Setting forth how the Voyager is minded to ascend the mountain
called Mungo Mah Lobeh, or the Throne of Thunder, and in due course
reaches Buea, situate thereon.
After returning from Corisco I remained a few weeks in Gaboon, and
then left on the Niger, commanded by Captain Davies. My regrets, I
should say, arose from leaving the charms and interests of Congo
Francais, and had nothing whatever to do with taking passage on one
of the most comfortable ships of all those which call on the Coast.
The Niger was homeward-bound when I joined her, and in due course
arrived in Cameroon River, and I was once again under the dominion
of Germany. It would be a very interesting thing to compare the
various forms of European government in Africa--English, French,
German, Portuguese, and Spanish; but to do so with any justice would
occupy more space than I have at my disposal, for the subject is
extremely intricate. Each of these forms of government have their
good points and their bad. Each of them are dealing with bits of
Africa differing from each other--in the nature of their inhabitants
and their formation, and so on--so I will not enter into any
comparison of them here.
From the deck of the Niger I found myself again confronted with my
great temptation--the magnificent Mungo Mah Lobeh--the Throne of
Thunder. Now it is none of my business to go up mountains. There's
next to no fish on them in West Africa, and precious little good
rank fetish, as the population on them is sparse--the African, like
myself, abhorring cool air. Nevertheless, I feel quite sure that no
white man has ever looked on the great Peak of Cameroon without a
desire arising in his mind to ascend it and know in detail the
highest point on the western side of the continent, and indeed one
of the highest points in all Africa.
So great is the majesty and charm of this mountain that the
temptation of it is as great to me to-day as it was on the first day
I saw it, when I was feeling my way down the West Coast of Africa on
the S.S. Lagos in 1893, and it revealed itself by good chance from
its surf-washed plinth to its skyscraping summit. Certainly it is
most striking when you see it first, as I first saw it, after
coasting for weeks along the low shores and mangrove-fringed rivers
of the Niger Delta. Suddenly, right up out of the sea, rises the
great mountain to its 13,760 feet, while close at hand, to westward,
towers the lovely island mass of Fernando Po to 10,190 feet. But
every time you pass it by its beauty grows on you with greater and
greater force, though it is never twice the same. Sometimes it is
wreathed with indigo-black tornado clouds, sometimes crested with
snow, sometimes softly gorgeous with gold, green, and rose-coloured
vapours tinted by the setting sun, sometimes completely swathed in
dense cloud so that you cannot see it at all; but when you once know
it is there it is all the same, and you bow down and worship.
There are only two distinct peaks to this glorious thing that
geologists brutally call the volcanic intrusive mass of the Cameroon
Mountains, viz., Big Cameroon and Little Cameroon. The latter,
Mungo Mah Etindeh, has not yet been scaled, although it is only
5,820 feet. One reason for this is doubtless that the few people in
fever-stricken, over-worked West Africa who are able to go up
mountains, naturally try for the adjacent Big Cameroon; the other
reason is that Mungo Mah Etindeh, to which Burton refers as "the
awful form of Little Cameroon," is mostly sheer cliff, and is from
foot to summit clothed in an almost impenetrable forest. Behind
these two mountains of volcanic origin, which cover an area on an
isolated base of between 700 and 800 square miles in extent, there
are distinctly visible from the coast two chains of mountains, or I
should think one chain deflected, the so-called Rumby and Omon
ranges. These are no relations of Mungo, being of very different
structure and conformation; the geological specimens I have brought
from them and from the Cameroons being identified by geologists as
respectively schistose grit and vesicular lava.
After spending a few pleasant days in Cameroon River in the society
of Frau Plehn, my poor friend Mrs. Duggan having, I regret to say,
departed for England on the death of her husband, I went round to
Victoria, Ambas Bay, on the Niger, and in spite of being advised
solemnly by Captain Davies to "chuck it as it was not a picnic," I
started to attempt the Peak of Cameroons as follows.
September 20th, 1895.--Left Victoria at 7.30, weather fine. Herr
von Lucke, though sadly convinced, by a series of experiments he has
been carrying on ever since I landed, and I expect before, that you
cannot be in three places at one time, is still trying to do so; or
more properly speaking he starts an experiment series for four
places, man-like, instead of getting ill as I should under the
circumstances, and he kindly comes with me as far as the bridge
across the lovely cascading Lukole River, and then goes back at
about seven miles an hour to look after Victoria and his sick
subordinates in detail.
I, with my crew, keep on up the grand new road the Government is
making, which when finished is to go from Ambas Bay to Buea, 3,000
feet up on the mountain's side. This road is quite the most
magnificent of roads, as regards breadth and general intention, that
I have seen anywhere in West Africa, and it runs through a superbly
beautiful country. It is, I should say, as broad as Oxford Street;
on either side of it are deep drains to carry off the surface
waters, with banks of varied beautiful tropical shrubs and ferns,
behind which rise, 100 to 200 feet high, walls of grand forest, the
column-like tree-stems either hung with flowering, climbing plants
and ferns, or showing soft red and soft grey shafts sixty to seventy
feet high without an interrupting branch. Behind this again rise
the lovely foot hills of Mungo, high up against the sky, coloured
the most perfect soft dark blue.
The whole scheme of colour is indescribably rich and full in tone.
The very earth is a velvety red brown, and the butterflies--which
abound--show themselves off in the sunlight, in their canary-
coloured, crimson, and peacock-blue liveries, to perfection. After
five minutes' experience of the road I envy those butterflies. I do
not believe there is a more lovely road in this world, and besides,
it's a noble and enterprising thing of a Government to go and make
it, considering the climate and the country; but to get any genuine
pleasure out of it, it is requisite to hover in a bird- or
butterfly-like way, for of all the truly awful things to walk on,
that road, when I was on it, was the worst.
Of course this arose from its not being finished, not having its top
on in fact: the bit that was finished, and had got its top on, for
half a mile beyond the bridge, you could go over in a Bath chair.
The rest of it made you fit for one for the rest of your natural
life, for it was one mass of broken lava rock, and here and there
leviathan tree-stumps that had been partially blown up with
gunpowder.
When we near the forest end of the road, it comes on to rain
heavily, and I see a little house on the left-hand side, and a
European engineer superintending a group of very cheerful natives
felling timber. He most kindly invites me to take shelter, saying
it cannot rain as heavily as this for long. My men also announce a
desire for water, and so I sit down and chat with the engineer under
the shelter of his verandah, while the men go to the water-hole,
some twenty minutes off.
After learning much about the Congo Free State and other matters, I
presently see one of my men sitting right in the middle of the road
on a rock, totally unsheltered, and a feeling of shame comes over me
in the face of this black man's aquatic courage. Into the rain I
go, and off we start. I conscientiously attempt to keep dry, by
holding up an umbrella, knowing that though hopeless it is the
proper thing to do.
We leave the road about fifty yards above the hut, turning into the
unbroken forest on the right-hand side, and following a narrow,
slippery, muddy, root-beset bush-path that was a comfort after the
road. Presently we come to a lovely mountain torrent flying down
over red-brown rocks in white foam; exquisitely lovely, and only a
shade damper than the rest of things. Seeing this I solemnly fold
up my umbrella and give it to Kefalla. I then take charge of Fate
and wade.
This particular stream, too, requires careful wading, the rocks over
which it flows being arranged in picturesque, but perilous
confusion; however all goes well, and getting to the other side I
decide to "chuck it," as Captain Davies would say, as to keeping
dry, for the rain comes down heavier than ever.
Now we are evidently dealing with a foot-hillside, but the rain is
too thick for one to see two yards in any direction, and we seem to
be in a ghost-land forest, for the great palms and red-woods rise up
in the mist before us, and fade out in the mist behind, as we pass
on. The rocks which edge and strew the path at our feet are covered
with exquisite ferns and mosses--all the most delicate shades of
green imaginable, and here and there of absolute gold colour,
looking as if some ray of sunshine had lingered too long playing on
the earth, and had got shut off from heaven by the mist, and so lay
nestling among the rocks until it might rejoin the sun.
The path now becomes an absolute torrent, with mud-thickened water,
which cascades round one's ankles in a sportive way, and round one's
knees in the hollows in the path. On we go, the path underneath the
water seems a pretty equal mixture of rock and mud, but they are not
evenly distributed. Plantations full of weeds show up on either
side of us, and we are evidently now on the top of a foot-hill. I
suspect a fine view of the sea could be obtained from here, if you
have an atmosphere that is less than 99.75 per cent. of water. As
it is, a white sheet--or more properly speaking, considering its
soft, stuffy woolliness, a white blanket--is stretched across the
landscape to the south-west, where the sea would show.
We go down-hill now, the water rushing into the back of my shoes for
a change. The path is fringed by high, sugar-cane-like grass which
hangs across it in a lackadaisical way, swishing you in the face and
cutting like a knife whenever you catch its edge, and pouring
continually insidious rills of water down one's neck. It does not
matter. The whole Atlantic could not get more water on to me than I
have already got. Ever and again I stop and wring out some of it
from my skirts, for it is weighty. One would not imagine that
anything could come down in the way of water thicker than the rain,
but it can. When one is on the top of the hills, a cold breeze
comes through the mist chilling one to the bone, and bending the
heads of the palm trees, sends down from them water by the bucketful
with a slap; hitting or missing you as the case may be.
Both myself and my men are by now getting anxious for our "chop,"
and they tell me, "We look them big hut soon." Soon we do look them
big hut, but with faces of undisguised horror, for the big hut
consists of a few charred roof-mats, etc., lying on the ground.
There has been a fire in that simple savage home. Our path here is
cut by one that goes east and west, and after a consultation between
my men and the Bakwiri, we take the path going east, down a steep
slope between weedy plantations, and shortly on the left shows a
steep little hill-side with a long low hut on the top. We go up to
it and I find it is the habitation of a Basel Mission black Bible-
reader. He comes out and speaks English well, and I tell him I want
a house for myself and my men, and he says we had better come and
stay in this one. It is divided into two chambers, one in which the
children who attend the mission-school stay, and wherein there is a
fire, and one evidently the abode of the teacher. I thank the
Bible-reader and say that I will pay him for the house, and I and
the men go in streaming, and my teeth chatter with cold as the
breeze chills my saturated garment while I give out the rations of
beef, rum, blankets, and tobacco to the men. Then I clear my
apartment out and attempt to get dry, operations which are
interrupted by Kefalla coming for tobacco to buy firewood off the
mission teacher to cook our food by.
Presently my excellent little cook brings in my food, and in with it
come two mission teachers--our first acquaintance, the one with a
white jacket, and another with a blue. They lounge about and spit
in all directions, and then chiefs commence to arrive with their
families complete, and they sidle into the apartment and
ostentatiously ogle the demijohn of rum.
They are, as usual, a nuisance, sitting about on everything. No
sooner have I taken an unclean-looking chief off the wood sofa, than
I observe another one has silently seated himself in the middle of
my open portmanteau. Removing him and shutting it up, I see another
one has settled on the men's beef and rice sack.
It is now about three o'clock and I am still chilled to the bone in
spite of tea. The weather is as bad as ever. The men say that the
rest of the road to Buea is far worse than that which we have so far
come along, and that we should never get there before dark, and "for
sure" should not get there afterwards, because by the time the dark
came down we should be in "bad place too much." Therefore, to their
great relief, I say I will stay at this place--Buana--for the night,
and go on in the morning time up to Buea; and just for the present I
think I will wrap myself up in a blanket and try and get the chill
out of me, so I give the chiefs a glass of rum each, plenty of head
tobacco, and my best thanks for their kind call, and then turn them
all out. I have not been lying down five minutes on the plank that
serves for a sofa by day and a bed by night, when Charles comes
knocking at the door. He wants tobacco. "Missionary man no fit to
let we have firewood unless we buy em." Give Charles a head and
shut him out again, and drop off to sleep again for a quarter of an
hour, then am aroused by some enterprising sightseers pushing open
the window-shutters; when I look round there are a mass of black
heads sticking through the window-hole. I tell them respectfully
that the circus is closed for repairs, and fasten up the shutters,
but sleep is impossible, so I turn out and go and see what those men
of mine are after. They are comfortable enough round their fire,
with their clothes suspended on strings in the smoke above them, and
I envy them that fire. I then stroll round to see if there is
anything to be seen, but the scenery is much like that you would
enjoy if you were inside a blanc-mange. So as it is now growing
dark I return to my room and light candles, and read Dr. Gunther on
Fishes. Room becomes full of blacks. Unless you watch the door,
you do not see how it is done. You look at a corner one minute and
it is empty, and the next time you look that way it is full of rows
of white teeth and watching eyes. The two mission teachers come in
and make a show of teaching a child to read the Bible. After again
clearing out the rank and fashion of Buana, I prepare to try and get
a sleep; not an elaborate affair, I assure you, for I only want to
wrap myself round in a blanket and lie on that plank, but the rain
has got into the blankets and horror! there is no pillow. The
mission men have cleared their bed paraphernalia right out. Now you
can do without a good many things, but not without a pillow, so hunt
round to find something to make one with; find the Bible in English,
the Bible in German, and two hymn-books, and a candle-stick. These
seem all the small articles in the room--no, there is a parcel
behind the books--mission teachers' Sunday trousers--make delightful
arrangement of books bound round with trousers and the whole affair
wrapped in one of my towels. Never saw till now advantage of
Africans having trousers. Civilisation has its points after all.
But it is no use trying to get any sleep until those men are
quieter. The partition which separates my apartment from theirs is
a bamboo and mat affair, straight at the top so leaving under the
roof a triangular space above common to both rooms. Also common to
both rooms are the smoke of the fire and the conversation. Kefalla
is holding forth in a dogmatic way, and some of the others are
snoring. There is a new idea in decoration along the separating
wall. Mr. Morris might have made something out of it for a dado.
It is composed of an arrangement in line of stretched out singlets.
Vaseline the revolver. Wish those men would leave off chattering.
Kefalla seems to know the worst about most of the people, black and
white, down in Ambas Bay, but I do not believe those last two
stories. Evidently great jokes in next room now; Kefalla has thrown
himself, still talking, in the dark, on to the top of one of the
mission teachers. The women of the village outside have been
keeping up, this hour and more, a most melancholy coo-ooing. Those
foolish creatures are evidently worrying about their husbands who
have gone down to market in Ambas Bay, and who, they think, are lost
in the bush. I have not a shadow of a doubt that those husbands who
are not home by now are safely drunk in town, or reposing on the
grand new road the kindly Government have provided for them, either
in one of the side drains, or tucked in among the lava rock.
September 21st.--Coo-ooing went on all night. I was aroused about
9.30 P.M., by uproar in adjacent hut: one husband had returned in a
bellicose condition and whacked his wives, and their squarks and
squalls, instead of acting as a warning to the other ladies,
stimulate the silly things to go on coo-ooing louder and more
entreatingly than ever, so that their husbands might come home and
whack them too, I suppose, and whenever the unmitigated hardness of
my plank rouses me I hear them still coo-ooing.
No watchman is required to wake you in the morning on the top of a
Cameroon foot-hill by 5.30, because about 4 A.M. the dank chill that
comes before the dawn does so most effectively. One old chief
turned up early out of the mist and dashed me a bottle of palm wine;
he says he wants to dash me a fowl, but I decline, and accept two
eggs, and give him four heads of tobacco.
The whole place is swathed in thick white mist through which my
audience arrive. But I am firm with them, and shut up the doors and
windows and disregard their bangings on them while I am dressing, or
rather re-dressing. The mission teachers get in with my tea, and
sit and smoke and spit while I have my breakfast. Give me cannibal
Fans!
It is pouring with rain again now, and we go down the steep hillock
to the path we came along yesterday, keep it until we come to where
the old path cuts it, and then turn up to the right following the
old path's course and leave Buana without a pang of regret. Our
road goes N.E. Oh, the mud of it! Not the clearish cascades of
yesterday but sticky, slippery mud, intensely sticky, and intensely
slippery. The narrow path which is filled by this, is V-shaped
underneath from wear, and I soon find the safest way is right
through the deepest mud in the middle.
The white mist shuts off all details beyond ten yards in any
direction. All we can see, as we first turn up the path, is a patch
of kokos of tremendous size on our right. After this comes weedy
plantation, and stretches of sword grass hanging across the road.
The country is even more unlevel than that we came over yesterday.
On we go, patiently doing our mud pulling through the valleys;
toiling up a hillside among lumps of rock and stretches of forest,
for we are now beyond Buana's plantations; and skirting the summit
of the hill only to descend into another valley. Evidently this is
a succession of foot-hills of the great mountain and we are not on
its true face yet. As we go on they become more and more abrupt in
form, the valleys mere narrow ravines. In the wet season (this is
only the tornado season) each of these valleys is occupied by a
raging torrent from the look of the confused water-worn boulders.
Now among the rocks there are only isolated pools, for the weather
for a fortnight before I left Victoria had been fairly dry, and this
rich porous soil soaks up an immense amount of water. It strikes me
as strange that when we are either going up or down the hills, the
ground is less muddy than when we are skirting their summits, but it
must be because on the inclines the rush of water clears the soil
away down to the bed rock. There is an outcrop of clay down by
Buana, but though that was slippery, it is nothing to the
slipperiness of this fine, soft, red-brown earth that is the soil
higher up, and also round Ambas Bay. This gets churned up into a
sort of batter where there is enough water lying on it, and, when
there is not, an ice slide is an infant to it.
My men and I flounder about; thrice one of them, load and all, goes
down with a squidge and a crash into the side grass, and says
"damn!" with quite the European accent; as a rule, however, we go on
in single file, my shoes giving out a mellifluous squidge, and their
naked feet a squish, squash. The men take it very good temperedly,
and sing in between accidents; I do not feel much like singing
myself, particularly at one awful spot, which was the exception to
the rule that ground at acute angles forms the best going. This
exception was a long slippery slide down into a ravine with a long,
perfectly glassy slope up out of it.
After this we have a stretch of rocky forest, and pass by a widening
in the path which I am told is a place where men blow, i.e. rest,
and then pass through another a little further on, which is Buea's
bush market. Then through an opening in the great war-hedge of
Buea, a growing stockade some fifteen feet high, the lower part of
it wattled.
At the sides of the path here grow banks of bergamot and balsam,
returning good for evil and smiling sweetly as we crush them. Thank
goodness we are in forest now, and we seem to have done with the
sword-grass. The rocks are covered with moss and ferns, and the
mist curling and wandering about among the stems is very lovely.
In our next ravine there is a succession of pools, part of a
mountain torrent of greater magnitude evidently than those we have
passed, and in these pools there are things swimming. Spend more
time catching them, with the assistance of Bum. I do not value
Kefalla's advice, ample though it is, as being of any real value in
the affair. Bag some water-spiders and two small fish. The heat is
less oppressive than yesterday. All yesterday one was being
alternately smothered in the valley and chilled on the hill-tops.
To-day it is a more level temperature, about 70 degrees, I fancy.
The soil up here, about 2,500 feet above sea-level, though rock-
laden is exceedingly rich, and the higher we go there is more
bergamot, native indigo, with its underleaf dark blue, and lovely
coleuses with red markings on their upper leaves, and crimson
linings. I, as an ichthyologist, am in the wrong paradise. What a
region this would be for a botanist!
The country is gloriously lovely if one could only see it for the
rain and mist; but one only gets dim hints of its beauty when some
cold draughts of wind come down from the great mountains and seem to
push open the mist-veil as with spirit hands, and then in a minute
let it fall together again. I do not expect to reach Buea within
regulation time, but at 11.30 my men say "we close in," and then,
coming along a forested hill and down a ravine, we find ourselves
facing a rushing river, wherein a squad of black soldiers are
washing clothes, with the assistance of a squad of black ladies,
with much uproar and sky-larking. I too think it best to wash here,
standing in the river and swishing the mud out of my skirts; and
then wading across to the other bank, I wring out my skirts. The
ground on the further side of the river is cleared of bush, and only
bears a heavy crop of balsam; a few steps onwards bring me in view
of a corrugated iron-roofed, plank-sided house, in front of which,
towards the great mountain which now towers up into the mist, is a
low clearing with a quadrangle of native huts--the barracks.
I receive a most kindly welcome from a fair, grey-eyed German
gentleman, only unfortunately I see my efforts to appear before him
clean and tidy have been quite unavailing, for he views my
appearance with unmixed horror, and suggests an instant hot bath. I
decline. Men can be trying! How in the world is any one going to
take a bath in a house with no doors, and only very sketchy wooden
window-shutters?
The German officer is building the house quickly, as Ollendorff
would say, but he has not yet got to such luxuries as doors, and so
uses army blankets strung across the doorway; and he has got up
temporary wooden shutters to keep the worst of the rain out, and
across his own room's window he has a frame covered with greased
paper. Thank goodness he has made a table, and a bench, and a
washhand-stand out of planks for his spare room, which he kindly
places at my disposal; and the Fatherland has evidently stood him an
iron bedstead and a mattress for it. But the Fatherland is not
spoiling or cosseting this man to an extent that will enervate him
in the least.
The mist clears off in the evening about five, and the surrounding
scenery is at last visible. Fronting the house there is the cleared
quadrangle, facing which on the other three sides are the lines of
very dilapidated huts, and behind these the ground rises steeply,
the great S.E. face of Mungo Mah Lobeh. It looks awfully steep when
you know you have got to go up it. This station at Buea is 3,000
feet above sea-level, which explains the hills we have had to come
up. The mountain wall when viewed from Buea is very grand, although
it lacks snowcap or glacier, and the highest summits of Mungo are
not visible because we are too close under them, but its enormous
bulk and its isolation make it highly impressive. The forest runs
up it in a great band above Buea, then sends up great tongues into
the grass belt above. But what may be above this grass belt I know
not yet, for our view ends at the top of the wall of the great S.E.
crater. My men say there are devils and gold up beyond, but the
German authorities do not support this view. Those Germans are so
sceptical. This station is evidently on a ledge, for behind it the
ground falls steeply, and you get an uninterrupted panoramic view of
the Cameroon estuary and the great stretches of low swamp lands with
the Mungo and the Bimbia rivers, and their many creeks and channels,
and far away east the strange abrupt forms of the Rumby Mountains.
Herr Liebert says you can see Cameroon Government buildings from
here, if only the day is clear, though they are some forty miles
away. This view of them is, save a missionary of the Basel mission,
the only white society available at Buea.
I hear more details about the death of poor Freiherr von
Gravenreuth, whose fine monument of a seated lion I saw in the
Government House grounds in Cameroons the other day. Bush fighting
in these West African forests is dreadfully dangerous work. Hemmed
in by bush, in a narrow path along which you must pass slowly in
single file, you are a target for all and any natives invisibly
hidden in the undergrowth; and the war-hedge of Buea must have made
an additional danger and difficulty here for the attacking party.
The lieutenant and his small band of black soldiers had, after a
stiff fight, succeeded in forcing the entrance to this, when their
ammunition gave out, and they had to fall back. The Bueans,
regarding this as their victory, rallied, and a chance shot killed
the lieutenant instantly. A further expedition was promptly sent up
from Victoria and it wiped the error out of the Buean mind and
several Bueans with it. But it was a very necessary expedition.
These natives were a constant source of danger to the more peaceful
trading tribes, whom they would not permit to traverse their
territory. The Bueans have been dealt with mercifully by the
Germans, for their big villages, like Sapa, are still standing, and
a continual stream of natives come into the barrack-yard, selling
produce, or carrying it on down to Victoria markets, in a perfectly
content and cheerful way. I met this morning a big burly chief with
his insignia of office--a great stick. He, I am told, is the chief
or Sapa whom Herr von Lucke has called to talk some palaver with
down in Victoria.
At last I leave Herr Liebert, because everything I say to him causes
him to hop, flying somewhere to show me something, and I am sure it
is bad for his foot. I go and see that my men are safely quartered.
Kefalla is laying down the law in a most didactic way to the
soldiers. Herr Liebert has christened him "the Professor," and I
adopt the name for him, but I fear "Windbag" would fit him better.
At 7.30 a heavy tornado comes rolling down upon us. Masses of
indigo cloud with livid lightning flashing in the van, roll out from
over the wall of the great crater above; then with that malevolence
peculiar to the tornado it sees all the soldiers and their wives and
children sitting happily in the barrack yard, howling in a minor key
and beating their beloved tom-toms, so it comes and sits flump down
on them with deluges of water, and sends its lightning running over
the ground in livid streams of living death. Oh, they are nice
things are tornadoes! I wonder what they will be like when we are
up in their home; up atop of that precious wall? I had no idea
Mungo was so steep. If I had--well, I am in for it now!