.  When we get down towards the big crater plain, it is a race between us and the pursuing mist as to who shall reach the camp first, and the mist wins, but we have just time to make out the camp’s exact position before it closes round us, so we reach it without any real difficulty.  When we get there, about one o’clock, I find the men have kept the fires alight and Cook is asleep before one of them with another conflagration smouldering in his hair.  I get him to make me tea, while the others pack up as quickly as possible, and by two we are all off on our way down to the forest camp. The boys are nervous in their way of going down over the mountain wall.  The misadventures of Cook alone would fill volumes.  Monrovia boy is out and away the best man at this work.  Just as we reach the high jungle grass, down comes the rain and up comes the mist, and we have the worst time we have had during our whole trip, in our endeavours to find the hole in the forest that leads to our old camp. Unfortunately, I must needs go in for acrobatic performances on the top of one of the highest, rockiest hillocks.  Poising myself on one leg I take a rapid slide sideways, ending in a very showy leap backwards which lands me on the top of the lantern I am carrying to-day, among miscellaneous rocks.  There being fifteen feet or so of jungle grass above me, all the dash and beauty of my performance are as much thrown away as I am, for my boys are too busy on their own accounts in the mist to miss me.  After resting some little time as I fell, and making and unmaking the idea in my mind that I am killed, I get up, clamber elaborately to the top of the next hillock, and shout for the boys, and “Ma,” “ma,” comes back from my flock from various points out of the fog.  I find Bum and Monrovia boy, and learn that during my absence Xenia, who always fancies himself as a path-finder, has taken the lead, and gone off somewhere with the rest.  We shout and the others answer, and we join them, and it soon becomes evident to the meanest intelligence that Xenia had better have spent his time attending to those things of his instead of going in for guiding, for we are now right off the track we made through the grass on our up journey, and we proceed to have a cheerful hour or so in the wet jungle, ploughing hither and thither, trying to find our way. At last we pick up the top of a tongue of forest that we all feel is ours, but we - that is to say, Xenia and I, for the others go like lambs to the slaughter wherever they are led - disagree as to the path.  He wants to go down one side of the tongue, I to go down the other, and I have my way, and we wade along, skirting the bushes that fringe it, trying to find our hole.  I own I soon begin to feel shaky about having been right in the affair, but soon Xenia, who is leading, shouts he has got it, and we limp in, our feet sore with rugged rocks, and everything we have on, or in the loads, wringing wet, save the matches, which providentially I had put into my soap-box. Anything more dismal than the look of that desired camp when we reach it, I never saw.  Pools of water everywhere.  The fire-house a limp ruin, the camp bed I have been thinking fondly of for the past hour a water cistern.  I tilt the water out of it, and say a few words to it regarding its hide-bound idiocy in obeying its military instructions to be waterproof; and then, while the others are putting up the fire-house, Head man and I get out the hidden demijohn of rum, and the beef and rice, and I serve out a tot of rum each to the boys, who are shivering dreadfully, waiting for Cook to get the fire.  He soon does this, and then I have my hot tea and the men their hot food, for now we have returned to the luxury of two cooking pots. Their education in bush is evidently progressing, for they make themselves a big screen with boughs and spare blankets, between the wind and the fire-house, and I get Xenia to cut some branches, and place them on the top of my waterproof sheet shelter, and we are fairly comfortable again, and the boys quite merry and very well satisfied with themselves. Unfortunately the subject of their nightly debating society is human conduct, a subject ever fraught with dangerous elements of differences of opinion.  They are busy discussing, with their mouths full of rice and beef, the conduct of an absent friend, who it seems is generally regarded by them as a spendthrift.  “He gets plenty money, but he no have none no time.”  “He go frow it away - on woman, and drink.”  “He no buy clothes.”  This last is evidently a very heavy accusation, but Kefalla says, “What can a man buy with money better than them thing he like best?” There is a very peculiar look on the rotten wood on the ground round here; to-night it has patches and flecks of iridescence like one sees on herrings or mackerel that have been kept too long.  The appearance of this strange eerie light in among the bush is very weird and charming.  I have seen it before in dark forests at night, but never so much of it. September 27th. - Fine morning.  It’s a blessing my Pappenheimers have not recognised what this means for the afternoon.  We take things very leisurely.  I know it’s no good hurrying, we are dead sure of getting a ducking before we reach Buea anyhow, so we may as well enjoy ourselves while we can. I ask my boys how they would “make fire suppose no matches live.”  Not one of them thinks it possible to do so, “it pass man to do them thing suppose he no got live stick or matches.”  They are coast boys, all of them, and therefore used to luxury, but it is really remarkable how widely diffused matches are inland, and how very dependent on them these natives are.  When I have been away in districts where they have not penetrated, it is exceedingly rarely that the making of fire has to be resorted to.  I think I may say that in most African villages it has not had to be done for years and years, because when a woman’s fire has gone out, owing to her having been out at work all day, she just runs into some neighbour’s hut where there is a fire burning, and gives compliments, and picks up a burning stick from the fire and runs home.  From this comes the compliment, equivalent to our “Oh! don’t go away yet,” of “You come to fetch fire.”  This will be said to you all the way from Sierra Leone to Loanda, as far as I know, if you have been making yourself agreeable in an African home, even if the process may have extended over a day or so.  The hunters, like the Fans, have to make fire, and do it now with a flint and steel; but in districts where their tutor in this method - the flint-lock gun - is not available, they will do it with two sticks, not always like the American Indians’ fire-sticks.  One stick is placed horizontally on the ground and the other twirled rapidly between the palms of the hands, but sometimes two bits of palm stick are worked in a hole in a bigger bit of wood, the hole stuffed round with the pith of a tree or with silk cotton fluff, and the two sticks rotated vigorously.  Again, on one occasion I saw a Bakele woman make fire by means of a slip of rafia palm drawn very rapidly, to and fro, across a notch in another piece of rafia wood.  In most domesticated tribes, like the Effiks or the Igalwa, if they are going out to their plantation, they will enclose a live stick in a hollow piece of a certain sort of wood, which has a lining of its interior pith left in it, and they will carry this “fire box” with them.  Or if they are going on a long canoe journey, there is always the fire in the bow of the canoe put into a calabash full of sand, or failing that, into a bed of clay with a sand rim round it. By 10 o’clock we are off down to Buea.  At 10.15 it pours as it can here; by 10.17 we are all in our normal condition of bedraggled saturation, and plodding down carefully and cheerfully among the rocks and roots of the forest, following the path we have beaten and cut for ourselves on our way up.  It is dangerously slippery, particularly that part of it through the amomums, and stumps of the cut amomums are very likely to spike your legs badly - and, my friend, never, never, step on one of the amomum stems lying straight in front of you, particularly when they are soaking wet.  Ice slides are nothing to them, and when you fall, as you inevitably must, because all the things you grab hold of are either rotten, or as brittle as Salviati glass-ware vases, you hurt yourself in no end of places, on those aforesaid cut amomum stumps.  I am speaking from sad experiences of my own, amplified by observations on the experiences of my men. The path, when we get down again into the tree-fern region, is inches deep in mud and water, and several places where we have a drop of five feet or so over lumps of rock are worse work going down than we found them going up, especially when we have to drop down on to amomum stems.  One abominable place, a V-shaped hollow, mud-lined, and with an immense tree right across it - a tree one of our tornadoes has thrown down since we passed - bothers the men badly, as they slip and scramble down, and then crawl under the tree and slip and scramble up with their loads.  I say nothing about myself.  I just take a flying slide of twenty feet or so and shoot flump under the tree on my back, and then deliberate whether it is worth while getting up again to go on with such a world; but vanity forbids my dying like a dog in a ditch, and I scramble up, rejoining the others where they are standing on a cross-path: our path going S.E. by E., the other S.S.W.  Two men have already gone down the S.W. one, which I feel sure is the upper end of the path Sasu had led us to and wasted time on our first day’s march; the middle regions of which were, as we had found from its lower end, impassable with vegetation.  So after futile attempts to call the other two back, we go on down the S.E. one, and get shortly into a plantation of giant kokos mid-leg deep in most excellent fine mould - the sort of stuff you pay 6 shillings a load for in England to start a conservatory bed with.  Upon my word, the quantities of things there are left loose in Africa, that ought to be kept in menageries and greenhouses and not let go wild about the country, are enough to try a Saint. We then pass through a clump of those lovely great tree-ferns.  The way their young fronds come up with a graceful curl, like the top of a bishop’s staff, is a poem; but being at present fractious, I will observe that they are covered with horrid spines, as most young vegetables are in Africa.  But talking about spines, I should remark that nothing save that precious climbing palm - I never like to say what I feel about climbing palms, because one once saved my life - equals the strong bush rope which abounds here.  It is covered with short, strong, curved thorns.  It creeps along concealed by decorative vegetation, and you get your legs twined in it, and of course injured.  It festoons itself from tree to tree, and when your mind is set on other things, catches you under the chin, and gives you the appearance of having made a determined but ineffectual attempt to cut your throat with a saw.  It whisks your hat off and grabs your clothes, and commits other iniquities too numerous to catalogue here.  Years and years that bush rope will wait for a man’s blood, and when he comes within reach it will have it. We are well down now among the tree-stems grown over with rich soft green moss and delicate filmy-ferns.  I should think that for a botanist these south-eastern slopes of Mungo Mah Lobeh would be the happiest hunting grounds in all West Africa. The vegetation here is at the point of its supreme luxuriance, owing to the richness of the soil; the leaves of trees and plants I recognise as having seen elsewhere are here far larger, and the undergrowth particularly is more rich and varied, far and away.  Ferns seem to find here a veritable paradise.  Everything, in fact, is growing at its best. We come to another fallen tree over another hole; this tree we recognise as an old acquaintance near Buea, and I feel disgusted, for I had put on a clean blouse, and washed my hands in a tea-cupful of water in a cooking pot before leaving the forest camp, so as to look presentable on reaching Buea, and not give Herr Liebert the same trouble he had to recognise the white from the black members of the party that he said he had with the members of the first expedition to the peak; and all I have got to show for my exertion that is clean or anything like dry is one cuff over which I have been carrying a shawl. We double round a corner by the stockade of the station’s plantation, and are at the top of the mud glissade - the new Government path, I should say - that leads down into the barrack-yard. Our arrival brings Herr Liebert promptly on the scene, as kindly helpful and energetic as ever, and again anxious for me to have a bath.  The men bring our saturated loads into my room, and after giving them their food and plenty of tobacco, I get my hot tea and change into the clothes I had left behind at Buea, and feeling once more fit for polite society, go out and find his Imperial and Royal Majesty’s representative making a door, tightening the boards up with wedges in a very artful and professional way.  We discourse on things in general and the mountain in particular.  The great south-east face is now showing clear before us, the clearness that usually comes before night-fall.  It looks again a vast wall, and I wish I were going up it again to-morrow.  When “the Calabar major” set it on fire in the dry season it must have been a noble sight. The north-eastern edge of the slope of the mountain seems to me unbroken up to the peak.  The great crater we went and camped in must be a very early one in the history of the mountain, and out of it the present summit seems to have been thrown up.  From the sea face, the western, I am told the slope is continuous on the whole, although there are several craters on that side; seventy craters all told are so far known on Mungo. The last reported eruption was in 1852, when signs of volcanic activity were observed by a captain who was passing at sea.  The lava from this eruption must have gone down the western side, for I have come across no fresh lava beds in my wanderings on the other face.  Herr Liebert has no confidence in the mountain whatsoever, and announces his intention of leaving Buea with the army on the first symptom of renewed volcanic activity.  I attempt to discourage him from this energetic plan, pointing out to him the beauty of that Roman soldier at Pompeii who was found, centuries after that eruption, still at his post; and if he regards that as merely mechanical virtue, why not pursue the plan of the elder Pliny?  Herr Liebert planes away at his door, and says it’s not in his orders to make scientific observations on volcanoes in a state of eruption.  When it is he’ll do so - until it is, he most decidedly will not.  He adds Pliny was an admiral and sailors are always as curious as cats. Buea seems a sporting place for weather even without volcanic eruptions, during the whole tornado season (there are two a year), over-charged tornadoes burst in the barrack yard.  From the 14th of June till the 27th of August you never see the sun, because of the terrific and continuous wet season downpour.  At the beginning and end of this cheerful period occurs a month’s tornado season, and the rest of the year is dry, hot by day and cold by night. They are talking of making Buea into a sanatorium for the fever-stricken.  I do not fancy somehow that it’s a suitable place for a man who has got all the skin off his nerves with fever and quinine, and is very liable to chill; but all Governments on the Coast, English, German, or French, are stark mad on the subject of sanatoriums in high places, though the experience they have had of them has clearly pointed out that they are valueless in West Africa, and a man’s one chance is to get out to sea on a ship that will take him outside the three-mile-deep fever-belt of the coast. Herr Liebert gives me some interesting details about the first establishment of the station here and a bother he had with the plantations.  Only a short time ago the soldiers brought him in some black wood spikes, which they had found with their feet, set into the path leading to the station’s koko plantations, to the end of laming the men.  On further investigation there were also found pits, carefully concealed with sticks and leaves, and the bottoms lined with bad thorns, also with malicious intent.  The local Bakwiri chiefs were called in and asked to explain these phenomena existing in a country where peace had been concluded, and the chiefs said it was quite a mistake, those things had not been put there to kill soldiers, but only to attract their attention, to kill and injure their own fellow-tribesmen who had been stealing from plantations latterly.  That’s the West African’s way entirely all along the Coast; the “child-like” native will turn out and shoot you with a gun to attract your attention to the fact that a tribe you never heard of has been and stolen one of his ladies, whom you never saw.  It’s the sweet infant’s way of “rousing up popular opinion,” but I do not admire or approve of it.  If I am to be shot for a crime, for goodness sake let me commit the crime first. September 28th. - Down to Victoria in one day, having no desire to renew and amplify my acquaintance with the mission station at Buana.  It poured torrentially all the day through.  The old chief at Buana was very nice to-day when we were coming through his territory.  He came out to meet us with some of his wives.  Both men and women among these Bakwiri are tattooed, and also painted, on the body, face and arms, but as far as I have seen not on the legs.  The patterns are handsome, and more elaborate than any such that I have seen.  One man who came with the party had two figures of men tattooed on the region where his waistcoat should have been.  I gave the chief some tobacco though he never begged for anything.  He accepted it thankfully, and handing it to his wives preceded us on our path for about a mile and a half and then having reached the end of his district, we shook hands and parted. 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.  I made a brief halt here, getting some soda water.  I was not anxious to reach Victoria before nightfall, but yet to reach it before dinner, and while I was chatting, my boys came through the wood and the engineer most kindly gave them a tot of brandy apiece, to which I owe their arrival in Victoria.  I left them again resting, fearing I had overdone my arrangements for arriving just after nightfall and went on down that road which was more terrible than ever now to my bruised, weary feet, but even more lovely than ever in the dying light of the crimson sunset, with all its dark shadows among the trees begemmed with countless fire-flies - and so safe into Victoria - sneaking up the Government House hill by the private path through the Botanical Gardens. Idabea, the steward, turned up, and I asked him to let me have some tea and bread and butter, for I was dreadfully hungry.  He rushed off, and I heard tremendous operations going on in the room above.  In a few seconds water poured freely down through the dining-room ceiling.  It was bath palaver again.  The excellent Idabea evidently thought it was severely wanted, more wanted than such vanities as tea.  Fortunately, Herr von Lucke was away down in town, looking after duty as usual, so I was tidy before he returned to dinner.  When he returned he had the satisfaction a prophet should feel.  I had got half-drowned, and I had got an awful cold, the most awful cold in the head of modern times, I believe, but he was not artistically exultant over my afflictions. My men having all reported themselves safe I went to my comfortable rooms, but could not turn in, so fascinating was the warmth and beauty down here; and as I sat on the verandah overlooking Victoria and the sea, in the dim soft light of the stars, with the fire-flies round me, and the lights of Victoria away below, and heard the soft rush of the Lukola River, and the sound of the sea-surf on the rocks, and the tom-tomming and singing of the natives, all matching and mingling together, “Why did I come to Africa?” thought I.  Why! who would not come to its twin brother hell itself for all the beauty and the charm of it! <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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