THE JUNGLE FOLK OF AFRICA

BY
ROBERT H. MILLIGAN

The Jungle Folk of Africa

Illustrated, 8vo, cloth, net $1.50

“As one reads, the mystery and terror of the jungle seem to penetrate his soul, yet he reads on reluctant to lay down a book so grimly fascinating.”—Presbyterian.

Fetish Folk of West Africa

Illustrated, 8vo, cloth, net $1.50

“Mr. Milligan has written interestingly and vividly of the people among whom he labored, telling of their ways and habits, repeating some of their legends and beliefs and pointing out their failings as well as their good qualities.”—N. Y. Sun.

CANOE OF A CHIEF ON THE CAMERON RIVER. ([See page 354])

The Jungle Folk of Africa

By
ROBERT H. MILLIGAN

ILLUSTRATED

New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1908, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

Second Edition

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Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
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Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

PREFACE

“In the realm of the unknown, Africa is the absolute,” said Victor Hugo. Since the time of Hugo the civilized world has become better acquainted with African geography; but the Africans themselves are still a people unknown.

A certain noted missionary, while on furlough in America, after delivering a masterly and brilliant lecture on Africa to an audience of coloured people, gave an opportunity for persons in the audience to ask him questions pertaining to the subject. He was rather abashed when an elderly negro, who had been deeply interested in the lecture, called out: “Say, Mistah S., is they any colo’ed folks ovah thah?” Most people know that there are a goodly number of “colo’ed folks” in Africa; but the knowledge of the majority extends only to the colour of the skin. And if in this book I endeavour to make the Africans known as they really are, it is because I believe that they are worth knowing.

In the generation that has passed since the books of Du Chaillu were the delight of boys—old boys and young—the African has received but scant sympathy in literature. Du Chaillu had the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet. He never understated the degradation of the African nor exaggerated his virtues, but he recognized in him the raw material out of which manhood is made. He realized that the African, like ourselves, is not a finality, but a possibility—“the tadpole of an archangel,” as genius has phrased it. But, then, Du Chaillu lived among the Africans long enough to speak their language, to forget the colour of their skin, and to know them, mind and heart, as no passing traveller or casual observer can possibly know them.

In more recent books the African is usually and uniformly presented as physically ugly, mentally stupid, morally repulsive, and never interesting. This is by no means my opinion of the African. Kipling’s characterization, “half child, half devil,” is very apt. But what in the world is more interesting than children—except devils?

This book is an attempt to exhibit the human nature of the African, to the end that he may be regarded not merely as a being endowed with an immortal soul and a candidate for salvation, but as a man whose present life is calculated to awaken our interest and sympathy; a man with something like our own capacity for joy and sorrow, and to whom pleasure and pain are very real; who bleeds when he is pricked and who laughs when he is amused; a man essentially like ourselves, but whose beliefs and whose circumstances are so remote from any likeness to our own that as we enter the realm in which he lives and moves and has his being we seem to have been transported upon the magic carpet of the Arabian fable, away from reality into a world of imagination—a wonderland, where things happen without a cause and nature has no stability, where the stone that falls downwards to-day may fall upwards to-morrow, where a person may change himself into a leopard and birds wear foliage for feathers, where rocks and trees speak with articulate voice and animals moralize as men—a world running at random and haphazard, where everything operates except reason and where credulity is only equalled by incredulity. Elsewhere it is the unexpected that happens: in Africa it is the unexpected that we expect.

A knowledge of the jungle folk of Africa will include some acquaintance with their jungle home, their daily life, their work, their amusements, their social customs, their folk-lore, their religion, and, among the rest, it will include their response to missionary effort. Of these several subjects, those which receive scant treatment in this book will be more fully presented in a second book on Africa, which is now in course of preparation.

I have avoided generalizations and abstractions, in the belief that the concrete and the personal would be not only more interesting but also more informing. This book is, therefore, in the main, a narration of the particular incidents of my own experience and observation during seven years in Africa; incidents, many of which, at their occurrence, moved me either to laughter or to tears, and sometimes both in alternation. For, nowhere else in the world does tragedy so often end in comedy, and comedy in tragedy.

I am indebted to Mr. Harry D. Salveter for his kindness in furnishing me with many photographic illustrations, including the best of my collection.

Robert H. Milligan.

New York.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Jungle Folk of Africa

I
THE VOYAGE

“O ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,

Feast them upon the wideness of the sea.”

—Keats.

When I was about to sail for Africa a friend read to me a thrilling incident which was supposed to be prophetic of my own fate. A cannibal maiden proposes marriage to a newly-arrived missionary. The missionary modestly declines her offer; whereupon, looking down at him with utmost complacency, she tells him that she will have him anyhow—either married, or fried. I have gone to Africa twice, and have lived there nearly seven years, yet I have escaped both of these dreadful contingencies. There is no longer any glamour of romance about the missionary life. It is not a life of hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. In those seven years I was never frightened and seldom killed. Dull monotony is the normal experience and loneliness the besetting trial.

Neither are the sacrifices and privations of missionary life so great as many of us have supposed. The sacrifices of the missionary are more tangible, but not therefore greater, than those of the faithful minister at home; whose sacrifices are often more real because less obvious. A few days before I sailed the second time for Africa, when I knew from former experience that the missionary life was no martyrdom, I was one day seated at a dinner-table where Africa and my going was the subject of conversation. The company had the most exaggerated ideas of the privations incident to missionary life. There was no use in a denial on my part; and to have disclaimed any of the fictitious virtues with which they loaded me would only have caused them to add the virtue of modesty to the rest.

A maiden lady across the table, who for some time had sat with abstracted countenance, at last, with upturned eyes and clasped hands, remarked: “Well, I think it is an appalling sacrifice.”

To have lived up to my part, my face at that moment should have worn a saintly expression of all the virtues rolled into one; but it happened that my mouth was quite full of pork and cabbage, with which my carnal mind was occupied, and I am sure I looked more like an epicure than an ascetic. Nothing but the pork and cabbage kept me from laughing outright.

Really, life in Africa is much the same as life anywhere else; and the “privations” only teach us how many things we can do without which we once thought were indispensable. This lesson is impressed the more deeply in such a land as Africa, where a human being may live for threescore years—comfortable, apparently happy, and at least healthy—with little else than a pot, a pipe and a tom-tom; the first ministers to his necessity, the second to comfort and the third to pleasure. If we will persist in regarding the missionary as a martyr, let us consider that the martyr does not differ essentially from other Christians. Martyrdom is potentially contained in the initial decision of each Christian. The consecration of a life to Christ implies the willingness to lay it down for Him. In an uncivilized land there is a likelihood of unwonted hardships, and among savages some possibility of a violent death; but the latter is vastly improbable.

One can procure an outfit more conveniently and at less cost in Liverpool than in New York. A week at Liverpool is sufficient for this purpose. The outfit will depend somewhat upon whether one expects to live on the coast or in the bush where he will be cut off from the facilities of transportation by water. All transportation to the interior is by native porters, who carry sixty or seventy pounds on their backs, in loads as compact as possible. This excludes most furniture; and such furniture as can be transported is usually “knocked down.” An ordinary outfit will include several helmets of cork or pith, several white umbrellas lined with green, a dozen white drill suits, denim trousers, canvas shoes, leather shoes, rubber boots, cheese-cloth for mosquito-bars, rubber blankets, pneumatic pillows, hot-water bags, a supply of medicines (unless these are already on the field) especially quinine and castor-oil, a six-mouths’ supply of food—canned meats, vegetables and fruits—besides bedding and kitchenware, tableware, napery, etc., according to need, and guns and ammunition.

There is a romantic interest about this last week spent in the purchase of strange articles for an untried life, and in taking leave of civilization,—of such things as cities, society, music, fresh beef and fine clothes. The last evening in Liverpool I went to hear Tannhauser. Music had always been my pastime, and it was not an easy sacrifice to make. I therefore looked forward to that evening with peculiar interest, knowing that not again until my return, however long I might remain in Africa, would I hear any music worthy of the name. But Tannhauser proved to be not a sweet parting from civilization but an awful experience, by reason of some one in my neighbourhood beating the time with his foot, as they so often do in England. I had one of the best seats in the house, but I exchanged it for another, only to find myself in a worse neighbourhood; for, in addition to a man on each side of me beating the time, a woman immediately behind “hummed the tune.” At the close of the performance I was in a condition of “mortal mind” that would have scandalized those who are disposed to canonize missionaries. But the sorrow of parting was thus mitigated as I reflected that civilization has its pains and savagery some compensations.

I went home and wrote the following to a friend: “Some one alluding to Macaulay’s knowledge of history and his unerring accuracy once said that infinite damnation to Macaulay would consist in being surrounded by fiends engaged in misquoting history while he was rendered speechless and unable to correct them; and I am thinking that my inferno would consist in being compelled to listen to some such exquisite melody as O Thou Sublime Sweet Evening Star, surrounded the while by fiends keeping time with their feet, and Beelzebub humming the tune.”

On my first voyage to Africa (having been appointed to the West Africa Mission, by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church) I was four weeks on the way, from Liverpool, and landed at Batanga, in Cameroon, two hundred miles north of the equator. On the second voyage I was five weeks on the way, and landed at Libreville (better known as Gaboon) in the Congo Français, almost exactly at the equator. Libreville was the capital of the French Congo. Gaboon is properly the name of the bay or great estuary upon which Libreville is situated, and is one of the very few good harbours on the west coast. But long before the existence of Libreville, captains and traders had used the name Gaboon to designate the adjacent settlement of native villages and trading-houses, and it is still the name in general use.

We made many calls along the way. Some of the places are very beautiful, such as the Canary Islands, Sierra Leone, Cape Coast Castle, Victoria, Fernando Po and Gaboon; and some are quite otherwise, for Africa is a land of extremes. Bonny is repulsive, and the Rio del Rey is a nightmare. Meanwhile, we are getting further and further away from all that is known and natural to our eyes, and nearer to a land of strange birds and beasts and trees, inhabited by tribes that to the white man are only a name, or have no name, and to whom he is perhaps an imaginary being, or the ghost of their dead ancestors.

At the Canary Islands, a week after leaving Liverpool, one may spend a day of interest and pleasure. On my first voyage we called at Las Palmas, in Grand Canary Island. On the second voyage we called at Santa Cruz on Teneriffe Island. The object of chief interest is the great Mount Teneriffe, seen sometimes a hundred miles at sea; probably the Mount Atlas of ancient fable, which was supposed to support the firmament. There are of course many mountain peaks in the world which rise to a greater height above the sea-level; but they are usually in ranges or on high table-lands far from the sea, and while the altitude is great, the individual peak may not be great. Teneriffe rises directly out of the sea, slowly at first but with increasing inclination, until at last it sweeps upward to the clouds and far above them, to a height of 12,500 feet. The sandy slopes upon the higher altitudes reflect the light with unequalled splendour. From the harbour of Las Palmas we saw the sun rising on Teneriffe. We stood on the deck before the dawn, and while darkness was all around us, saw the heights already struggling with the darkness, and the summit bathed in the light of the unrisen day. A heavy mist rolled down and spread over the valleys, like a sea resplendent with every interchange of deepening and dissolving colour; while from below arose the increasing noise and tumult of a half-civilized city awaking from slumber. In a little while the clouds begin to assemble, and the peak is hidden throughout the day: so it is always. But in the evening, the clouds again are parted, like opening curtains, and the whole mountain is disclosed, majestic and beautiful in the light of the setting sun.

On the homeward voyage the steamers often take on an enormous deck-cargo of bananas. They are put in crates the size of barrels and are packed in straw. In the event of a severe storm before reaching Liverpool they are more than likely to be washed overboard. It is a pleasure to watch this loading from the upper deck. The Spanish workmen are neat and clean; they are skillful and work rapidly, as indeed they must in order to load the entire cargo in one day, which is usually the limit of time. All day long Spanish boys without clothes are crowded around the steamer in small boats, begging the passengers to throw pennies into the water and see them dive and get them. Many pennies and small silver coins are thrown over in the course of the day; and the boys seldom miss one.

A number of the passengers debark at the Canary Islands, and the rest have more room and more comfort. Immediately upon leaving the Islands double awnings are stretched over the decks; and the passengers and ship’s officers the next day don their tropical clothing. The sea is exceedingly calm as compared with the North Atlantic and the air soft and balmy. It recalled those lines of Keats—

“Often it is in such gentle temper found,

That scarcely will the very smallest shell,

Be moved for days from where it sometime fell,

When last the winds of heaven were unbound.”

MOUNT TENERIFFE, CANARY ISLANDS.

Probably the Mount Atlas of ancient fable, which was supposed to support the firmament.

The change to tropical life takes place in one day and it is like being suddenly transported into another world. The men nearly all are dressed in white drill suits, and most of them wear white caps and white canvas shoes. If they go ashore at various ports along the way they will exchange the cap for a cork helmet and besides will probably carry a white umbrella. The white suits if well made and well laundered look much more comfortable and becoming than any other clothing. They are usually made in military style with stitched collar, so as we go on further south the shirt of civilization may at length be dispensed with and the coat worn directly over an undershirt,—which latter ought to be of wool and medium weight. Except my first year, I wore no shirt at any time through all the years that I lived in Africa, not even at the French Governor’s annual reception at Gaboon. The English at Old Calabar on formal occasions make themselves ridiculous in black dress suits with the conventional area of shirt-front and collar. In these they swelter, vastly uncomfortable, while the starch dissolves and courses towards their shoes down back and breast. It is not only, nor chiefly, the high temperature but the extreme humidity that makes the atmosphere so oppressive. It seems to be seventy-five per cent, warm water.

On shipboard it is usually comfortable and pleasant while we are under way. The most delightful part of the voyage is the first few days after leaving the Canary Islands, when the course lies in the track of the northeast trade-winds. One thinks very differently, however, of this trade-wind in coursing against it on the homeward voyage after a length of time on the fever-stricken coast. It seems piercing cold, and, as Miss Kingsley says, one wishes that the Powers above would send it to the Powers below to get it warmed. It is in this zone that deaths most frequently occur on board. On the outward voyage immediately after the most delightful part of the voyage comes the very worst part of it, as we pass beyond the trade-wind and close in to the coast near Cape Verde. For several days one is tempted to wish that he might turn back. There is a dead calm on board, and the heat is enough to curl one’s hair. It recalled Sydney Smith’s description of some such place, where “one feels like taking off his flesh and sitting in his bones.” But it continues only two or three days. During this time the “punka” is installed, a large fan suspended from the ceiling, the entire length of the table, worked by a rope, which a boy pulls with his hand.

A week after leaving the Canary Islands we reached our first African port, Sierra Leone. It has the finest harbour on the entire west coast. From the harbour it is very beautiful, with mountains of intense green standing like sentinels on either side and behind the town. The sound of the wind raging about these peaks, like the roaring of a lion, gives the name, Sierra Leone. Despite its attractive appearance, it is called The Whiteman’s Grave, and its history justifies the name. But as we proceed down the coast we find that every place which has any considerable number of white men is called The Whiteman’s Grave. The name Sierra Leone applies to the entire English colony; that of the town at this place is Freetown. It was originally a colony of freed slaves, which the English planted there during the suppression of the slave traffic. The first ship-load of colonists, between four and five hundred, was landed in 1787. Of these, sixty died on the way or within a fortnight after landing. Freetown has now a population of thirty thousand, and is prosperous. Along the wharf are warehouses with roofs of corrugated iron. The roofs of the traders’ houses also, both here and all along the coast, are of corrugated iron. Here and there among the colourless huts of the natives there stands out boldly the frame houses of successful native traders, made of imported material and usually painted an impudent blue. Houses with floors are everywhere called deck-houses; for the decks of ships were the first floors ever seen by the natives.

So soon as we had anchored, the natives, in a score of boats, were crowding about the gangway, pushing back each other’s boats, fighting, cursing and yelling, in a general strife for the very lucrative privilege of rowing passengers ashore. However otherwise engaged in this scramble they are all yelling; and the resultant noise is the proper introduction to Africa. For, as noise is the first, so it will be the final and lasting impression. It is the grand unity in which other associations are gradually dislimned. We went ashore in the late afternoon. The people were all in the streets, moving about, but no one moving rapidly; all active, but no one very active. As there are no vehicles, pedestrians occupy the whole street, which is covered with grass. There is a great variety of dress and considerable undress. Many of the women wear a loose calico wrapper—a Mother Hubbard; and many of the men are dressed in the Mohammedan costume, which is more becoming, and more suitable for the climate, than any possible modification of European dress. It consists of a long white shirt with loose, flowing sleeves, and an outer garment somewhat like a university gown, of black or of blue. The ordinary man wears anything he may happen to have, from an eighth of a yard of calico to a rice-bag in which he cuts holes for his head and arms.

Ever so many were carrying loads on their heads—never any other way—and without touching them with their hands. Indeed, if their hands were engaged I am not sure whether they could talk; for when they talk they gesticulate continually. Some were carrying beer bottles erect on their heads, some carried books, some of the women carried folded parasols; others carried fire-wood, or bananas, or large baskets of vegetables. They exchange the neighbourhood gossip as they pass, but without turning their heads; and sometimes they throw down their loads and seat themselves on opposite sides of the street to have “a friendly yell.” When we returned to the steamer we found on board, on the lower deck, about twenty native passengers. They have brought all their household goods, including chickens; and several of the women have babies strapped to their backs. They pay only for a passage on deck, taking the risk of the weather, and expect to yell their way to Fernando Po, in about two weeks. The number of deck passengers increases at each of the next several ports, until the deck is crowded; but they are never allowed on the upper deck.

The deck, formerly spacious and shining, is now covered with baggage, the abundance of which is only exceeded by its outlandish variety. The first mate is the ship’s general housekeeper. Cleanliness and order are a mental malady with him. If he could have his way the ship would carry no cargo, since the opening of the hatches and the discharging of it deranges the order of the lower deck and litters it with rubbish. Besides he would like to employ the boat-crews in holystoning one deck or another all the time instead of only once each morning. The sight of a dog affects him more seriously than seeing a ghost. Passengers are a great trial to him who carelessly place their deck chairs for comfort or for conversation with each other instead of leaving them in unneighbourly straight lines as he arranged them. He is rarely on speaking terms with the chief engineer, because the latter must frequently have coal carried from the forehold; and there is a standing feud between him and the cook, whose grease-tub sits outside the galley door. The mate’s sole horror of a storm at sea is that the rolling of the ship spills the grease. Imagine the life this gentleman lives from the time that the native passengers begin to come aboard and fill the deck with their piles of miscellaneous baggage. He ages perceptibly. Disorder is precisely the weak point in the native character; and much of the mate’s time is spent in pitched battles with the native women, over the bestowment of their goods. No sooner has he, with the help of several deck-hands, arranged a lady’s goods in a neat square pile ten feet high and seated her children in a straight row than the lady orders all her children to get out of her way and proceeds to tear down the pile in order to get a cosmetic and a mirror that happen to be in two different boxes in the bottom. When the mate is not around the deck passengers seem very happy as they sit at random on their baggage and yell at each other. Here and there men in Mohammedan dress sit on the sunny deck in cross-legged tailor-fashion, reminding one of old Bible pictures. If they quarrel a great deal they also laugh a great deal, and the quarrels are no sooner ended than they are forgotten.

At Lagos several native men came out in a boat to meet a deck passenger and land his baggage. The natives are not allowed to use the gangway, and if the rope ladder is in use they pass up and down a single rope suspended over the ship’s side. On this occasion I observed one of the men from the boat alongside sliding down a rope and carrying a heavy box, by no means an easy thing to do. He expected that the others of his party would be waiting to receive him in the boat below. But they had drifted several yards away and were engaged in eating some potato peelings which a steward had thrown to them. He called to them but they paid no attention:—they were eating. He yelled at them and cursed them, at the same time making with his legs impressive gestures of appeal and threat. But they sat indifferent until they had finished, while he with his load remained suspended in the air. Moreover, the sea at Lagos abounds with sharks. At last, having finished their repast, they came to his rescue. I was watching eagerly to see how many would be killed in the ensuing fight. But not a blow was struck, and the palaver did not last a minute. So forgetful are they of injuries. And though they are capable of great cruelty towards their enemies, their cruelty is callous rather than vindictive; not the cruelty that delights in another’s pain, but rather that of a dull imagination which does not realize it.

A few days after leaving Sierra Leone we anchored off Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, where we shipped eighty native men, Krumen, who were engaged by the ship as workmen for the discharging and loading of cargo. They are engaged for the round trip down the coast, three or four months, and are unshipped again on the homeward voyage. Of these Krumen I shall speak at some length in another chapter. They are the original native tribe of this part of the coast and are not to be confounded with the proper Liberians whose ancestors emigrated from America.

Liberia represents the philanthropic effort of America to restore to their native land the Africans carried to America by the slave trade. A large area of country was purchased from the native chiefs, and in 1820 the first settlement of colonists was established. Liberia is a country of possibilities. There is no richer soil on the entire west coast. It is especially suitable for coffee and cocoa; but it has remained undeveloped. The poor and ignorant colonists were not fit for self-government. America should have done more or else less. The Liberians might far better have remained in America. During the several generations of their absence from Africa they seemed to have lost the power of resisting the malaria. The mortality among them was very great and they were pitiably helpless. The government of Liberia some one has said is a fit subject for comic opera. At one time becoming possessed of a little cash, by some wonderful accident, they provided themselves with a small gunboat by which they hoped to convince calling ships that theirs is a real government competent to collect dues, impose fines, and enforce the rules of quarantine and release that obtain at other ports, for which purpose it has proved as ineffective as a pop-gun. But they have used it successfully against the canoes of the Krumen in levying a heavy and unjustifiable duty upon these men when they return from the south voyage with their pay.

After two weeks on shipboard the immobility of life becomes agreeable and we are all content to be lazy. And in the evening when the social instinct is lively and men sit together at leisure in the balmy breeze, under the canvas roof, on a well-lighted deck, the sea so calm as to allay all apprehension, a wall of darkness around us, and the immensity of the sea beyond, as separate from the rest of the world as would be some tiny planet that has separated from the solid earth and rotates upon its own axis, then the charm of travel on the tropical sea is all that the imagination had preconceived,—a lazy, luxurious dream. When Boswell remarked to Johnson, “We grow weary when idle,” Johnson replied: “That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company; but if all were idle there would be no growing weary; we should entertain one another.” We were all equally idle and lazy, and wished we could be lazier. There were whole days when the conversation—until evening—contained nothing more epigrammatic than “Please pass the butter,” or “Have a pickle?”

The company consists of traders, government officials and missionaries; and the captain is usually present. As our number diminishes at each successive port, we become better acquainted and more friendly. Men of antipodal differences are thus frequently brought into friendly and sympathetic relations, men who in ordinary life would seldom have been brought into contact with each other, and who never would have known that they had anything in common; and the experience is wholesome. I have learned to think more kindly of the African trader and to refrain from criticism because of some whom I have known intimately on these long voyages.

As we sit on deck in the evening the captain tells us that at Lagos, where we are due in a few days, he has seen the natives fight the sharks in the sea and kill them. The shark is the monster of the tropical seas, the incarnation of ferocity and hunger. The native takes a stout stick, six inches long and sharpened at both ends. With his hand closed tight around this he dives into the sea, and as the shark comes at him with its terrible mouth open, he thrusts the stick upright into its mouth as far as he can. There it remains planted in the upper and lower jaws of the shark, which, not being able to close its mouth, soon drowns and comes to the surface. It is a good story, and not incredible as a fact; for the native is brave enough and fool enough to do this very thing. But this is the same captain who tells of fearful storms which he has successfully encountered, when the ship rolled until she took in water through the funnels. He remarked to me one day, speaking of one of his officers who was not the brightest: “I always have to verify his reckoning; for he always mistakes east for west and invariably puts latitude where longitude ought to be.” He also tells of an invitation he once received from a cannibal chief near Old Calabar, to come ashore and help him pick a missionary. He has seen the sea-serpent many a time and knows all about it. It is not dark green with brown stripes, as is generally supposed, but is bright yellow with blue spots, and is quite three hundred feet long. On one occasion it followed the captain’s ship for several days, at times raising one hundred and fifty feet of its length out of the water, and being prevented from helping itself to a sailor now and then only by great quantities of food which they threw over to it. This caused a famine on board, and they reached the nearest port in a half-starved condition. An affidavit goes with each of the captain’s stories. Most captains indulge in this entertaining hyperbole. Some are decidedly gifted with what has been called a “creative memory.” I have never yet known a captain who could not turn out as handsome a yarn as Gulliver.

As the company become better acquainted conversation is more intimate and varied. Now we are discussing some subject of continental magnitude, and again, with equal interest, some infinitesimal triviality. Detached from the rest of the world, and with no daily budget of news, our interest becomes torpid, and things great and small appear without perspective on a flat surface of equality. We avowed our disbelief in the infallibility of the pope, and pronounced against his claim to temporal authority. We anticipated all the conclusions of the Hague Conference, and discussed the imminence of the “yellow peril.” We resolved that the Crown Colony system was a failure and had never been a success, and we devised an elaborate substitute but could not agree upon the details. We agreed that the English aristocracy had long been effete, and that the Duke of X, related to the queen, was a “hog.” We reached the amicable conclusion that the thirteen colonies should never have rebelled, and that the blame was all on the side of England. We left posterity nothing to say on the relative merits of the republican and the monarchic forms of government, and decided that the enfranchisement of the negro was a mistake.

In juxtaposition to these discussions, one man occupied the company a part of an evening recounting the entire history of his corns; but I regret that I have forgotten their number and disposition. Another disclosed the fact that he always wore safety-pins instead of garters, and descanted upon his preference with such enthusiasm that he made at least one convert that I know of. I was carefully told how to mix a gin cocktail (though I may never have any practical use for this valuable knowledge) and how to toss a champagne cocktail from one glass to another in a beautiful parabolic curve; also how many cocktails a man might drink in a day without being chargeable with intemperance: in short, if there is anything about “booze” that I do not know it must be because I have forgotten.

One night (but this was another voyage and a different kind of captain) we put in practice the principle of arbitration of which we were all adherents; and the result was my discomfiture. An argument had arisen among us as to which was the more simple of the two currency systems, dollars and cents, and pounds, shillings and pence—as if there were logical room for difference of opinion! At last, the captain arriving, we decided to refer the matter to him and to surrender our judgment to his arbitrament. The captain (an Englishman of the very stolid sort), after a period of reflection replied very slowly, and with all the gravity of a judge: “Pounds, shillings and pence is the simpler system; for, don’t you know, that when you are told the price of a thing in dollars and cents you always, in your mind, convert it into pounds, shillings and pence.”

“Of course, Captain,” said I; “I had not thought of that until you mentioned it; neither had I recalled the well-known fact that a Frenchman, while speaking French in the streets of Paris, is really thinking in English. Your decision is as shrewd as it is impartial.”

II
THE COAST

But the pleasure of the voyage depends largely upon the season. The wet and the dry seasons are distinctly divided. There is a long wet season of four months and a short wet season of two months each year, and corresponding long and short dry seasons. The rains generally follow the course of the sun as it moves between the northern and southern solstice. The regularity of the seasons is modified by local influences such as the proximity of mountains. The seasons at Batanga, for instance, are not so distinctly divided as at Gaboon. I am most familiar with the climate of Gaboon, which is practically at the equator. The long wet season begins in September, when the sun is coursing from the equator towards the southern solstice, and continues nearly four months. The long dry season begins in May and continues for four months. Those are the delightful months of the year. We are accustomed to associate a dry spell with heat and glaring sunshine. But there the brightest sunshine is in the wet season between the showers. The dry season is both cool and shady; so cool that the natives find it uncomfortable, while the sun is sometimes not seen for a week. It always seems to be just about to rain. A stranger to the climate would not risk going half a mile without taking an umbrella. But he is perfectly safe. There is not the least danger of rain between May and September. Often in the dry season I have travelled through the midday hours in a canoe, lying full length on a travelling rug with my face towards the sky; for there is no glare: the mellow light has the quality of moonlight.

But a strong wind prevails during the dry months, and it is the season when the surf rages wildly on the open coast; when surf boats with cargo are often broken on the beach and the native crews lose their limbs and sometimes their lives. The ground though very dry does not become parched. The rustling of the palms or of the thatch roof at the close of the season is like the heavy pattering of rain, so much so that sometimes one is deceived in spite of himself. The dry season is healthiest for white men, but not for the native. They are not sufficiently protected against the wind, and pneumonia is common. However much we prefer the dry season, yet we weary of it towards the close, and like the natives we fairly shout for joy at the first shower.

The wet season is very disagreeable. The rain falls in streams, and, as Miss Kingsley says, “does not go into details with drops.” There are several torrential downpours each day and night. In the intervals during the day the sky is swept clear of clouds and the sun shines the strongest. The atmosphere is extremely humid and sultry. With the least exertion, or with no exertion, one perspires profusely, and there is no evaporation. One ought to change his clothing several times a day; but most of us cannot afford to devote so much time to comfort. Frequent tornadoes often cool the air in the evening.

The most uncomfortable of all places during the rain is on shipboard. The rain will at length find its way through any thickness of awning, and the delightful deck must be deserted for the stifling saloon. Our paradise is transformed to a purgatory. The rain is accompanied by a heavy mist and as it dashes upon the surface of the sea it lifts a cloud of spray that hides the water beneath and we seem to be drifting courseless through cloudland, with our horizon immediately around us. As it continues day after day everybody becomes depressed; and as for the captain, it is scarcely safe to speak to him. One day when I was travelling in the wet season, the captain lost a whole day prowling up and down the coast looking for a place which was completely hidden in the rain and mist. He was angry; and an angry captain is a fearsome object. He is accustomed to being obeyed, and is master of everything else but the fourth element, which occasionally thwarts his plans and derides his authority. At a moment when the rain slackened from a torrent to a heavy shower, a passenger put his head out on deck and remarked: “It’s not raining, Captain.”

“Well, if that is not rain,” thundered the disgusted captain, “it is the best imitation of rain that I have ever seen.”

The subject upon which conversation dwells longest and to which it ever returns with gruesome interest is the African fever. The news that is brought on board at each port is like a death bulletin. To the new comer it is all very trying and very tragical. But he cannot escape from it; for the Old Coaster (and a man who has been out once before is an Old Coaster) assumes the grave responsibility of impressing deeply upon the mind of the tenderfoot the serious conditions which he is about to confront. It is impressed upon him that the fever is inevitable, and that the young and healthy die first; that temperate habits instead of being a defense are a snare, and that not to drink is simply suicide. Missionaries die like flies. But then of course it comes to the same thing in the end; there is no escape; and to worry about it, or to expect it, will bring on a fever in two days. Exposure to the sun is sure to induce fever; and yet none die so quickly as those who carry umbrellas. Quinine is useless except to brace the mind of those who believe in it; but it isn’t any good. And when you get fever, you can’t escape, by leaving the coast in a hurry, even if there should be a steamer in port, which is very unlikely; for a man going aboard with fever is sure to die. Perhaps it is the horror of being buried at sea that kills him.

“How is that new clerk whom I brought out for you last voyage?” asks the captain, of a trader who has come aboard for breakfast.

“Poor chap!” says the trader, “he didn’t live two weeks. Another came on the next steamer, and he pegged out in three weeks. They ought to be sent out two at a time.”

“You remember so-and-so,” says another; “well, poor chap! (and as soon as he says “poor chap” we know the rest) he was found dead in bed one morning since you were here. They had used up all the lumber that they had laid away for coffins, so they took half the partition out of his house, to make a coffin; and then they didn’t get it long enough. The next fellow is now living alone in that same house with half the partition gone, and of course he can’t help reflecting that there is just enough left to make another coffin; and, indeed, to judge by the way he was looking when I saw him last they may have used it by this time.”

“Have you heard about the poor chap that so-and-so sent up country? Well, he died a few weeks ago. He was all alone except for the native workmen, and as soon as he died they ran away in fear. The agent got word of it and started up country immediately; but the rats had found him first.”

It is only when one reflects that all these “poor chaps” were somebody’s sons, and somebody’s brothers, that one realizes the tragedy of the coast. These little conversations on board seem like the final obsequies performed for those who are dead.

“Do men ever die of anything except fever?” asks a new comer.

“O yes,” says the Old Coaster. “Let me see: there’s dysentery,—poor C died of that last week; and there’s enlarged spleen, abscesses, pneumonia, consumption (one falls into consumption here very quickly, and often when he least expects it), kraw-kraw and smallpox (smallpox has just broken out at Fernando Po: that’s our next port), not to speak of seven or eight varieties of itch, which some men have all the time; but itch doesn’t kill. By the way, I suppose you know that in this climate it is necessary that bodies be buried a few hours after death.”

In the speech of the coast there is no such thing as reticence, and soon enough we all learn to speak with brutal bluntness. The only comfort held out to the new comer is the hope that he will receive, as a sort of obituary, the kindly designation, “Poor Chap.”

I have never argued for the salubrity of the African climate; nor am I disposed to protest the general opinion that it is “the worst climate in the world.” The white man never becomes acclimatized, and never will until he develops another kind of blood. One lives face to face with the constant and proximate possibility of death as long as he is on the coast. It is an unnatural consciousness, which, when prolonged through years, tends to become fixed and permanent even when one has removed from the circumstances that were its occasion. And yet, the conversation of the Old Coaster is liable to make an exaggerated impression. In the first place, the impression is natural that the climate being so unhealthful must also be uncomfortable. But, in reality, while several months of the year are extremely uncomfortable, the greater part of the year is tolerably comfortable and there are several months of exceedingly pleasant weather. Neither is the heat so great as is generally supposed. With the greatest effort on my part, I never succeeded in disabusing my friends of the notion that I was slowly roasting to death in Africa. With every hot spell in America, when the thermometer was standing at 100°, their thoughts turned towards me in profound sympathy. While I have at times suffered with the heat and there have been times on the river, between high banks, cut off from the breeze, when I nearly fainted, and one occasion upon which I was quite overcome, yet as a rule I lived comfortably by day; and the nights are always cool. The maximum temperature on the coast is from 86° to 88°, Fahrenheit, and even such a temperature is rare. One ought to add, however, that owing to the extreme humidity this temperature in Africa is incomparably hotter than the same temperature in America. It is the sultriness of the hottest weather that makes it insufferable. West Africa is heated by steam and without the medium of radiators. The uniformity of the climate is pleasurable, and is very strange to us of northern latitudes. One may reckon upon the weather to a certainty. Within the limits of a given season there is scarcely any variation from day to day.

The insalubrity is due to the deadly malaria of the reeking, mosquito-infested swamps. Mr. Henry Savage Landor, after a journey across Africa, announces to the world that he is a strong disbeliever in the mosquito theory of malaria. But, that the mosquito is the agent of the malaria bacillus, medical science no longer regards as theory, but as fact, a fact established by the most elaborate and painstaking series of experiments ever conducted in the interest of medical science. Mr. Landor also tells us that he and his men were frequently attacked by malarial fever, becoming so weak that they could not raise their hands; but in every case a dose of castor-oil effected a cure in a few hours. He is therefore a strong advocate of castor-oil, but disbelieves in quinine. The use of castor-oil is no new discovery. Every man who has had any experience in West Africa takes it at the approach of a fever. But there is no substitute for quinine. And the medical men of the coast will agree in saying that life depends always upon the judicious use of it.

In recent years there has been such progress in the knowledge of malaria, and how to meet malarial conditions, that the record of West Africa is continually improving. Then again, missionary societies, following the example of the various European governments, have ceased to make war upon the inevitable and have greatly reduced the term of service. In American missions the term is generally three years; in English missions it is a year and a half or two years; and in the government service the term is usually much shorter than in the missions. My first experience in Africa was not a fair test of the climate. We were engaged in opening a new mission station in the bush, and the conditions were the most unhealthful. Our food was the coarsest,—it was several mouths before we tasted bread; our accommodations were the poorest,—part of the time we lived in a tent that did not protect us against the heavy rains; and besides there were forced journeys to the coast in the wet season with incidental hardships. After a succession of fevers and sensational recoveries I fled from the coast with broken health at the end of a year and a half.

But the second time, when I lived at Gaboon, I stayed five and a half years,—far too long. During the first three years at Gaboon T had fever once every two or three months. I became very familiar with its preceding symptoms—physical exhaustion for several days, such that the least effort induced painful weariness and a frequent heavy sigh; aching of head and limbs; chills alternating rapidly with feverish heat, and a terrible temper. At the end of the third year I had a very severe fever which, instead of yielding to quinine the third day, became much worse, and the natives carried me in a hammock to the French hospital. There I remained for five weeks. But after that I had no more fever, not even once, though I remained in Africa more than two years longer, which would have been absolutely impossible if the fevers had continued. The difference was in my use of quinine. At first I took quinine only with the attacks of fever, and then I took an enormous quantity. But in the later period I kept myself immune by taking it daily whether I was ill or not. I took five grains every night for those several years. People are usually greatly surprised at this and ask if such an amount of quinine was not a terrible strain upon the constitution. It was, without doubt; but not so great a strain as malarious blood, and frequent fevers, and the shock of very large doses of quinine at such times. If I had not been in greatly reduced health before I began to take it regularly it is not likely that I should have required nearly so much. But this is anticipating; for we are still on the outward voyage.

In general the coast of West Africa is not beautiful; although it has a weird fascination for those who have once lived on it. It is low-lying, straight and monotonous: a gleaming line of white surf, a golden strip of sandy beach, a dark green line of forest—and that is all, for days and days and days, and for some two thousand miles, only broken at long intervals by the great estuary that is a peculiar characteristic of African rivers, and by low hills far away on the horizon. Many of the traders are living, not in the white settlements, but in single trading-houses and far apart along this lonely shore. They like it or they hate it. To some it is an idle dream-life that they enjoy, and to others it is a nightmare that they abhor. Some of those who came aboard looked like haunted men. Each day is exactly like all the others, and the natural surroundings never vary however far they may wander along the beach—three endless lines of colour stretching away to eternity, the dull green forest front, the yellow strip of sand, the white surge of the foaming surf, and beyond it the boundless sea. Even in the darkest night the forest still shows as a blacker rim against the darkness, and the surf-line is white with a whiteness that no night can obscure. The unceasing sound of it is like low thunder, and unless one loves it he must often think what a relief it would be if it would stop but for one brief moment, and how the silence would “sink like music on his heart.”

In such places, and in the bush, the traders sometimes wear only pajamas, by day as well as night. There are natives enough around, and there is always noise enough; but it is the noise that only emphasizes solitude. And one were better to live entirely alone than to be subjected to the influence of African degradation without the moral restraints of home and the society of equals, unless his religious belief be something more than a mere acceptance of tradition, and his principles something more than conventional morality. There is a better class of natives whose society might relieve loneliness, but the trader, as a rule, does not gather this class around him.

Some are pleased to say very hard things about the traders. But he who would judge justly must have a mind well attempered to the claims of morality on the one hand, and on the other, to the allowance due to the frailty of human nature when placed in circumstances of unparalleled temptation. No man ever realizes the moral restraints of good society until they are all withdrawn; nor how insidious the influence even of the most repulsive vices when they have become so common to our eyes that they cease to shock: the moral safety of most men is in being shocked. Of course there are bad men among the traders, and some very bad; and the rumshop which, wherever the white man has penetrated, rises like a death-spectre in the landscape, is an abomination to which it would be difficult to do injustice. But it is not chiefly the trader who is responsible for the rum traffic. Many of them would be thankful if the various governments would entirely prohibit its importation. Moreover, they sell a thousand things besides rum,—as many useful things, and necessary to civilization, as the native is willing to buy. The traders are all men of courage—we can at least admire them for that—and many are honest and many are kind; and it were far better to refrain from condemning the dissolute than that in so doing one should soil the reputation of an honest man.

We called at Cape Coast Castle, Accra, Lagos, Monrovia and several other places where there are no harbours, and where the surf is so violent that passengers rarely go ashore unless these places are their destination. The longest stop on the voyage was at Old Calabar, sixty miles up the Calabar River, where we stayed five days. Old Calabar when I was there first was the English capital of the Oil Rivers Protectorate, which afterwards became a part of Nigeria. The heat was insufferable; for, while it is possible to keep cool on the hills where the white men live, it is not possible in the low channel of the river, and especially in the cabin of a steamer. The name Old Calabar has a fine far-away sound, like Cairo or Bagdad, and suggests a place of romantic and legendary interest. And indeed the tales of the Arabian Nights scarcely surpass the real history of the native despots that have ruled at Old Calabar even down to the death of King Duke in our own times, when, despite the presence of the English, it is said that five hundred natives were stealthily put to death to furnish the king a seemly retinue in the other world.

The run up the Calabar River is a pleasant variety after the long weeks on the sea. Here we first saw the crocodile, which abounds in all the largest rivers of Africa. It is the ugliest beast in the world. Lying on a bank of mud, its head always towards the water, and among old logs and roots, it looks itself like some gnarled and slimy log, and is difficult to discern. But at the sound of a gun or the near approach of the steamer it slides down into the water quick as a flash. Most of the passengers get their guns and take a few shots at them. In every case the passenger declares that he has shot the crocodile without a doubt; and as the creature disappears into the water there is of course no way of disproving the statement. But when we were coming down the river there seemed to be as many as ever.

The Spanish Island of Fernando Po is the most beautiful place in West Africa. Seen from the harbour in the early morning light or in the soft glow of the evening it is a fairy-land of tropical beauty. The bottom of the semicircular harbour is the crater of an extinct volcano and is very deep. The bank is covered down to the water with a lavish growth of ferns, and trailing vines, and flowers of many colours; while above the palm tree is abundant—the most graceful of all trees, and the billowy bamboo tosses in the breeze. In the middle and extending backwards is the white town of Saint Isabel, and behind the town stands a great solitary mountain of green, which rises to a height of ten thousand feet. Like other fairy-lands it requires the illusion of distance. It appears best from the harbour, and that is true of most tropical beauty. The soil is the most fertile in West Africa. I have seen plantains there full twice as large as any that I have seen elsewhere. For some years it has been producing large quantities of cocoa, most of which is shipped to Spain and thence over the world in the form of chocolate.

Africa is a land of extremes. From Fernando Po crossing again to the mainland we went fifteen miles up the Rio del Rey to the ugliest place in the world. I have also been in the Rio del Rey several times on the homeward voyage, when the steamers usually spend a day there taking on palm-oil and rubber,—a coast steamer would go to Hades for palm-oil and take all the passengers along with it. There is no native village here. The three trading houses receive the produce which the natives bring down the river. All around is one vast mangrove swamp, an ideal mosquito-incubator. The trading-houses are erected upon a foundation made with the ashes of passing steamers, which were saved and deposited here.

The foliage of the mangrove is thin, and at a distance resembles our poplar. But the greater part of the mangrove is a solid mass of roots, almost wholly above ground and more nearly vertical than horizontal. The trees seem to be standing on stilts, six or eight feet long, as if they were trying to keep out of the water. There are also aerial roots, long, leafless and straight, depending from all the branches, even the highest, which as they reach the water spread into several fingers. At the high tide the roots are submerged and the ugliness of the swamp concealed for a while. But as the tide ebbs the roots appear dripping and slimy until they are completely exposed: and as the water still recedes long stretches of fœtid mud-bank appear. The smell has been accumulating for ages. A low-lying mist rises from the oozing banks, and now and then stretches a stealthy arm out over the river, or creeps from root to root. Some one standing near exclaimed: “O heavens, what a place!” I could only wonder at the geographical direction of his thoughts; for my thoughts were of Gehenna and the river Styx. The mangrove swamp is surely the worst that nature has ever been known to do. My feeling of disgust was intensified by many experiences of after years. Sometimes approaching a town at the ebbing tide, a strong native has carried me on his back from the boat to the solid bank, across a waste of sludge, and sometimes he has fallen in the act. Other times, when one could not wade, they have thrown me a line and have dragged me across in a canoe; and I felt that if the canoe should capsize I would sink almost forever; or, perhaps be dug up twenty thousand years hence and exhibited as a pre-historic specimen. “Every prospect pleases,” reads the hymn, “and only man is vile.” But the worst débris of humanity is not half so vile as the prospect of a mangrove swamp at low tide.

The death record of the Rio del Rey is appalling. Every time that I have been there—seven times—the traders that came on board looked like dying men; and often their limbs were bandaged for ulcers or kraw-kraw. I was once on board when an English missionary and his wife debarked at this place, expecting to go on up the river, beyond the swamps, to the mission station in the hills of the interior. The lady was becoming more and more fearful during the voyage, and the effect upon her of this lower river was such that she was almost hysterical. She remained on board all day until we were about to weigh the anchor. The first impression counts for much in the matter of health and resistance to the fever; and the sight of that shrinking woman going ashore in such a place was pitiable; for we all felt that she was doomed. After a few months, however, she escaped with her life; but she was never able to return to Africa. The mangrove swamp stretches along the greater part of the coast of West Africa, and along the rivers where the water is salt or brackish because of the flow of the tide from the sea.

The next experience after the Rio del Rey was a greater contrast than ever. We proceeded forty miles southward and called at Victoria, in the German colony of Cameroon. The harbour at Victoria is divided from the sea by a semicircle of islands, some small and some larger. One of these islands, a large barren rock, when seen from a certain part of the beach, bears a singular though grotesque resemblance to Queen Victoria as she appeared when seated upon the throne. It is presumably from this that the place was given the name Victoria; for the English traders were there before Germany occupied the territory.

Immediately behind the harbour is the great Mount Cameroon, one of the greatest mountains in the world, a solitary peak, which rises immediately from the sea to a height of 13,700 feet; which is twelve hundred feet higher than Teneriffe. It was evening as we approached, and before we had entered the harbour it was night; for in the tropics day darkens quickly into night and there is no twilight. But on the top of the mountain, far above our night, we still saw the rose-red of the lingering day. The moon rose behind the mountain and we steered into the shadow of it closer and closer, for by night it seemed much nearer than it really was. The number of passengers had diminished to a very few, and they were silent; not a voice was heard on the deck. It was the strangest silence I have ever experienced; not the mere negation of sound, but like something positive, and diffused from the mountain itself; a silence more impressive than speech; the silence of an infinite comprehension. The engines stopped: we were ready to cast the anchor, and I found myself wondering how the captain’s voice would sound when in a moment he would shout: “Let go.”

“How fit a place,” someone at length remarked, “for the sounding of the last trumpet and the final judgment! before this mountain which has looked down unchanged upon all the generations that have come and passed away since the world began.”

It is not always silent, however, for the natives, with some sense of its majesty, call it the “Throne of Thunder.” Fierce storms wage battle around its middle height, with terrific peals of thunder such as I have never heard elsewhere. Sometimes for many days it wraps itself in clouds and darkness, completely invisible. I was once a whole week at various ports within a few miles of it, and did not catch a glimpse of it. The clouds wrapped it about to the very base, and there was nothing to indicate that it was there except the unusual frequency of storm and thunder. Then, one day when we were at Victoria, the weather brightened so much that we expected soon to see the peak. I asked a native attendant, a young man, to watch for it and tell me if he saw it. At length, while I was sitting on deck watching for it myself, he exclaimed: “The peak! Mr. Milligan, the peak!”

“Where?” I said. “I don’t see it.”

“Look higher,” he exclaimed.

“I am looking as high as I can. I am looking as high as the sky.”

“Look higher than the sky,” he cried, with native simplicity; “the sky is not high.”

I lifted my eyes still higher towards the zenith, and there, through an expanding rift in the heavy cloud, I saw the peak, calm, bright and beautiful, just as it had been all the time, even when hidden by low-hanging clouds. I have often thought of it since. God is higher than our highest thought, higher than our sky. Our habits of mind and heart, even our theology may hide Him from our sight, until by some unwonted experience these are shattered, and through the rent clouds of our former sky we see the living God.

A short time before I left Africa I spent ten days at a sanitarium of the Basle Mission, on the side of Cameroon, between three and four thousand feet high. I had then been in Africa for years and had tropical blood in my veins, and I suffered much with the cold. There was so much covering on my bed that I was fairly sore with the weight of it, and yet I was cold. The storms raged frequently, hiding the heavens from those below and the earth from us; for we were above the storm-cloud, and dwelt in light and sunshine. The detonation of thunder beneath us was like the muttering rumble of an earthquake.

The German government has built a splendid road from the base of the mountain up to the sanitarium. The road is well graded, and winds upwards like a continuous S, covering a distance of sixteen miles in the ascent. I was delighted when I found that the missionaries would provide me a mule upon which I could ride up to the sanitarium. I am a lover of horses, and often during those years in Africa I had been homesick for the sight of one. The mule, when he appeared, was sleek and strong; I put my arms around his neck and patted him and caressed him as if he were a long-lost friend. Then I mounted him and started up the road, an attendant following behind with another mule and carrying my baggage. The mule which I rode was deeply imbued with Longfellow’s sentiment: “Home-keeping hearts are happiest; to stay at home is best.” He climbed slowly and reluctantly, and by some mysterious operation of the law of gravitation his head had a persistent tendency to turn about and swing down the grade. I soon realized that I could go faster without him, and that the strength which I was expending in keeping him in the path of duty was greater than that which I would require in going my way alone; and I had no strength to spare. Therefore after three or four miles in his company, finding his disposition fixed and unaspiring, I dismounted, and leaving him in the road for the guide, I walked the rest of the sixteen miles.

But ten days later, when I was returning to Victoria, the same mule was again put at my disposal, and I gladly accepted him. For I was much stronger, and I was going in the direction of his own desire; and besides it was down-hill all the way, and I knew that he was too lazy to hold back. The grade was not such that there was any danger to him from running; so I galloped the sixteen miles, and had the ride of my life. I could have shouted with delight. After a few miles I took a severe pain in my side. I dismounted and lay down on the ground. In a little while I was all right again, and taking off a pair of stout suspenders I tied them as tight as possible around my waist with a large clumsy knot at my side. I had already discarded my coat, and my only upper garment was a woolen undershirt with short sleeves. The suspenders around my waist gave me a new accession of strength and I galloped all the rest of the way, with the same pleasure, and entered Victoria where I made something of a sensation. My last association, therefore, with the great mountain, was not an impression of its solemn majesty, but the memory of a jolly good ride.

MISSION HOUSE AT BATANGA.

I was glad when at last we reached Batanga, and the long voyage was over. Our attention was drawn to the canoes in which men were fishing, and for which Batanga is famous. The quiet morning sea was dotted with them within a radius of a mile around us, some of them being two miles from the shore. The Batanga canoe is the smallest on the entire coast. It is almost as light as bark; the men come to the beach in the morning carrying their canoes on their heads. It is quite an entertainment to see them going out through the surf, and I have seen a canoe capsized half a dozen times in the attempt. Later in the day, when the surf is heavier, they cannot get out at all. At sea the man straddles his canoe and lets his legs hang in the water; and in this fashion he sometimes ventures two miles from the shore.

We anchored nearly a mile from the beach and were sent ashore in a surf-boat manned by native Krumen. There is no harbour at Batanga, and the landing in the surf was the most exciting of my African experiences until that time. As we entered the surf the boat stood still for a moment, until caught up on the breast of a breaker, and—“Then, like a pawing horse let go, she made a sudden bound,” and we were carried towards the beach with violent speed that looked like destruction for us all. The crest of the breaker passed under us, however, when we were close to the beach, and immediately the Krumen leaped into the water, and with all their might ran the boat up on the beach far enough to escape the next wave. Then, while most of them placed themselves around the boat to steady it, the rest of them presented their backs to the passengers and yelled at them to jump on and ride ashore.

As the pitching boat was poised for a moment, standing on the gunwale, I seized a Kruman firmly by the hair with both my hands, and leaped upon him, astride his neck with my legs over his shoulders. I had put on a fresh white suit for the occasion, notwithstanding that I had been instructed by the Old Coasters that the Kruman, with his unique sense of humour, makes it a point to drop the new comer into the surf and present him to his friends ashore as much bedraggled and beflustered as possible. I also had on the inevitable cork helmet, so bulky, and drooping over the eyes. Most men unaccustomed to them feel as awkward as they would in a Gainsborough hat. The Kruman, I am glad to report, did not drop me; perhaps because I kept so firm a hold on his hair that he did not know how much of it he might lose by a sudden or unexpected separation from me. It was probably my own fault, and not his, that when he stooped to deposit me, I missed the trick of lighting on my feet, which I afterwards learned. I reached the ground on all fours, in the wet sand. The white helmet fell from my head and rolled off towards the sea and I followed it, running quadrupedal fashion, and snatched it from an approaching wave.

A moment later I was exchanging greetings with a group of missionaries who had gathered on the beach.

At this landing on the beach I observed that we were standing under a cocoa-palm. I looked up, and lo, there was no snake hanging from it. Now, the most vivid impression—in fact the only impression of Africa that I had carried thus far through life, except that of sunny fountains rolling down golden strands, was made by a picture in the old-fashioned geography; in which there were crowded together, with contempt of perspective, an elephant, a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros, a lion, a leopard, a gorilla, a chimpanzee, several other monkeys, and a python hanging from a tree.

“They are all here,” said some one, in explanation; “but they are not so thick on the ground as you may have supposed.”

REV. A. C. GOOD, Ph.D.

Dr. Good died at Efulen at the age of thirty-seven. He was a man of the Livingstone type.

III
BUSH TRAVEL

Upon our arrival at Batanga we at once commenced the preparations for a journey into the bush, than which nothing could have been a greater contrast to the long, idle voyage on the sea; for our physical strength and powers of endurance were to be taxed more than ever before.

There were two others besides myself, Mr. Kerr, a new arrival, and the Rev. A. C. Good, an intrepid and consecrated missionary whose name was already known throughout the United States. Dr. Good had been twelve years in Africa, working most of the time among the Fang of the Ogowé River, but had lately come to Batanga for the purpose of opening the Bulu interior. The language of the Fang was so much like the Bulu that Dr. Good could converse with the latter from the first. Before the arrival of Mr. Kerr and myself Dr. Good had already made one journey into the Bulu country to a distance of seventy-five miles, where he chose the site of the first station, afterwards named Efulen.

In those days nearly all the distance between Efulen and the beach was covered with dense unbroken forest. None of the Bulu as far as we knew had ever been to the coast; and no white man had ever entered that part of the interior. The Mabeya tribe, living immediately behind the coast tribe, were already in trade relations with the Bulu; so that there were roads, that is, foot-paths, through the forest. But they were seldom used, and were only a little better than none at all. The present good bush-road from Batanga to Efulen did not exist in those days. We made it ourselves after we had been there nearly a year, and it has been greatly improved from time to time. The first road which we followed made a great detour to the south, and we walked, according to Dr. Good’s calculation, seventy-five miles from Batanga to Efulen, although the distance by the present straight road is less than sixty miles.

And, by the way, before we enter the forest, bidding a temporary farewell to civilization, we do well to take leave of this highly civilized term, “mile.” It is more than superfluous in such a forest: it is positively misleading. Such roads are not measured in terms of linear distance, but only in measures of time. To say that a place is distant half a day’s journey, or five hours, is to speak intelligibly; but to say that a place is five miles distant is to give not the slightest information as to the time it will take to reach it. On the few good roads which in recent years have been improved by the government one might perhaps walk thirty miles a day: on the worst roads that I have attempted I could not walk five miles a day with equal labour.

Men can now walk to Efulen in three days over the present road, and I with others have done it in that time, although in greatly reduced health; yet I was not nearly so tired as when I used to walk it in five days over the road that we first followed. The greater distance was by no means the only difference; the chief difference was in the quality of the road. The first road was so obscure that in many places we could scarcely follow it; and in some places it was so completely overgrown that we had to cut our way through, making the road as we went, for which reason we always kept men with cutlasses ahead of the caravan. Much also depends upon the season. A road might be very good and easy to travel in the dry season, but almost, or quite, impassable in the wet season, when the forest is flooded, when the streams have become rivers and the rivers have far overspread their banks, so that the traveller is wading in water much of the time. In opening a new station we could not choose our time for travel, and it so happened that in my year and a half at Efulen I only made two round trips in the dry season.

The African forest is the greatest in the world, both in the area covered and in the density of growth. The tribes with whom I am familiar conceive of the whole world as a vast bush intersected with rivers. The tribes are moving ever from the interior towards the sea; and some of those who have long been coast tribes still retain in the idiom of their language the record of their former ignorance. The word for “river” is used to designate the sea, and “the whole world” is “the whole bush.” A man will speak of his country as his “bush,” and the white man’s country he calls “the white man’s bush.” God, they say, loves “the whole bush.” Heaven, or the other world, is “the other bush,” and in singing “I have a Father in the promised land,” they say: “I have a Father in the bush beyond.”

One who is accustomed to the maple, beech, oak and pine, finds the African forest strangely unfamiliar. There are extremes of soft and hard woods; and one will soon observe that as a rule the soft woods have large leaves, while most of the hard woods have small leaves. Teak, mahogany, lignum vitæ, ebony and camwood are characteristic. The most striking and beautiful tree of the forest is a species of cotton wood. It grows an enormous height, with a silver-gray trunk like a column of granite, and is supported by immense buttresses. In the primeval forest, that which has not at any time been cut down for man’s habitation, the foliage is very high and the gray trunks suggest the columns of a cathedral. The branches above interlace, forming a canopy of foliage and excluding the sun. Cable vines of various sizes, many of them six or eight inches in diameter, lash the trees together, ascending the tree trunks in a spiral coil like an endless python and sometimes strangling them to death, then swinging from tree to tree in loops and coils, gnarled and twisted. The foliage and flowers of these spread through the tree tops, making the dim light below more dim, and from the swinging cables an undisciplined profusion of other vines and various hanging plants depend in festoons and draperies, all interwoven in bewildering confusion. The ground is covered with a thick compost of rotting leaves and branches and insects. Every few yards a giant tree trunk lies prostrate and is filled with myriad insects that will soon devour it.

Lightning sometimes strikes the tallest trees, which come crashing down bringing half a dozen others with them. Then in this open place where the sunlight reaches the ground there shoots up with amazing rapidity a tangled undergrowth, from which young trees race upwards to secure the light and air in such rivalry and struggle that the weak are soon strangled or crowded to death, and the battle is to the swift.

The poet William Watson in melodious verses prays for—

“The advent of that morn divine

When nations may as forests grow,

Wherein the oak hates not the pine,

Nor beeches wish the cedars woe,

But all in their unlikeness blend

Confederate to one golden end.”

No one will deny that this is beautiful poetry; but it is deplorably false science. Nothing could be more untrue to the facts. The oak, the pine and the cedar, considered as living things with conscious aims and individual interests (for that is how the poet would have us consider them), do hate each other with a hatred to which there is no parallel in human society. Men sacrifice for each other, and we even have martyrs. But in the forest there is no sacrifice, no martyrdom, nor do trees ever confederate; but each fights for itself in a ceaseless and savage struggle. And nowhere else in the forest world is the struggle for existence so remorseless as in the tropic zone of Africa; for nowhere else is variety so profuse and growth so rapid.

In the primeval forest the undergrowth is not dense and travel is not so difficult. But as the natives are always moving their towns and abandoning old sites, a considerable portion of the forest is the growth of a few years; and here the undergrowth is so dense and matted that there is no possibility of passing through it except as one tunnels his way with the cutlass, and the jungle closes on both sides of the path like a wall. This is the usual character of the bush along the rivers. There are not many flowers in the forest. The most common is the orchid. But flowers are numerous in the clearings and more open places. In particular there is a lovely convolvulus of delicate lavender that climbs over all the lower growth of the clearing and blooms in such profusion as to give its colour to the landscape. The impression of the beauty or the ugliness of the forest depends largely upon whether one sees it in the wet or the dry season. In the dry season, travelling on a fairly good road, the idea of the cathedral with its solemn majesty was often present with me; I was impressed with its beauty and enjoyed the solitude. But in the wet season I loathed it. Who could enjoy, or even recognize, beauty while standing knee-deep in mud? Its stillness is not the stillness that speaks to the mind and heart. It is dull and dead.

We had twenty-eight native carriers (whom we must call porters when speaking to Englishmen) each with a load of about forty pounds. They often carry more than twice that weight over the present road to Efulen; seventy pounds is the standard load. But besides the better roads there is also this great difference that the natives were at that time new to the work of carrying heavy loads, to which they have since become accustomed. The present young men have grown up in the work. Besides our personal effects and food supplies we carried trade-goods, with which to buy food and building material from the natives, and to pay native workmen. There was no currency in that interior tribe. We paid out principally salt, beads, and brass rods, the latter used for ornaments for the legs and arms. After a year there was some demand for cloth—highly coloured prints—and other articles for which there was no use at first.

We were dressed in suits of denim or other cheap material. I bought my suit at a trading-house in Batanga for two dollars, and packed away all my better clothing. Beneath the coat I wore a heavy woollen undershirt, the only proper kind for the tropics, and proper all the time, no matter what else one may choose or discard. We were glad to discard the helmet while travelling in the forest, and to substitute a felt hat. Tastes differ widely as to the best footwear; but I like best for such a road a pair of canvas shoes with rubber soles, alternating with stout leather shoes every second or third day. Each man carries a wooden stick or staff about five feet in length. When a man has chosen and trimmed for himself a stick that exactly suits him, he becomes attached to it with a sentimental regard, according to the distance he has travelled with it and the journeys he has made. He is sensitive to any criticism passed upon it; and no experienced bush-traveller will make disparaging remarks about another man’s staff, but around the camp-fire they will vie with each other in praising each his own. I remember mine very well and I would give much to have it now.

Perhaps this attachment is the stronger because, as a rule, we do not carry watches in that country. Most watches will run only for a short time. A fine gold watch is the most useless of all; the very cheapest will run longest. When I began to tell this in America, I found that I was sacrificing my reputation for accuracy of statement: whereupon I stated the facts to a jeweller who, after consideration, said there was a very plain explanation, namely, that the hair-spring of the more expensive movements is usually finer and more closely coiled than that of the cheaper watches, so fine that the least rust upon it would interfere with its motion.

Our outfit for the road was very light. This was Dr. Good’s habit and with me it was a kind of instinct. We were measuring our strength against the forces of the forest, testing our ability to endure and to wrest from the forest itself the means of enduring. Having this feeling, to carry along the ready-made comforts of civilization seems like taking a mean advantage of nature. Some few things must be taken. But the opinions of the wisest differ as to what those few things should be, and each man ardently believes in, and advocates his own outfit. The explanation is that nothing of the outfit except food is an absolute necessity. Other things, however important, are of the nature of comforts; and what is necessary to one man’s comfort, another can often do without.

One may suggest for such a journey a good water-proof bag containing a sweater, extra socks and pajamas, and two blankets. A good rubber blanket is a necessity if one expects to sleep in the open forest. Canned foods, of course, are used, and for cooking utensils, a frying-pan and a sauce-pan will suffice for three, and a cup, tin plate, knife, fork and spoon for each. Several cutlasses are necessary for clearing the road, preparing beds, cutting fire-wood and other uses. Matches also must be taken and kept in a dry place. A few towels and toilet articles complete the necessary outfit. On our first journey we took camp-beds, but only because we had need of them at Efulen. I never carried one again.

Besides this general and common outfit each man nearly always has some one article that nobody else carries but himself, and that, in his mind, is more important than anything else. I do not remember what Mr. Kerr’s indispensable was, for we never walked together except this once, it being necessary that either one of us should stay at the station. Mine, however, was a pair of leather gloves, at which Dr. Good used to laugh; for we travelled often together. But they saved me much loss of blood and the pain of torn hands from the brambles and long briers that stretched across the path, and they also enabled me to protect my face from them by pushing them aside better than I could have done with bare hands. Dr. Good’s indispensable was a mosquito-net with canopy and sides which he also urged upon me as a necessity and which I insisted was a superfluity. There were no mosquitoes in our camping-places in the forest; but he used the net to protect against damp and against any slight motion of the air, for one takes cold very easily and the least cold is liable to induce fever. We had many a good-natured “scrap” over these hobbies; but neither of us ever converted the other. There was, however, one article with which I was always well supplied and for which Dr. Good himself usually thanked me before the end of a journey, and that was the indispensable safety-pin. I never foresaw any particular use for it, but many uses unforeseen invariably emerged as we travelled. Some travellers carry a piece of oiled baize in a convenient and accessible place. It can be used to sit down on; for one can never sit on the ground, even if it is dry, because of insects. But its special use is for an apron, which is attached with safety-pins and worn in the morning through the dripping shrubbery. If one is wearing high shoes he can even keep his feet dry by this means.

The road that threads the forest from Batanga to Efulen was a narrow foot-path twelve inches wide and poorly beaten. The wet season had begun and the rains had been falling two or three weeks. The road was not even as good as we had expected; for Dr. Good, who had fully described it, had passed over it at the end of the dry season, when the road was at the best. The typical African road is a contorted line that vacillates and swerves to right and left, turning and twisting at acute angles continually, and often for no apparent reason, as if it had been made by some crazy person. But in such cases there was always an original reason even when it no longer exists. For instance, the native carrying a load finds a tree fallen across the path. It is easier for him with his load to go around it than to climb over it. But a log does not remain long in an African forest. Between insects and rot it is soon demolished. Meantime, along its length there has grown up a dense undergrowth; and rather than cut through this the native keeps to the path, now beaten, which passed around the log; and the new traveller wonders why the path should not be straight. It is estimated that an African road is a third longer in each mile by reason of its crookedness. But this is not the only peculiarity of a forest path. African trees have enormous roots, and much of them is above ground. This is the chief obstruction, and there are many others.

No two successive steps are the same length, nor upon the same level. If the attention is diverted for a moment, one may stumble and fall. The road carefully avoids the hills and keeps down in the lowest parts. The natives, carrying loads, dislike climbing, but they have not the least aversion to mud; indeed, it has some advantages for their bare feet. One passes through every variety of it and every depth. The road often follows the bed of a stream for a distance, a foot or more under water or in mud, according to the season. Meanwhile, the part of the traveller that is above ground is kept moist by the dripping shrubbery that meets across the path. Many of the shrubs are covered with thorns, spines and hooks. One of the worst of these, armed with sharp spikes and not easy to see because it bears but little foliage, sprawls across the path just high enough to catch the average man under the chin, where it leaves a mark that looks as if it might have been made with a cross-cut saw. Then, again, there are long stretches of road that are not any worse than crossing a ploughed field after a rain. Every day, and sometimes several times a day, we forded streams, often wading to the waist, and we rather enjoyed it after the mud.

The deeper ravines we crossed on bridges. Bridge-building in Africa is no great triumph of mechanical engineering. The bridges which crossed the narrower ravines and gorges consisted simply of several long, slender poles laid down side by side. They ought to be on a level but are not. One is six inches or a foot higher than the other, and there is so much spring in them that the feat of crossing is equal to a tight-rope performance. Over extensively flooded areas where the water is too deep to wade, a bridge of single poles is supported in forked uprights at intervals of the length of the poles, and above the bridge a rope of vine is stretched to hold with the hand. It happened more than once that by some mishap we tumbled into the stream below; but the natives were quick to fish us out.

The worst part of the journey was on the last day, through the new clearings which the natives had made for their gardens. In these the whole forest lay prostrate,—trees great and small, the tangled mass of vines, and all the débris made by its crashing fall. The whole enormous mass is left lying until the lighter parts of it dry: then it is burned over. This burning is repeated at long intervals until at length much of it is burned away. But by this time the natives are perhaps thinking of deserting it and making a new garden somewhere else, or they may have moved their town away. Meanwhile, they somehow reach the ground and plant their cassava which flourishes in the fresh, rich soil. The difficulty in an African garden is not to get things to grow, but to keep other things from growing. They never hesitate to fell the forest thus across the road, obstructing the caravans and bringing curses on their heads.

One might think on approaching a town through one of these clearings that it had been made as a formidable defense in time of war. To go through it is a tedious and exhausting trial. One moment the traveller is crawling on all fours under a log; then he walks up the inclined trunk of a tree a distance of fifty feet, then turns and follows one of its branches, from this leaps to a branch of another tree which he follows down to the trunk, which is perhaps ten feet above the ground, while below him are upright sticks or broken branches upon which he may be impaled if he falls, or at least badly bruised. From this he mounts a cross-log and proceeds downwards to another which he follows until it brings him five feet from the ground, when he jumps the rest of the way, crawls under another log, proceeds a few yards on the ground, mounts another log, follows it until he finds himself again six feet off the ground and wondering how he will reach it; but the next moment he has already reached it and wonders how he got there. Then he does this all over again, and then again. I never passed through such a clearing without getting bruised or hurt in some way. The natives with their bare feet climb over these smooth logs better than the white man with his shoes unless they have rubber soles; in the morning before the dew has dried it is especially hard. It is much harder from the fact that we are no longer in the shade of the forest, but exposed to the fierce tropical sun unrelieved by the least breeze because of the surrounding forest.

A caravan with their heavy loads, walking through such a forest ruin, presents a picturesque scene to the spectator. Some are crawling under logs, some are climbing on top of them, half a dozen are walking in procession up an inclined trunk, some are walking a log ten feet in the air, others are twisting their way through a maze of branches and some have fallen to the ground. With such a clearing in mind, and remembering what has been said about African bridges, the reader will not be likely to ask the oft-repeated question, why donkeys and horses are not more used. The use of either would necessitate the carrying of a derrick with rope and tackle.

This recalls to my mind an occasion some years afterwards that afforded high amusement to some friends of mine. I had been home in America for several years and was about to go to Africa a second time when I received a visit from Mr. Kerr, who was home on furlough. He gave me an enthusiastic account of the work done by the German government in improving the Bulu roads,—although it was perhaps the road to Lolodorf rather than that to Efulen of which he was speaking. He declared that as compared with the first roads that he and I had travelled, I would never recognize it as an African road; for it was “grand,”—“simply grand.”

With an outburst of enthusiasm I replied that since I might be appointed to that station, and since the road was “simply grand,” I would buy a pair of donkeys at the Canary Islands and take them with me.

“Man alive!” he exclaimed, “one would think you had never been in Africa; a donkey couldn’t get over it.”

To my friends it was a hopeless paradox that a road could be “simply grand,” and yet be impassable to a donkey. Nevertheless, about that time they began using donkeys on the road to Efulen, so much had the roads been improved in the intervening years, and they have been using them more and more since that time. There is difficulty, however, in getting them over the streams and ravines, and I am not sure whether they are used to advantage in the wet season.

Only experience will teach a man to walk the bush-road with the least effort; and some never learn. I can remember yet how on that first morning I shrunk from the water and the mud, trying to keep my feet dry and my clothes clean. I think Mr. Kerr had more sense from the beginning. I, however, was in a state of rigidity, both physical and mental, that would soon have exhausted me. But after a while a kindly Providence took me in hand, sending upon me a rapid succession of blessings in disguise. The mud lay deep in the path and I was trying to straddle it as I walked, when, as I sprang forward to clear a wider space, some demon was evidently permitted to catch my foot and throw it up, with the result that I landed full length on my back in the mud. A few minutes later the same impalpable enemy tripped me and I fell headlong on my stomach. Still later we reached a broad, black, quiescent pond of water of the consistency of molasses.

“Can you swim?” said Dr. Good to me; “I forgot to ask you that.”

“Yes,” said I, thinking of the glowing description he had given me of the road, “there were several things you forgot to ask me, and some things you forgot to tell. But even if I could not swim in clear water, I could probably swim in that pond.”

We plunged in and were able to wade through it.

Shortly after this a drenching rain fell, a tropical downpour, that wet us to the skin. In this rain we stood and ate our first lunch, some fresh biscuits which one of the ladies at Batanga had baked that morning, saying as she tied them up for us in heavy oil paper, that it would be the last food of that sort that we would taste for a long time. But when the rain came on, the native carrier who had them in charge appropriated the oil paper to carry his shirt in, leaving the biscuits exposed to the rain. As we stood eating them while it still rained, it was with mitigated sorrow we reflected that it would be the last of that sort we would taste for a long time. I will admit that this was a dreary outset, but it was not unfortunate. My tenderfoot rigidity had completely relaxed for the remainder of the day. I cared not what happened afterwards, and walked without timidity, fearing neither mud nor water, nor height, nor depth, nor any such thing.

No amount of experience and practice in walking long distances on our public roads at home will insure success in walking a bush-path. In the latter there are constant obstructions and frequent annoyances, the obstructions requiring a peculiar physical aptitude, the annoyances a peculiar mental aptitude. The native possesses both aptitudes to a marvellous degree. The average native, carrying on his back a load of forty pounds, can keep up with the average white man carrying nothing. Yet, I have no doubt that on a turnpike, neither of them carrying anything, the average white man would equal the native and perhaps outwalk him. It must also be remembered that the white man is in a hostile climate in Africa, and is never normally strong.

We started in the morning as soon as it was light enough to see the path, that is, about six o’clock, and walked eight or nine hours a day, stopping an hour at noon. We walked at a very rapid pace, almost on a run where the path would permit. About four o’clock we stopped for the day, usually at a camping-ground made by the natives in carrying produce from the interior. These camps were open glades surrounded by the forest wall and ceiled by the blue sky.

Two or three nights we camped beside a flowing stream, a hidden brook, that “all night to the sleeping woods sang a quiet tune.”

After sitting ten minutes I followed along a short distance till I found an inviting spot where the pellucid stream widened and spread over a sand bottom, and there, all mud-bespattered, perspiring, weary and sore, I lay down in the cool, running stream, with my clothes on. Does the reader know what luxury is? Certainly not, unless after eight or nine hours of walking and wading over such a road he has lain down in a cool stream with his clothes on. I turn my face to one side and then the other, and let the flowing water caress my cheek, and as it washes away the mire from my clothing, it also soothes the weary limbs and sore joints and smoothes out the wrinkles of care; and my heart answers back in a song to the murmur of its music. This is the ancient Lethean stream in which the weary and the aged bathed and became oblivious of pain and sorrow. After a bath I get into woollen pajamas and slippers, and sit down a little later to the best repast of modern times—an absolutely unlimited quantity of boiled rice and corned beef. “Is this really corned beef?” said I; “it tastes like angel.” Does the reader know what luxury is? Not unless after such a journey he has sat down to such a meal. For luxury is not something objective in the thing that we enjoy, but in the keenness of our relish; and that depends upon contrast—in this instance the contrast of rest and food with hard and hungry endurance. A few days after reaching New York, I attended a banquet at which was served I know not how many courses, the richest and the best. Objectively, it was everything that ingenuity could devise; only keen-edged appetite was wanting. And I was saying within me to my fellow guests: “Ah! I have a secret that you know not. This is only a taste of luxury; but if you would enjoy it to the full measure of your capacity, you must follow me eight hours through the fell roads of the jungle, bathe in running water, get into woollen pajamas, and then sit down in an arboreal salle à manger to a banquet of unlimited rice and corned beef.”

We usually slept under booths made from the boughs of trees which we found in most of the camps. The most primitive bed and that which we sometimes used, was made by cutting slender, round poles six feet long and laying them side by side on two cross-sticks at the head and foot. The native carrier sleeps on this bed of poles with nothing under him and nothing over him; but when possible he keeps a fire beside him. We white men were wrapped in a blanket or two. But the use of such a bed is not wise when it can be avoided, and it is seldom necessary. More than once some one unable to sleep had to rise in the dark, find one or two bags in which loads were packed, spill the contents on the ground (making such a noise that one suddenly waking might suppose that an elephant had charged the camp) and spread the bags upon the bed in the hope of subduing the effect of its knots and depressions and its general hardness. I soon discarded that sort of bed and preferred to bivouac in a hammock of stout and stiff canvas, suspended between two trees, with a rope stretched taut above it upon which I threw a large and light rubber blanket which formed a gable over me. This was, at least for me, the most comfortable and luxurious bush-bed that I ever slept in.

But in the early morning of the second day both comfort and luxury seemed remote and unrealizable ideas. There is a miserable chill in the forest at five o’clock in the morning that always makes one reluctant to leave his warm blankets; and on that morning it was raining. After coming out of the stream the night before, I had wrung out of my clothes what water I could, and they remained without further drying until I put them on in the morning to the accompaniment of chattering teeth, for they seemed as cold as ice. The boys’ fires had all gone out and we ate some boiled rice left over from the night before—ate it standing; for sitting down one’s clothes will get next to him, but standing up one can shrink away from them, or, at least, he can try. After some experience I was almost able to stand up in a suit of clothes without letting them touch me. Everything was wet and cold and the branches and shrubs shook water on us. There is a right way and a wrong way to conquer the ill-will of such a morning. The wrong way is to confess your misery, to shiver and shrink and try to save yourself. The right way is to plunge into it suddenly, get wet as quickly as possible, step lively, and make believe that you like it. The power of this mental attitude is astonishing, and with a little determination you will soon be master of the situation.

Before the end of the second day we discovered that the native stomach is made of the finest kind of rubber. Before leaving Batanga we had given to each carrier a supply of food for seven days, and before the end of the second day, some of them had eaten it all. That meant hunger and trouble for all those “foolish virgins” for the rest of the journey. It also meant trouble for us. The others divided with them, as they nearly always do when this happens. But still they did not have enough and all were hungry before the end of the journey. In consequence they were too weak to carry their loads. They lagged behind and grumbled continually, and sometimes they seemed on the point of refusing to go on. The difference between a good carrier and a poor one is often simply this, that the one stops eating when he is full and the other stops only when the supply of food is exhausted.

IV
BUSH PERILS

“By what I have read in books, I think few that have held a pen were ever really wearied, or they would write of it more strongly.”—Robert Louis Stevenson.

Several months later Dr. Good and I returned from the interior to Batanga, passing over the road at its very worst. It was near the end of the wet season. For many weeks the rains had fallen day and night. The forest was flooded; the streams were rushing rivers, and the rivers had far overspread their banks. Beyond these floods were marshes which were still worse. Where the water was too deep to be waded, temporary bridges such as I have described had been constructed, consisting of a single line of poles extending from one support to another, sometimes two or three feet under the water, with a rope of vine stretched a few feet above that one might hold with his hand. These bridges were more simple than ingenious, and more ingenious than safe. A number of times the vine above broke, upon which we lost our balance and fell into the water but were rescued by a life-saving crew of the carriers. For in crossing the worst places we always waited for the carriers. Nor did we proceed until we saw all the loads over safely. One or two crossed at a time and the others, having laid down their loads, stood by to be of service in case of accident. In one place when we were crossing a rushing stream in which the bridge was buried two feet under the water, the line of poles beneath our feet suddenly came to an end, having been swept away by the current, and we crossed the deepest part on the upper vine alone going hand over hand until our feet came in contact with another pole. But this let us down into the water almost to our necks. In another place, crossing a considerable stretch of water, the bridge was such that Dr. Good preferred to cross by climbing the trees and passing along the interlacing branches.

We were seven days on the way between Efulen and Batanga, including a Sunday on which we rested. I was a convalescent, having recently been sick with a very severe fever that had kept me in bed for more than a month, and I was still weak. Indeed, the reason for hurrying to the coast at this time instead of waiting for the dry season was chiefly my need of a physician. The first day I walked four hours very slowly and could do no more; but my strength increased greatly on the way and we walked further each day.

On that journey we had to use the cutlasses very often to clear the road so as to make it passable; and one day we found the road so flooded that we were obliged to leave it and for several hours we cut our way through the matted undergrowth where there was no road; but it was very slow work. That same day Dr. Good, in jumping over a muddy place, lighted on a slippery stick that was hidden beneath the surface and fell headlong. I was following so close behind that I was already in mid-air when he fell; and, of course, I tripped over him and fell too. For a few seconds at least we were a sorry sight. There was a stream near by, however, and we washed away the portion of German territory that clung to us, and made a presentable toilet.

But Dr. Good had fallen on a projecting root and had hurt his side quite badly. It was like him to say nothing about it until, as we stood at the stream, I observed that he was pale. Then he told me that he had hurt himself and that there was a pain in his side. He thought that a band tied around his waist would relieve him; so I peeled a strip of bark four inches wide from a tree and tied it tight around him, over his coat, making a bow at his back. Considered æsthetically it left much to be desired, but it served the purpose. He walked with difficulty the first hour or two; then the pain gradually subsided, and although he was bruised, it occasioned him no further trouble.

On the last night of our long immurement in the forest, we camped for the first time in an open glade where the sun had warmed and dried the ground, and the wood also was dry enough to enable us to have a big camp-fire. We kept the fire all night, and for the first time on the way got our clothes well dried. Not only were they dry; they were even warm when we dressed in the morning. We were in high spirits and greatly enjoyed our breakfast. But immediately upon starting out, and before our blood was in vigorous circulation, we came to a long stretch of water covering acres of ground. We were greatly surprised at this, for Dr. Good knew this place and had not expected any such thing. The explanation, as we found two hours later, was that a little town had just been built near by and the people, being at war with their neighbours, had dammed a stream so as to surround their town with water and marsh for defense against the approach of their enemies. This unsightly and disgusting place they were very proud of as serving admirably their purpose of safety.

When we came to the water we waded in and walked on and on not knowing its extent. But at last we were in almost to our shoulders, and Dr. Good suggested that I should wait while he looked for the road, for he knew the way better than I. It was long before he found it and I stood for an hour in the water. I had never felt any ill effects from wading water, but now I was standing, not wading; and I had not done any walking that morning to invigorate me. Before we had proceeded far after leaving the water, my joints were stiff and muscles sore, especially the tendons of the heel and the knee, and every step cost pain. But we had the longest day of all before us, and our food supply being exhausted, we must reach Batanga that night. It was a day I shall never forget. To the pain of aching joints and sore muscles was soon added that of exhaustion. It happened that I had been quoting Heine and passing severe moral verdicts upon him for saying somewhere—“Psychical pain is more easily borne than physical; and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former.” This, no doubt, is pure paganism; but now when I was suffering something of the weakness and pain that poor Heine endured, I am afraid that if I had been offered a bad conscience in exchange for physical suffering, with the sure promise that I could get my better conscience back again at the beach, I might have succumbed to the temptation. Thank God that in the crises we seldom have the choice. At any rate, Heine did not seem so much of a pagan that day as when I sat by the warm camp-fire the night before descanting on another’s pain, and Dr. Good did not have to listen to further moral dissertations on my part. Hours before we reached the beach my legs were fainting under me but still we walked on with long strides and at the usual rapid pace, threading the forest while hour was added to hour.

We did not take our usual noonday rest, for we both knew that if I should stop walking for a little while I would be unable to go on. We usually chatted together as we walked, but that day from noon until we reached the beach, I do not recall that a word was spoken. Dr. Good was too wise to express the sympathy that I knew he felt. We had always taken turns in setting the pace; but at noon I said to him: “You go ahead; I am not equal to the extra mental exertion of setting the pace: it will be easier for me to keep up with you.”

The last hour of that interminable day was through a grass field where we were exposed to the sun and the heat. The rank grass was much higher than our heads and intercepted the sea-breeze. It also cut my arms and face till I was covered with blood; for I was too tired to protect myself. Each successive step required a new decision, and an effort involving the utmost conjoint exertion of mind and body. My teeth were set and I was breathing audibly. At last we entered a native town and as we passed through the long street, the people and their chief, Bivinia, came trooping forward with cordial greetings and hands extended towards us; but I neither extended my hand nor replied to their salutations. Indeed, my mind was so concentrated on the effort that it required to keep on walking that I was only half-conscious of the presence and attention of the natives; they were like forms moving to and fro in an uneasy dream. But the longest day has an end. We reached Dr. Good’s house and I threw myself into a chair while he dispatched a messenger to Mr. Gault who lived two miles further, asking Mr. Gault to send men with a hammock to carry me on to his house where I was going to stay.

It is doubtful whether one ever recovers from such an unnatural straining of nerves and muscles. The muscles in a few days may regain their elasticity and the joints their suppleness; but somewhat of the power of endurance is lost and especially the quality of resiliency, the power of quickly recovering from mental or physical prostration, leaving one an easier victim of virulent disease; and nerves so overwrought may from time to time wreak the vengeance of untold misery through all the after years.

During the following dry season we employed a force of men in making a new road, the present road from Batanga to Efulen. It is practically straight, and therefore much shorter than the old road, so that a good walker can make the journey in three days. Moreover, it follows higher ground and is more dry. We also cut down many trees along the way, which relieved the gloom, although the road still passes beneath a leafy arcade sufficient to protect from the sun. We improved the bridges and wherever possible made a bridge by felling a tree. But the native roads, except the few that have been improved by white men, are still such as I have described. It happened also that most of our journeys were at first made in the wet season. After the first year, however, that was no longer necessary, and we began to feel that the pioneer period was drawing to a close. But I presume that those who now live at Efulen and other interior stations, in journeys to the further interior, especially to towns off the main road, if they travel in the wet season, find just such roads as we first travelled.

The last time I walked from Efulen during my first term in Africa, I enjoyed the journey. The forest was more dry than I had believed it could be. The ground was strewn with leaves suggestive of our autumn. Nor was it dark and depressing as before. Upon the forest-canopy of green, supported by tall columns of sombre gray, the light danced and played like sunshine on rippling water and shone through in silvery streams and shifting golden bars. The forest floor was a humus of soft mould and light, dry leaves. The low green undergrowth, closing the path before and behind me, now that it was not dripping with water, was attractive, and gave a pleasant sense of privacy combining with the subtle sense of companionship with the vast life of the great forest. For it was no longer the dead, repellent jungle of some months ago, but a real forest in which one loves to walk alone, a forest full of mystery and spiritual suggestion, whose stillness speaks to us in a language that we strive to understand, or gives, as Tennyson says, “A hint of somewhat unexprest:”

“’Tis not alone the warbling woods,

The starred abysses of the sky,

The silent hills, the stormy floods,

The green, that fills the eye.—

These only do not move the breast;

Like some wise Artist, Nature gives

Through all her works, to each that lives,

A hint of somewhat unexprest.”

In setting out from Efulen we always had a “palaver” with the carriers which in one instance, at least, threatened to become a fight. Dr. Good on his first journey before my arrival in Africa had paid the carriers a certain amount for the round trip; for they had to carry their loads both ways. One can scarcely overestimate the authority of precedent in Africa. The citation of a precedent is sufficient to justify any subsequent action that may be to the advantage of him who cites it, even though the action be flagitious and the precedent only remotely relevant. A single precedent may establish a custom and established custom is a despot from whom there is no appeal, and whose authority transcends moral law. A Kruman, if asked why he does this or that, thinks that he gives the most lucid explanation when he answers: “It be fashion for we country.” We had expected to pay our carriers from Batanga to Efulen less than Dr. Good had paid, since they were carrying loads only one way. But his one trip had established the amount of pay, and at the first mention of lower prices there was a storm of protest accompanied by scathing moral observations. It made no difference to them, they averred, whether or not they carried loads both ways; they would just as soon walk with a load as without one, and indeed a little rather. We had no alternative, so we paid the full price of a round trip; but we stipulated that if at any time we should wish to send loads from the interior to Batanga, we should require the carriers to take them without any additional pay; and to this they cordially agreed.

It was seldom that we had anything but mail to send to Batanga, except when one of ourselves was going, and then we usually had four or five loads. But there were always several times this number of carriers. Some few, therefore, must be selected to carry the loads, while the rest walked light. It was natural, I suppose, that when they knew a white man was going back with them to Batanga they should all pretend to be sick in order to escape carrying a load. So sure as they heard me coming towards their house in the early morning to choose several carriers, immediately they presented such a spectacle of suffering as was never seen in any hospital. It was very perplexing for almost invariably some one or two of them were really sick and quite unfit to carry loads. On one occasion as I approached, the scene was more heartrending than usual. There were means and cries and shrieks such as might issue from a railroad wreck in which a score of broken and mangled human beings were pinioned by the wreckage. I found them sitting and lying around in every posture of pain. Some were nursing sore feet and sprained ankles, some had violent attacks of indigestion, several had fever, and one had a fit. Each one was occupied with his own suffering and betrayed no consciousness of my presence.

After looking around I walked out without speaking. I made a bold guess as to the sick and the well; and returning a few minutes later, followed by several workmen with the loads, I advanced as if by some occult means I knew exactly the degree of sincerity or insincerity on the part of each, and placed the heaviest load in front of a certain man, saying quietly: “You will carry this load.” Now it happened that this was the only sick man in the crowd and he was quite unfit to carry anything. The truth is that the man, being really sick, did not call in the assistance of dramatic art, and he made less fuss than any of the others. We were not many hours on the way before I discovered the mistake I had made. It is very difficult to make any change on the road, and is regarded as something less than fair. To accomplish it without a mutiny one must assume a terrifying countenance of the utmost ferocity and cannibalism. In this I was evidently successful; for late in the afternoon I suddenly called a halt, waited until all the men came up, and then ordered a man to take the load off the back of the sick man and put it on the man who that morning had been seized with a fit at my approach. This I did with the more relish because I had heard him chuckling about it along the way and telling the joke on the white man.

We seldom saw an animal in the forest, although we knew they were there. The only monkey that we saw on our first journey Mr. Kerr shot and gave to the carriers who ate every part of it, inside and out, including the skin—after burning off the hair. We sometimes heard the blood-curdling night-cry of the leopard; but we never saw one. On several occasions when I was alone I heard elephants plunging along the path before me, or suddenly discovered their tracks at my feet, so fresh that the water was still trickling into them. The elephant is not dangerous unless one comes upon him suddenly and startles or frightens him; but if he “charges,” he is terrible. A chief near Efulen was one day walking in the forest at the head of a hunting party. At a point where the path suddenly swerved around the upturned root of a tree, he found himself face to face with an elephant. Before he had time to fire the elephant instantly charged. It put its tusk through his body and then trampled him to death under its feet. The natives taught me, when I heard elephants ahead, to stop and shout until there was complete silence; which meant that they had hidden in the forest and I could pass along the path in perfect safety, no matter how near they might be. But the first time that this occurred, and the second time, I made the natives prove their advice by going ahead themselves, which they never hesitated to do.

In the wet season I always walked in company with the caravan; but in the dry season I preferred to walk alone, and often left the carriers far behind me, scattered along the road in different groups. At a fork in the road I always threw a handful of fresh leaves upon the road that I followed, as a sign to the carriers that they might be sure to take the same way. Never but once did they fail to follow me. On that occasion some of the carriers were boys of a strange tribe, the Galway, more used to waterways than to bush roads. Until the last evening they had walked behind others who were familiar with bush travel and whom they could follow heedlessly. But that evening it happened that the Galway were ahead and they took the wrong road, not observing my sign of the leaves on the path, and the whole caravan went astray except two carriers who were far behind and separated from the others. To follow their misfortune to the issue, the Galway got separated from the rest of the caravan and arrived at Batanga two days late, famished with hunger and frightened half to death.

Meanwhile, I had walked on far ahead until I thought that the carriers might require all the daylight that was left to catch me, and then I stopped and waited for them; though I had not yet reached the camp. As time passed and no carriers appeared I began to feel uneasy. The chill of the evening was approaching, and I had not even a coat; so I began to walk back and forth rapidly to keep warm. Finally, two carriers arrived. One of them had my food, which was fortunate; but the other had nothing that I wanted on the road. The lost Galway had my bed and extra clothing, and even the matches. We waited for them anxiously and called loudly, but there was no answer. Then swiftly, as always in the forest of the tropics, the day turned into night: “At one stride comes the dark.” A heavy, palpable darkness, like smoke, enshrouded us and rose higher till it blotted out the leafy canopy and blackened the very sky. The opacity of the darkness was such that we could not see each other, nor could I see my hand when I placed it before my eyes.

For a while I forgot the loss of the other carriers in thankfulness for the company of these two men. For, however kindly the mood of the forest by day, or however joyful the camp-fire by night in congenial company, yet, to one alone through the night, without comfort or means of rest, and with the possibility of being lost, the forest is truly dreadful. One in such a plight interprets the forest through the medium of his misery and his fear. The intolerable vastness of his prison dungeon suggests the “outer darkness,” and the experience of a soul forsaken. I was miserably cold and had nothing to protect me; nor had I a bed except a rubber blanket. I kept walking back and forth on a bit of path a few yards long, notwithstanding that I had walked all day. There was but little rest. Occasionally I threw myself down on the rubber blanket but was so cold that before long I rose again and began walking. Fortunately I was in unusually good health, for Africa, or the exposure might have resulted even more seriously than it did. My cook, Eyambe, a Batanga man, who had worked for us at Efulen for several months, possessed the remnant of a shirt, so much prized that he had carried it with him to the bush, lest his numerous relatives, male and female, should wear it out in his absence. He came to me in the darkness feeling his way, and said, “Mr. Milligan, my shirt, you must take him and wear him, please. This bush he no be too bad for we black man; but my heart cry for white man.”

I took it, of course, and wore it. But the cheer that I derived from the kindness of his heart was greater than the poor comfort of the shirt.

I thanked God when morning dawned at last; but it is unnecessary to say that I was in poor condition for walking next day, the last day of the journey. I knew that the exposure would bring on fever and I walked more rapidly than usual so as to reach Batanga as soon as possible. I sometimes even ran, as if in precipitate flight from a pursuing beast. The part of the road over which I passed that day was quite new and poorly cleared. My clothing may not have been stout enough to withstand the thorns and briers which I encountered; or else, in my hurry, I was reckless. At any rate, when I emerged from the forest, behind Mr. Gault’s house, one leg of my trousers was gone from above the knee, and the other leg was also exposed through several rents, the remainder of the trousers being fastened with numerous safety-pins. I was also scratched and bleeding more than on any previous trip.

As I turned and looked back from the beach towards the gloomy and sullen forest, in the vivid realization of the exposure of that long night and the fever which I knew was imminent, I had the feeling which Stanley describes when he and his long caravan emerged from the dark prison forest after the immurement of several months, in which scores of their comrades had died by the way, the whole caravan now enfeebled and wasted with hunger, the black, glossy skin turned an ashen gray. They ascended a hill and first looking up yearningly towards the bright blue sky, they then turned with a sigh and looked back over the sable forest that heaved away to the infinity of the west. In their sudden exaltation they shook their clenched fists at it, uttering imprecations, and with gestures of defiance and hate. They apostrophized it for its cruelty to themselves and their kinsmen; they compared it to hell, and accused it of the murder of a hundred of their comrades. But the forest which lay vast as a continent before them, and drowsy, like a great beast, answered not a word, but rested in its infinite sullenness, remorseless and implacable.

I was not mistaken in my apprehension of fever. I did not return to Efulen again. One fever followed another in quick succession, becoming at length so serious that my fellow missionaries at Batanga united in urging me not to risk another attack. An English steamer on the outward voyage called just at that time and I went south to Gaboon, where I sailed on a French steamer for Marseilles and thence home.

Little did I think when I was leaving Efulen for a few days, as I supposed, that I was really taking a long leave of Efulen and Africa, not again to see either for four years, and never again to see Dr. Good. That last morning, when I was setting out for the beach, he walked with me down the long Efulen hill to the foot, where we stood perhaps half an hour, formulating our expectations and making the clearest-cut plans, none of which were realized, although they pertained to the immediate future.

The element of accident is a constant factor in Africa, that continually changes the course of our reckoning and overturns our surest calculations. Accidents are no more numerous there than elsewhere, but they are more serious. Climbing a mountainside, a slip of the foot is fraught with more danger than on a level road. In the hostile climate of Africa, the smallest accident, a moment’s incaution or forgetfulness on your own part or on the part of others, may change the entire future. Elsewhere the best-laid plans of men have about an equal chance with the best-laid plans of mice, if the observation of Burns is to be trusted. But in Africa the probability of the future is entirely with the mice.

While I was in Africa a second time and living in Gaboon, two hundred miles further south on the coast, I visited Efulen once more. The road was much more improved than when I had seen it last. The sun shone through the arcade of vines and branches and formed upon the pathway a filigree of gold and silver light. The mode of travel was different accordingly. It was the best time of the year and there was a happy party of eleven, so that the journey was like a continuous picnic. Four of the party were ladies, three of whom were carried in hammocks and one rode a donkey. Besides, and chiefly, there was a very sweet little girl, two years old—a little splash of golden sunshine in the gray forest light, a dream of home, a fragment of a song⸺ Ah me! how lonely one becomes for the sight of a white child when he has lived some years in the jungles! Much of the time the ladies were walking and the hammocks empty. The hammock is suspended from a long bamboo pole borne upon the shoulders of two carriers. But the carriers must be relieved frequently, for it is dreadfully hard work. Six of the strongest native men are required for one hammock. Little Lois also had her special hammock, with a firm floor in it, so that she could sit upright, and she was perfectly happy when riding through the forest.

LITTLE FRANCES, BORN IN AFRICA.

Ah me, how lonely one becomes for the sight of a white child when he has lived some years in the jungles!

Several towns had been built along the way and in one of them we stopped each night, where we occupied native houses and slept on native beds of straight bamboo poles covered with armfuls of grass—as good a bed as one could desire. The numerous ticks in the grass were converted into bed-ticks—such was our resourcefulness of expedient. The only dislikable part of the journey was rising so early in the morning when we could have slept on for hours, after the walk of the preceding day. But an incident of that journey impressed it distinctly upon my mind that there is some advantage in eating breakfast before daylight. One morning we had an oatmeal breakfast. The day dawned upon two tardy boarders before they had eaten and they were horrified at discovering that the oatmeal was full of vermiform animalcules. Of course, they could not eat it and had the poorer breakfast in consequence, and the other nine thought that it served them quite right for being so late. A doubt has always lurked in the recesses of my mind as to whether the joke was really on the two or on the nine.

We did not, as in former days, keep steadily to a regular pace without stopping, even for hours at a time, and walking in comparative quiet. For the hammock carriers go very rapidly, on a dog-trot, continually shouting, and a white man follows immediately behind each hammock. They repeat a regular call and response, half song, half shout, as if to sustain their animation and courage. What wonderful voices they have! The forest, startled from her deep repose as we pass along, rebounds with shout and answering echo, while we dash on over height and depth, over rock and stream and mire, for an hour. Then, out of breath and in copious perspiration, we sit down for fifteen or twenty minutes, and at the word of command we are off again with a dash and a shout. It is all very pleasant and a great improvement on the old way, although one pays very little attention to the forest and is wholly oblivious to its moods. But the old way is still the regular way on all roads except those few which the white man has undertaken to improve.

And this disposition to “improve” everything he puts his hand to is a radical difference between the native and the white man. The mental habit of the native is contentment with things as they are; in which he is far more happy than fortunate. He would let this old world, or this old “bush” as he calls it, stay as it is to the end of time. The unhappy restlessness of the white man, his dissatisfaction with what he has and his longing for what he has not, his eagerness for change and “improvement,” the native is sometimes disposed to regard as a morbid mental disease. But the greatest wonder of it is that the white man includes the native himself in his program of improvement. He finds him a denizen of the forest, his mental habitudes like her changing moods, now sullen and cruel, now gentle and cheerful for a little while, partaking of her darkness mingled here and there with broken beams of light; and as he clears a way through the deep forest making the darkness light, so he labours that a gleam of heaven’s light may shine down into the benighted native soul; that it may lighten the path of his destiny more and more, and lead him on, in ways of purity and peace, till the gleam become the “perfect day.”

V
THE CAMP-FIRE

If it is dreadful to be overtaken in the forest by the punctual night of the tropics, while unprepared, without camp or comfort, yet, to the weary man, after a good bath and a good supper, and with a good bed awaiting him, the brief period of the departing day and the increasing camp-fire glow, the smell of wood smoke and the crackle of the burning log, are a delightful experience.

The camp is usually an open glade, where the night is not so sudden in its fall. The shadows grow longer in the evening light, and the gray twilight deepens till the stars shine through. Then in the red glow of the camp-fire, phantom shadows and eerie forms flit to and fro, approaching towards us and receding into the darkness like spirits impelled by curiosity, and planning either play or mischief according to the mood of the observer. In the day the man is properly the master of his mood, but in this hour it is pleasant to relax and let the mood be master of the man, giving a free rein to fancy.

Immediately after supper it was my custom to hold prayers with the carriers. Then, if the labour of the day has been easy, or a Sunday rest has intervened, they become more sociable and communicative than usual, and often prolong the evening with camp-fire stories. They are born orators and can tell a story to perfection, whether it be a fable handed down from others, or a narrative from their own experience. The knowledge of the native may be ever so limited and his thought meagre, but he can always give it appropriate and striking form and express himself in forceful and sometimes beautiful language. He never hesitates nor becomes incoherent; his words flow like a river and keep well within the course of his purpose. His gestures are animated and infinitely varied, sometimes grotesque, more often graceful, and always expressive.

He has also a faculty of imitation beyond all men. For instance, two schoolboys (if we may leave the camp-fire for a while to digress upon this native talent for imitation)—two schoolboys sit talking together, myself paying no attention, when one of them imitates the clicking of my typewriter so that I immediately recognize it. A new clock has recently been placed in the school, and I recognize their imitation of its stroke. Again, I recognize the noise of the gasoline engine of the launch, Dorothy, now at half speed, now full speed, now running smoothly and now with the peculiar omission followed by a heavier stroke, due to a weak battery.

A boy in talking to me refers to another boy by a name that I do not know, one with rather a peculiar countenance.

I say: “I do not know of whom you are speaking.”

He replies: “He looks like this”—slightly twisting his face into an exaggerated and ludicrous likeness of the other boy, which I instantly recognize.

One day at Efulen the body of a very large monkey, killed by Mr. Kerr or Dr. Good, hung suspended from the roof of our back porch. The expression of the monkey’s face was fearfully human. It did not look dead, but rather as if it had been very drunk the night before and was sleeping off the effects. I heard our two house-boys giggling and chuckling on the porch, and looking out I saw them standing in front of the monkey trying to look just like him, which they did with such startling success that I complimented them by telling them that either of them might exchange places with the monkey without Dr. Good ever knowing the difference.

On one occasion a party of white men and native boys were travelling on a river launch for several days. Four of the white men occupied their spare time in playing a certain game with dominoes. One day when they had left the cabin, four native boys sat down in their places and taking the dominoes, began to imitate the white men. They were absolutely ignorant of the game, and did not know the white men’s language, and yet they presented the semblance of the whole performance, each boy impersonating an individual white man—his exclamations, manner, and general behaviour during the progress of the game, from the deal to the last trick and the noisy conclusion.

This art of imitation is useful to the natives in hunting. For instance, a deer hunter in the forest will imitate the noise of two fighting bush-deer, and he will do it so well that any deer within hearing will come running to the spot. In reciting their numerous fables, in which animals are made to talk and act so as to teach lessons of prudence and goodness, the native will imitate the noise or the movements of each animal, and some of these stories one might almost follow without knowing the language.

This talent is also useful to the native in preaching the Gospel, which they all do, great and small, old and young, as soon as they become Christians, and often long before. I talked one day to a group of Christian boys, or young men, on the words: “Now the serpent was more subtile than any beast of the field,” applying the words obviously to the subtility of the Evil One in tempting us. Shortly afterwards, one of those young men, Ndong Koni (whose name I am likely to mention very frequently in the succeeding chapters) preached to a large audience a sermon on those words, which put mine to shame:

“You know where you may expect to find other animals,” he said, “and you also know their times.” And then naming first the leopard, he told them the kind of place that it frequents, and at what hours it seeks its prey, while the eager audience roared assent. So he did with the elephant, the gorilla and others. But the serpent, he told them, is found everywhere, often in the path before them, even in their houses, and always when least expected. Then he compared its powers with those of other animals, describing the leopard’s strength to fight, the fleetness of the deer in escaping, and how the monkey climbs; but how the serpent outfights the leopard, outruns the deer, outclimbs the monkey. The audience knowing well all the habits of the animals of the forest, was wildly appreciative, and several times took the sermon out of the speaker’s mouth.

On another occasion, a young man, Amvama, preached on the “Lost Sheep” of the parable, describing its peculiar helplessness. All the animals of the forest, however far they wander, can find their way back—but not the sheep; every other animal has some peculiar defense against its enemies of the forest, but the sheep is defenseless. The sheep lost in the forest cannot of itself get back to the town, and it is sure to be devoured by the wild beasts. Amvama did not fail to apply this to our own moral plight as lost and helpless.

But, we will return to the camp-fire in the forest, and the dim and dusky company seated around it, and the larger circle of fitful shadows and furtive forms that come gliding out, and back again into the forest. The opaque darkness pours forth such a volume of sound as never was heard in any forest elsewhere;—a thousand mingled noises of the night, weird, and difficult to associate with any bodily form, but belonging, one might easily fancy, to the shadow spirits of the forest, some of them perhaps the spirits of dead men—of those who, labouring under heavy loads, fell by the wayside, and died of sickness or fatigue, whose skeletons we sometimes pass; of those who by the spell of an enemy’s fetish lost their way, and never saw the face of man again; of those who for some crime have been driven forth into the forest by their own people, to die of hunger, or by the beasts.

Above all the myriad noises of the night, and separate from them, at times there falls upon the ear a prolonged cry of distress, that smites upon the heart, heard always in the African forest and never afterwards forgotten. It is a succession of ten or twelve long cries, shrill, tremulous and piercing; rather low at first, and vague, but gradually rising to a cry of definite terror, and again descending until it is lost in the volume of the forest noise.

It is a little disappointing to find the real source of this peculiar cry; and most people never find it, for it is exceedingly difficult to locate; whether near or far, whether high or low, one cannot be sure. It does not proceed as imagination suggested, from the spirits of the dead at variance and afflicting one another, but from a warm-bodied, innocent creature, the lemur, which lives in the heights of the trees, feeds upon insects, birds and reptiles, and seldom comes to the ground. In appearance it is somewhat like a bulky bear’s cub, but not well armed for offense or defense, and leading a precarious life among the stronger and fiercer creatures of the forest.

And now it occurs to me that the Lemures in Roman mythology were the spirits of those who had died in sin and who could not find rest, for whom expiatory rites were celebrated in the temple. It is generally supposed that Linnæus gave the name lemur to this family of animals because of the pale and strangely ghost-like faces of some of them; but the peculiar cry of this particular kind of lemur is more sepulchral than the appearance of any of them, and might well be a reason for the name they bear.

There is one other characteristic sound in the night-forest, though personally I have not heard this sound when far from the coast. It is a single monotonous note, a little like a low tone on a flute, about ten seconds in duration, and without rise or fall, a doleful sigh or sob of unending remorse. This sound, although it always seems to be distant, is even more difficult to locate than the other. It is human more than all other sounds of the forest, and yet sepulchral, and the superstitious mind is easily persuaded that it issues from the unseen world. The source of it is rather extraordinary; for according to native testimony it proceeds from a certain gigantic snail, as it slowly draws itself into and out of its shell. This theory is difficult either for white man or black man to verify; for the sound is heard only at night, and it ceases as one approaches. But the native is by no means likely to be mistaken.

And now at the camp-fire a native is relating to his fellows a strange legend of the origin of this sound; a legend familiar to all the tribes of West Africa, and illustrating a rare interpretative faculty of the native mind. This is the camp-fire story:

“There was once a wayward and wilful son who lived alone with his mother. One day coming home hungry he ordered her to gather some greens and cook them for him. The mother, who never resisted his wishes, went out and gathered plenty of greens and cooked them. But in the cooking they shrivelled up as greens always do. Then the mother presented the greens to her son; but the son looking at them accused his mother of having eaten the greens herself. This she denied; but the son would not believe her, and in his anger he struck her a blow on the head, and the mother fell dead at his feet. Then he cried out in anguish and sorrow; long and bitterly did he cry, but in vain. She was dead! She was dead! He had killed his own mother. From that day, all the days he mourned, saying always: ‘I killed my mother; I killed my mother;’ and all the nights he sobbed and moaned: ‘I killed my mother.’

“Then the spirits seeing his sorrow, that it was very great, and hearing him cry always day and night, at last were moved with pity, and turned him into a snail, which cannot suffer like a man. But though the snail does not weep in the daytime, yet at night it mourns and cries: ‘I—killed—my—mother;’ and so it will keep on crying until the end of the world.”

The reader will of course understand that the note of the snail is single and bears no resemblance to these articulate words of the son’s sorrow. The interpretation is purely spiritual, and poetic genius could scarcely improve upon it as an expression of the unending remorse which the sound conveys to sensitive and susceptive minds.

Sitting around the camp-fire they listen to the story as interested as if they had never heard it before, as children listen to the repetition of fables and nursery tales. Then remarks are made upon a son’s duty towards his mother, and some of them tell what good mothers they have; for this is the deepest reverence and highest sentiment of the African mind.

“Whatever other estimate we may form of the African,” wrote Leighton Wilson, than whom no one has ever known the African better, “we may not doubt his love for his mother. Her name, whether she be dead or alive, is always on his lips and in his heart. She is the first being he thinks of when awakening from his slumbers and the last he remembers when closing his eyes in sleep; to her he confides secrets which he would reveal to no other human being on the face of the earth. He cares for no one else in time of sickness; she alone must prepare his food, administer his medicine, perform his ablutions and spread his mat for him. He flies to her in the hour of his distress, for he well knows if all the rest of the world turn against him she will be steadfast in her love, whether he be right or wrong.

“If there be any cause which justifies a man in using violence towards one of his fellow men it would be to resent an insult offered to his mother. More fights are occasioned among boys by hearing something said in disparagement of their mothers than all other causes put together. It is a common saying among them that if a man’s mother and his wife are both on the point of being drowned, and he can save only one of them, he must save his mother, for the avowed reason that if the wife is lost he may marry another, but he will never find a second mother.”

Following the legend of the snail, several fables are told as we sit by the camp-fire. There is a fable called, The Chimpanzee and the Ungrateful Man:

“There was once a poor man who had but one wife and one child, and they lived in a small house in a far-away bush town near which was a stream with fish. The man was a hunter, and with his spear he hunted game in the forest, but the woman made fish-traps of basketwork and caught fish in the stream.

“One day when the man was hunting in the forest the woman took her babe and went to look at her fish-traps. She put her babe on the bank and herself went down into the water. Soon the babe began to cry; but the mother heard not for the noise of the running water. Now there was a mother chimpanzee in the top of a great tree near by. The chimpanzee had her home there in a safe place; but when she heard the babe she felt pity and she came down to the ground and taking the child in her arms, nursed it to sleep.

“The mother, having removed the fish from the traps, came up the bank to get her babe, and lo! there sat a great monkey and the babe sleeping upon its breast. She screamed with fright, and screamed again, so that the chimpanzee, afraid lest the hunter might come, put the babe down and ran into the forest. The woman snatched her babe and ran home very much frightened. She told the story to her husband but he only laughed.

“However, the next time the woman went to work at her fish-traps the man followed her and hid in the thicket. Again the woman laid down her babe and waded into the stream and again the babe began to cry and again at length the kind chimpanzee ventured down the tree and quieted the babe on her breast. Then the man thinking only of procuring a big feast of meat drew stealthily near with spear in hand and aiming it right at the heart of the chimpanzee suddenly hurled it with all his might. But the chimpanzee, seeing him just in time, held out the babe to receive the flying spear which pierced through its body. The horrified father had slain his own child.

“The chimpanzee laid the dead babe on the ground with the spear still sticking in it, and fled to the forest. But before disappearing it turned and said: ‘I was doing you a kindness in taking care of your babe. Therefore the evil that you would have done me has fallen upon yourself.’”

There is a very common fable in which the turtle teaches the wisdom and prudence of not interfering in other people’s palavers. The leopard and the python had a quarrel. The leopard visits the turtle and asks his help against the python. The turtle says to the leopard: “Come again to-morrow evening.”

Then the python comes to the turtle and asks his help against the leopard, and the turtle says to the python: “Come again to-morrow evening.”

The next evening the python comes again to the turtle and asks his help against the leopard. The turtle says to the python: “Go hide in the thicket and keep still for a while.”

Then the leopard comes to the turtle and asks his help against the python. “Go hide in the thicket,” says the turtle.

Then the leopard ran into the thicket and walked on top of the python.

“Now,” says the turtle to the python and the leopard, “you can settle your own palaver.”

Another man tells why it is that the leopard has no friend among all the animals, but walks always alone in the forest. Once upon a time a chief made a great trap to catch animals. First a gazelle fell into the trap. Then he cried and cried to his companion (the story-teller imitates the cry of this and the following animals to a critical but delighted audience) but the gazelle’s companion did not hear and he died there, for the chief was away on a journey. Then a wild boar came and was caught and he also cried to his companion. Then an antelope came and was caught. They all died in the trap. Then came a leopard and was caught, but before the leopard died a turtle came; and the turtle felt pity for the leopard and released him. Then the leopard wanted to kill the turtle which had released him. So the turtle crawled inside of a hollow tree. The leopard followed the turtle into the tree, but he got fast in the tree and could not get out.

Now this was a tree that bears fruit upon which monkeys feed. So after a while there came a blue-nosed monkey to eat the fruit of the tree. Then there came a white-nosed monkey; then a red-headed monkey; then a black monkey. When the leopard heard the noise of the monkeys he begged them to come and release him. Then the monkeys all came and got the leopard out of the tree. But no sooner did the leopard find himself safe than he fought with the monkeys, and he killed the white-nosed monkey and the red-headed monkey and ate them. Then the black-haired monkey, who had escaped up a tree, said to the leopard: “You leopards are rogues and treacherous. We helped you and saved your life, and as soon as you were helped you turned on us and began to kill us.” So the leopard to this day has no friends, but walks alone in the forest, for he cannot be trusted. And there are men who cannot be trusted any more than the leopard; therefore they live without friends.

“Oh,” cried the audience, “men do not know the language of the leopard and the language of the monkey.” “No,” replies the story-teller, “men cannot speak the language of either of these animals; but some men have fetishes by which they can understand the language of all animals when they hear them talk.”

A man tells “a true story” about a slave who lives in his town, and who frequently turns himself into a leopard and eats the sheep of the town. He has also, in the form of a leopard, attacked men and women of the town, who had offended him. Everybody in the town knows this to be true.

This suggests to another the story of a magic fight. A certain stranger coming into a town walked rudely against a man, wishing to quarrel with him that he might get his goods. The man said nothing, but expecting that the stranger would return and try to provoke a fight he prepared himself by making medicine; for he had great knowledge of medicine and magic, though he never used his knowledge except in self-defense. The stranger returned as he expected and again walked rudely against him. The man said to the stranger: “Do you want to fight with me?”

“Yes,” replied the stranger, and he cursed the man’s mother, at which the man struck him.

Now the stranger was a powerful witch, and immediately he turned into a leopard; but to his great surprise his opponent also turned into a leopard. Then a terrible fight took place between the two leopards. They leaped and sprang upon each other and howled so frightfully that the women of the town fell down with fear; but the men all gathered around the fighting leopards. Then suddenly the stranger turned himself into a python and springing upon the leopard threw a deadly coil around its neck; but the other leopard also turned into a python, and the pythons fought together, coiling about each other, hissing, and biting. Then the stranger turned into a gorilla that he might seize the python and choke it in his terrible hands, but the other python also turned into a gorilla, and the gorillas fought and tried to squeeze each other to death. At last the stranger, getting exhausted, turned into an eagle that he might fly away, but the other also turned into an eagle, and pursuing him dealt him a fatal blow. The dying eagle changed again into a man and begged the other man for mercy, which was refused. He would not make medicine for him, and so the stranger died.

On one of these camp-fire occasions a coast man who had been employed at Efulen tells how he recovered certain goods that a Bulu workman had stolen from him. He called together all the workmen, both Bulu and coast men, and after telling them that his goods had been stolen he proposed to discover the thief by ordeal. He told them of an ordeal that was well known in his town, and that never failed. Then he produced a dish of medicine he had made, which he said he would squirt into the eye of each man. In the eye of an innocent person it would be harmless as water, but it would burn the eye of the guilty one. From the first he had suspected a certain Bulu man, but he wanted formal evidence and the best evidence would be the man’s confession, which he determined to obtain. He stood the men in a row, with the suspected Bulu man near the last. Then he began squirting a copious dose of medicine into an eye of each man in turn. It did not hurt in the least, for the very good reason that it was nothing but water—which nobody knew but himself. Then when he came to the suspected man, he slipped a handful of red pepper into the water, and squirted it into the man’s eye. A sudden scream, a full confession, and the goods restored were some of the more important effects of this wonderful ordeal. And many African ordeals are useful for discovering a criminal when you happen to know who he is.

One man tells “a true story” of an evil spirit who hates people and who spreads disease and death. He once appeared in the forest near a town, in the form of a little child, evidently lost and hungry, and crying bitterly. Some kind-hearted woman finding him took pity on him and carried him to the town in her arms. But she was soon smitten with smallpox, which spread from her to others and the whole town was destroyed.

However the evening may begin with fable and fiction, it usually ends with narratives of fact and experience. But their facts are as fabulous as their fables and there is no distinct line between. One may listen to a story that is a tissue of impossibilities, and may suppose that the native is repeating a myth or a legend to which the imagination of at least several generations has contributed fantastic details, only to find that the purport of the story is a narrative of fact which the native solemnly believes. For they know little of nature’s laws and nothing of their uniformity.

Therefore “miracles” are always happening. The miracles of the New Testament, as a display of supernatural power, do not at first impress the native mind; not because he cannot believe them, but because he believes them too easily, and believes that miracles more wonderful take place in his own town every day. But the moral quality—the benevolence and mercy—of the New Testament miracles impresses him deeply, and this to him is their wonder. For, among his people, men and women who possess supernatural power wield it to an evil purpose, or at best, in their own interest.

A man tells of a murderer in his town who was suspected of having killed a number of persons who had died a mysterious death, after having first lost their shadows. The suspected man was closely watched, and, sure enough, one day they caught him in the very act of driving a nail into another man’s shadow. Everybody knows that a man’s shadow is his spirit, or at least one of his spirits, and if it be mortally wounded, or in any way induced to leave him, he will die. No man will long survive the loss of his shadow. But while witches and other murderers commit their evil deeds under cover of night, the shadow-slayer chooses the day and often the noonday. Many a man has lost his shadow at noonday—not so difficult to understand if it be remembered that we are speaking of the tropics, where, at certain seasons, the sun at noonday is directly overhead.

The people were so enraged at this murderer who was caught driving the nail into a man’s shadow—was caught only after the deed was done, making death certain—and who must have been the cause of all the recent unaccountable deaths in the town, that they carried him into the forest and bound him to the ground in the track of the driver ants, which immediately covered his whole body and devoured him, leaving nothing but the bones. But in the night-time his screams were still heard, even after his death, and the people were sore afraid. His spirit haunted the town, until at length the people deserted it and built in another place. And even yet the belated traveller passing that way hears the screams of the dead man.

But the greatest fear in all Africa is the witch. The witch’s soul is “loose from her body,” and at night she leaves her body and goes about the town, an unseen enemy, doing mischief and wickedness. A young man by the camp fire tells of a witch in his town who for some time had been “eating” the children of the town. It is not the body, but the spirit, that she eats, after which the child sickens, and gradually becoming worse, at length dies.

The discovery of witchcraft was made in a peculiar way. A certain man who was sick and lying awake at night with pain, thought one night that he heard a sound in the street. He crawled close to the wall and peering through a crack he beheld in the street the phantom form of a woman carrying the form of a child. She laid the child down in the street. Then she drew the form of a knife with the evident intention of cutting the child to pieces and eating it. But the knife was powerless to cut because of the bodily eyes of the man who was a spectator. Again and again the woman tried to dissect the child and still the knife refused to cut. At length it occurred to her that she was probably being watched. Then, taking the child up quickly, she returned it to the house whence she had stolen it, restored it to its body, and fled, without being recognized by the man who had seen her. In the morning he reported to the town all he had seen. The wildest excitement ensued. The mothers of the town were in terror, not knowing who the witch was that was eating their children. But one of the women was taken suddenly ill and they became suspicious, though they said nothing. She grew rapidly worse until she was seized with a convulsion and foam appeared at her mouth, a certain sign of witchcraft and that her own witch inside had rebelled and was eating her. Then they all reviled and cursed her, gave her no food, threw cold water on her, mocked her agony, and exulted in her pain until she died.

A deep, resonant, hungry roar of a leopard arrests the attention of the company around the camp-fire. It is at a pretty safe distance, however, and the white man having given orders to keep the fire burning retires to his hammock a little apart, but takes his rifle with him.

The effect of these last stories is sobering and saddening, especially to a mind not yet accustomed to such tales. A shadow lies across the white man’s heart. And that same shadow lies across every charm in Africa and mars every beauty—the reflection of the cruel ignorance and awful sufferings of its people. The observer who does not see the shadow must never have entered into the mind-life and the heart-life of the people. The vast forest darkness, and the weird night-sounds that befit the darkness, deepen the impression of the camp-fire stories.

That piercing cry of the lemur, how it suggests the terror of the wretched man devoured by driver ants! And that other mournful note is surely the remorse of spirits in the other world for cruel deeds committed here.

There is now something awful in the darkness. One feels with the Ancient Mariner—

“Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a fearful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.”