I VISIT A GRAVEYARD AND MEET A BLIND MAN.
I do not know whether in the preceding pages I have made the reader
understand what manner of place Quittáh is. Probably I have not, and
a few words of description may be useful before proceeding further.
Quittáh, then, is one of a row of towns or villages dotted along a
narrow tongue of sand which stretches from the mouth of the river
Volta with a few interruptions to the Niger Delta. On one side of this
isthmus is the ocean and on the other a chain of large lagoons, and so
narrow is the space separating sea and lagoon that, in many places,
travellers proceeding along the latter in canoes can not only hear the
boom of the surf upon the beach outside, but can see the white crests
of the waves over the low-lying shore.
Thus from the peculiarity of its position Quittáh was very much like
a small island. From the sea one was cut off by the dangerous surf;
from the adjacent villages of Jella-Koffi and Voja by the loose,
shifting sand which it was almost impossible to walk upon, while
between us and the mainland the lagoon spread out like an inland sea,
right away to the horizon.
This mainland, of which I heard occasional reports from native
traders, became to me a source of continually increasing curiosity.
From the lagoon-side market, where I often stood watching the fleets
of canoes unloading their little freights of produce on to the “hard,”
it was, as I have said, invisible, and the lagoon stretched, an
unbroken waste of water as far as the eye could see. But from our
verandah a few palms could be seen upon the other side, their heads
just standing above the horizon, while on very clear days one could
discern the dim and shadowy shape of the Adáklu--a solitary mountain
some seventy miles distant in the interior.
It happened one evening that as I stood on the verandah, telescope in
hand, dividing my attention between the cloudlike mountain and the
fleet of canoes returning homewards from the market, Pereira came out,
and flinging himself into a squeaking Madeira chair, began to roll a
cigarette, regarding me meanwhile with an indulgent smile.
“I often wonder, Englefield,” he said presently, “what it is that you
are continually spying at through that telescope. Surely the lagoon
and the canoes and the palms and the pelicans are pretty commonplace
objects by this time, and I think they comprise the entire landscape.”
“Certainly,” I replied, “the outlook is a little monotonous; but yet
somehow it attracts me, and I find myself continually wondering what
there is behind the horizon there.”
“Then wonder no longer, my friend,” said Pereira, “but come with me
to-morrow and see for yourself. I have to go to Anyáko to visit a
branch store that I have there, and as to-morrow is Sunday I propose
that we make my business visit into a picnic. But don’t imagine that
there is anything to see. Conceive Quittáh with pink clay instead of
grey sand, with ant hills in place of sand dunes; add to the cocoa-nut
palms a few gum trees and baobabs, and substitute a slightly different
stink, and there is Anyáko.”
“Any white people?” I inquired.
“Not now,” answered Pereira. “There was a mission station there once,
but the missionaries died off as fast as they were sent out, so the
station was abandoned. You’ll see the graves and the remains of the
chapel to-morrow.”
On the following morning I met Pereira by the lagoon-side just as the
sun was rising, but early as was the hour, all the necessary
preparations for the journey were completed. Half a dozen of the long
flat-bottomed canoes (each fashioned from a single log of
silk-cotton-wood) such as the natives use, were drawn up by the “hard”
or landing-place, and of these the largest was evidently set apart for
our use, for it contained two Madeira chairs, and even as I approached
I observed Aochi, Pereira’s servant, stowing in the bows a green gin
case from which protruded the necks of two claret bottles.
The lagoon at this hour was perfectly still, with a dull, unruffled
surface like a sheet of polished lead, and was overhung by a shroud of
yellowish rosy mist. A quite unusual silence brooded over the
scene--for ordinarily Quittáh with the strong sea breeze, the
chattering cocoa-nut palms and the boisterous natives, is rather a
noisy place--through which the giant pulse of the ocean could be heard
booming rhythmically upon the beach.
We had no sooner taken our places than the two canoe men--each
provided with a long crooked pole forked at the end--pushed off and
began to propel the canoe at quite a rapid rate. In a few minutes the
shore had vanished into the mist, and for the next hour we moved
smoothly on with nothing to mark our progress but some chance floating
stick or an occasional solitary pelican that emerged from the mist,
slid across our circumscribed field of view and faded away again
before we had time for mutual examination. Presently the sun began to
appear through the haze like a disc of burnished copper, and then the
sea breeze came down, dimming the surface of the water and driving
before it row after row of little hollow ripples that slapped noisily
on the flat side of the canoe. As the mist cleared there appeared
before us a low-lying shore clothed with fan palms and a few lank and
ragged trees, and one or two thatched roofs and a single whitewashed
building could be seen half hidden among the foliage. Nearly opposite
this building the canoe presently grounded in some six inches of
water, and the two stalwart canoe-men, stepping overboard, proceeded
to lift Pereira and me bodily out of our chairs and carry us through
the shallows, depositing us at length on dry land.
“Well, Englefield,” observed Pereira, stretching himself and stamping
on the dry mud, “here we are in your promised land, and here comes
Aochi with the chop box. Breakfast, Aochi, one time. We’ll have our
food first, and then I’ll see about my business while you take a walk
in the garden of Eden.”
We breakfasted in the mouldy-looking “hall” of the decaying mission
house, on the inevitable spatchcock and plantain fritters (“pranteen
flitters” Aochi called them) from the green box, and then Pereira
betook himself to the village, leaving me to roam about in the bush.
It was not a lovely spot, I was compelled to admit, but it was new to
me and a change from Quittáh. There were bushes and trees and fan
palms and actual solid earth of a curious pink colour--a great relief
after the eternal loose grey sand. And there were great snails with
shells striped like a zebra’s skin, and curious vole-like animals, and
large birds that uttered sounds like the whirring of an invalid chime
clock, and great ant-hills: in short, there were multitudes of things
that I had never seen before, so that I spent a couple of hours very
pleasantly poking about among the bushes. Making my way back towards
the village I stopped to examine a large and incredibly corpulent
baobab tree from whose branches the velvet-covered fruit hung down on
long straight stalks. I was about to move on when I perceived among
the bushes a low mud wall, and looking over it found that it formed
one side of a square enclosure.
“This,” I thought, “must be the old mission garden,” and forthwith I
resolved to explore it in case any of the fruit trees should be still
bearing.
Scaling the low crumbling wall, I entered and looked about me. The
whole place was choked with a riotous profusion of vegetation. The
ground was almost hidden by the feathery masses of the little
sensitive mimosa, whose leaves shrink away and close up at a touch;
low bushes and small trees were scattered about, and here and there
clumps of cactus and branching euphorbias rose out of the tangle. But
of cultivation there was no trace.
The most singular feature of the place was the large number of
ant-hills--sugar-loafed structures of bright red earth from eight to
ten feet high--of which a dozen or more were grouped quite near
together. From one of these I noticed an angular piece of white stone
projecting, and, wondering how a piece of stone could have got into
such a situation, I drew out my knife and endeavoured to dig it out,
when to my astonishment it turned out to be one arm of a monumental
cross around which the ant-hill had been built.
This discovery led me to examine the place more narrowly, with the
result that, by dragging aside creepers and bushes and scraping away
portions of other ant-hills, I found no less than seven flat
gravestones, each with a marble tablet let into it on which was
engraved a name and a scripture reference. All the names were German,
and mostly those of men.
So this was all that was left of the Anyáko mission! It was a solemn
sight to look upon, and fraught with a suggestiveness that was by no
means pleasant; one of those disagreeable reminders with which West
Africa is apt to salute the intrusive white man.
I sat down upon a flat slab that I had just cleared, lost in gloomy
meditation, insensibly contrasting the bright face of nature with the
sad and pathetic relics around; glancing at the blue, sunny sky, the
gay vegetation, the gem-like sun birds that hovered round the cactus,
and the great blue-bodied lizard that nodded his scarlet head at me
from the top of an ant-hill, and thinking of the “pestilence that
walketh in the noon-day” amidst all this exuberant life and light.
My reflections were interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the path
outside, and looking up, I perceived a figure approaching which, by
its tall black hat, long black coat and black umbrella could be that
of none other than Pereira.
“Aha!” he exclaimed as he came up. “Meditating among the tombs? And a
very fitting occupation for a coaster.” He furled his umbrella, and
leaning his arms on the wall, looked round.
“Yes,” he continued, “here is West Africa in a nutshell; a most
concise epitome. I knew all these men, Englefield, and the first of
them came here less than a dozen years ago. And here they are; and so
the world wags in Africa. The white man comes out full of life and
energy and purpose. The jungle laughs and covers him up and he is
straightway forgotten. Then more come, and the act is repeated _da
capo_, and so on. But what have we here?”
I stood up and looked over the wall. Two natives were coming towards
us along the path, one an aged woman, white-haired, lean and
shrivelled, and the other a middle-aged man who held the woman’s hand
with one of his and with the other grasped a long staff with which he
tapped upon the ground before him as he walked.
There was nothing remarkable in the appearance of the old woman,
excepting the fan-like group of radiating scars on her temples which
showed that she belonged to the Krepi tribe. But the aspect of the man
was most horrible. His body was to the last degree emaciated; his face
was so seamed and disfigured with scars as to be hardly human; his
neck was covered with a pattern of warty button-like scars; his ears
had been carved out into scallops like a cock’s comb, and his empty
eye-sockets were so sunken that his face was like that of a dry skull.
As the pair came up to where we were standing, Pereira addressed them
in the Efé language, and I gathered that he was inquiring after the
man’s health; but although his manner was kind and sympathetic enough,
his questions were received with sullen reserve, and after a very
brief conversation, the old woman put an end to the interview by
abruptly seizing the man’s arm and hurrying him away.
Pereira looked after them with a puzzled expression on his face, as
the old woman strode along and the man, with chin stuck forward and
his stick groping before him, stumbled by her side.
“There goes another African mystery,” my friend remarked turning to
me.
“How so?” I asked. “What did the old lady say?”
“Oh, she said,” replied Pereira, “that she had brought her son all the
way from Peki to see the white doctor at Quittáh.”
“Well, he does certainly look a trifle off colour,” I remarked. “Did
the old woman say how he lost his eyes?”
“Ah! that was the question that gave so much offence. Her explanation
was that he had some kind of sickness as a child, but she was not
inclined to be confidential, as you saw.”
“No, indeed. But I suppose there is a good deal of eye disease here as
in other tropical countries?”
“Oh, certainly there is; but I suspect that the disease that cost him
his sight was somehow connected with a flat iron rod with a hook at
the end.”
“Good God!” I exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say that you think his
eyes have been put out?”
“That is my belief,” answered Pereira. “Didn’t you notice his
eye-sockets with never a vestige of eyeball left? And did you see his
ears and his neck? Those were no tribal marks. That man has been an
Ashanti ‘donkor’ or alien slave. I remember once before meeting a
blind man--also a Krepi--with just the same appearance and marked in
the same manner, and he was just as reticent as this one; and he, I
learned for certain, had been one of the King’s slaves in Ashanti, but
I never could find out anything more about him.”
“And he had had _his_ eyes put out?”
“Evidently, although he told the same story of illness in childhood as
this one.”
“What an extraordinary and horrible thing!” I exclaimed. “Why, it
recalls that ghastly yarn of yours about the Aboási cavern.”
“I was just thinking the same myself. But come, that villain Aochi
will have our coffee ready by now, and we ought to be starting for
home presently. It doesn’t do to be overtaken by darkness on the
lagoon.”
During the return passage across the lagoon the usually loquacious and
discursive Pereira preserved an unwonted silence, and I surmised that
he was thinking of the old Krepi woman and her son. That this was
actually the case appeared later, for after he had wished me
“good-night” and was retiring to his room he paused in the doorway and
looked back at me.
“I can’t help thinking of that poor blind devil, Englefield,” he said.
“What fearful sufferings he must have gone through, and what constant
terror he must be in lest he should be discovered and dragged back to
his slavery. But miserable wretch as he is, he has the advantage of
you and me in one thing, if it can be considered an advantage: he
holds the key to some of the darkest secrets of this mysterious land.”