Wherein is recounted how the Voyager sets out from Buea, and goes up
through the forest belt to the top of the S.E. crater of Mungo Mah
Lobeh, with many dilemmas and disasters that befell on the way.
September 22nd.--Wake at 5. Fine morning. Fine view towards
Cameroon River. The broad stretch of forest below, and the water-
eaten mangrove swamps below that, are all a glorious indigo flushed
with rose colour from "the death of the night," as Kiva used to call
the dawn. No one stirring till six, when people come out of the
huts, and stretch themselves and proceed to begin the day, in the
African's usual perfunctory, listless way.
My crew are worse than the rest. I go and hunt cook out. He props
open one eye, with difficulty, and yawns a yawn that nearly cuts his
head in two. I wake him up with a shock, by saying I mean to go on
up to-day, and want my chop, and to start one time. He goes off and
announces my horrible intention to the others. Kefalla soon arrives
upon the scene full of argument, "You no sabe this be Sunday, Ma?"
says he in a tone that tells he considers this settles the matter.
I "sabe" unconcernedly; Kefalla scratches his head for other
argument, but he has opened with his heavy artillery; which being
repulsed throws his rear lines into confusion. Bum, the head man,
then turns up, sound asleep inside, but quite ready to come. Bum, I
find, is always ready to do what he is told, but has no more
original ideas in his head than there are in a chair leg. Kefalla,
however, by scratching other parts of his anatomy diligently, has
now another argument ready, the two Bakwiris are sick with abdominal
trouble, that requires rum and rest, and one of the other boys has
hot foot.
Herr Liebert now appears upon the scene, and says I can have some of
his labourers, who are now more or less idle, because he cannot get
about much with his bad foot to direct them, so I give the Bakwiris
and the two hot foot cases "books" to take down to Herr von Lucke
who will pay them off for me, and seeing that they have each a good
day's rations of rice, beef, etc., eliminate them from the party.
In addition to the labourers, I am to have as a guide Sasu, a black
sergeant, who went up the Peak with the officers of the Hyaena, and
I get my breakfast, and then hang about watching my men getting
ready very slowly to start. Off we get about 8, and start with all
good wishes, and grim prophecies, from Herr Liebert.
Led by Sasu, and accompanied by "To-morrow," a man who has come to
Buea from some interior unknown district, and who speaks no known
language, and whose business it is to help to cut a way through the
bush, we go down the path we came and cross the river again. This
river seems to separate the final mass of the mountain from the
foot-hills on this side. Immediately after crossing it we turn up
into the forest on the right hand side, and "To-morrow" cuts through
an over-grown track for about half-an-hour, and then leaves us.
Everything is reeking wet, and we swish through thick undergrowth
and then enter a darker forest where the earth is rocky and richly
decorated with ferns and moss. For the first time in my life I see
tree-ferns growing wild in luxuriant profusion. What glorious
creations they are! Then we get out into the middle of a koko
plantation. Next to sweet-potatoes, the premier abomination to walk
through, give me kokos for good all-round tryingness, particularly
when they are wet, as is very much the case now. Getting through
these we meet the war hedge again, and after a conscientious
struggle with various forms of vegetation in a muddled, tangled
state, Sasu says, "No good, path done got stopped up," so we turn
and retrace our steps all the way, cross the river, and horrify Herr
Liebert by invading his house again. We explain the situation.
Grave headshaking between him and Sasu about the practicability of
any other route, because there is no other path. I do not like to
say "so much the better," because it would have sounded ungrateful,
but I knew from my Ogowe experiences that a forest that looks from
afar a dense black mat is all right underneath, and there is a short
path recently cut by Herr Liebert that goes straight up towards the
forest above us. It had been made to go to a clearing, where
ambitious agricultural operations were being inaugurated, when Herr
Liebert hurt his foot. Up this we go, it is semi-vertical while it
lasts, and it ends in a scrubby patch that is to be a plantation;
this crossed we are in the Urwald, and it is more exquisite than
words can describe, but not good going, particularly at one spot
where a gigantic tree has fallen down across a little rocky ravine,
and has to be crawled under. It occurs to me that this is a highly
likely place for snakes and an absolutely sure find for scorpions,
and when we have passed it three of these latter interesting
creatures are observed on the load of blankets which is fastened on
to the back of Kefalla. We inform Kefalla of the fact on the spot.
A volcanic eruption of entreaty, advice, and admonition results, but
we still hesitate. However, the gallant cook tackles them in a sort
of tip-cat way with a stick, and we proceed into a patch of long
grass, beyond which there is a reach of amomums. The winged amomum
I see here in Africa for the first time. Horrid slippery things
amomum sticks to walk on, when they are lying on the ground; and
there is a lot of my old enemy the calamus about.
On each side are deep forested dells and ravines, and rocks show up
through the ground in every direction, and things in general are
slippery, and I wonder now and again, as I assume with unnecessary
violence a recumbent position, why I came to Africa; but patches of
satin-leaved begonias and clumps of lovely tree-ferns reconcile me
to my lot. Cook does not feel these forest charms, and gives me
notice after an hour's experience of mountain forest-belt work; what
cook would not?
As we get higher we have to edge and squeeze every few minutes
through the aerial roots of some tremendous kind of tree, plentiful
hereabouts. One of them we passed through I am sure would have run
any Indian banyan hard for extent of ground covered, if it were
measured. In the region where these trees are frequent, the
undergrowth is less dense than it is lower down.
Imagine a vast, seemingly limitless cathedral with its countless
columns covered, nay, composed of the most exquisite dark-green,
large-fronded moss, with here and there a delicate fern embedded in
it as an extra decoration. The white, gauze-like mist comes down
from the upper mountain towards us: creeping, twining round, and
streaming through the moss-covered tree columns--long bands of it
reaching along sinuous, but evenly, for fifty and sixty feet or
more, and then ending in a puff like the smoke of a gun. Soon,
however, all the mist-streams coalesce and make the atmosphere all
their own, wrapping us round in a clammy, chill embrace; it is not
that wool-blanket, smothering affair that we were wrapped in down by
Buana, but exquisitely delicate. The difference it makes to the
beauty of the forest is just the same difference you would get if
you put a delicate veil over a pretty woman's face or a sack over
her head. In fact, the mist here was exceedingly becoming to the
forest's beauty. Now and again growls of thunder roll out from, and
quiver in the earth beneath our feet. Mungo is making a big
tornado, and is stirring and simmering it softly so as to make it
strong. I only hope he will not overdo it, as he does six times in
seven, and make it too heavy to get out on to the Atlantic, where
all tornadoes ought to go. If he does the thing will go and burst
on us in this forest to-night.
The forest now grows less luxuriant though still close--we have left
the begonias and the tree-ferns, and are in another zone. The trees
now, instead of being clothed in rich, dark-green moss, are heavily
festooned with long, greenish-white lichen. It pours with rain.
At last we reach the place where the sergeant says we ought to camp
for the night. I have been feeling the time for camping was very
ripe for the past hour, and Kefalla openly said as much an hour and
a half ago, but he got such scathing things said to him about
civilians' legs by the sergeant that I did not air my own opinion.
We are now right at the very edge of the timber belt. My head man
and three boys are done to a turn. If I had had a bull behind me or
Mr. Fildes in front, I might have done another five or seven miles,
but not more.
The rain comes down with extra virulence as soon as we set to work
to start the fire and open the loads. I and Peter have great times
getting out the military camp-bed from its tight, bolster-like case,
while Kefalla gives advice, until, being irritated by the bed's
behaviour, I blow up Kefalla and send him to chop firewood.
However, we get the thing out and put up after cutting a place clear
to set it on; owing to the world being on a stiff slant hereabouts,
it takes time to make it stand straight. I get four stakes cut, and
drive them in at the four corners of the bed, and then stretch over
it Herr von Lucke's waterproof ground-sheet, guy the ends out to
pegs with string, feel profoundly grateful to both Herr Liebert for
the bed and Herr von Lucke for the sheet, and place the baggage
under the protection of the German Government's two belongings.
Then I find the boys have not got a fire with all their fuss, and I
have to demonstrate to them the lessons I have learnt among the Fans
regarding fire-making. We build a fire-house and then all goes
well. I notice they do not make a fire Fan fashion, but build it in
a circle.
Evidently one of the labourers from Buea, named Xenia, is a good
man. Equally evidently some of my other men are only fit to carry
sandwich-boards for Day and Martin's blacking. I dine luxuriously
off tinned fat pork and hot tea, and then feeling still hungry go on
to tinned herring. Excellent thing tinned herring, but I have to
hurry because I know I must go up through the edge of the forest on
to the grass land, and see how the country is made during the brief
period of clearness that almost always comes just before nightfall.
So leaving my boys comfortably seated round the fire having their
evening chop, I pass up through the heavily lichen-tasselled fringe
of the forest-belt into deep jungle grass, and up a steep and
slippery mound.
In front the mountain-face rises like a wall from behind a set of
hillocks, similar to the one I am at present on. The face of the
wall to the right and left has two dark clefts in it. The peak
itself is not visible from where I am; it rises behind and beyond
the wall. I stay taking compass bearings and look for an easy way
up for to-morrow. My men, by now, have missed their "ma" and are
yelling for her dismally, and the night comes down with great
rapidity for we are in the shadow of the great mountain mass, so I
go back into camp. Alas! how vain are often our most energetic
efforts to remove our fellow creatures from temptation. I knew a
Sunday down among the soldiers would be bad for my men, and so came
up here, and now, if you please, these men have been at the rum,
because Bum, the head man, has been too done up to do anything but
lie in his blanket and feed. Kefalla is laying down the law with
great detail and unction. Cook who has been very low in his mind
all day, is now weirdly cheerful, and sings incoherently. The other
boys, who want to go to sleep, threaten to "burst him" if he "no
finish." It's no good--cook carols on, and soon succumbing to the
irresistible charm of music, the other men have to join in the
choruses. The performance goes on for an hour, growing woollier and
woollier in tone, and then dying out in sleep.
I write by the light of an insect-haunted lantern, sitting on the
bed, which is tucked in among the trees some twenty yards away from
the boys' fire. There is a bird whistling in a deep rich note that
I have never heard before.
September 23rd.--Morning gloriously fine. Rout the boys out, and
start at seven, with Sasu, Head man, Xenia, Black boy, Kefalla and
Cook.
The great south-east wall of the mountain in front of us is quite
unflecked by cloud, and in the forest are thousands of bees. We
notice that the tongues of forest go up the mountain in some places
a hundred yards or more above the true line of the belt. These
tongues of forest get more and more heavily hung with lichen, and
the trees thinner and more stunted, towards their ends. I think
that these tongues are always in places where the wind does not get
full play. All those near our camping place on this south-east face
are so. It is evidently not a matter of soil, for there is ample
soil on this side above where the trees are, and then again on the
western side of the mountain--the side facing the sea--the timber
line is far higher up than on this. Nor, again, is it a matter of
angle that makes the timber line here so low, for those forests on
the Sierra del Cristal were growing luxuriantly over far steeper
grades. There is some peculiar local condition just here evidently,
or the forest would be up to the bottom of the wall of the crater.
I am not unreasonable enough to expect it to grow on that, but its
conduct in staying where it does requires explanation.
We clamber up into the long jungle grass region and go on our way
across a series of steep-sided, rounded grass hillocks, each of
which is separated from the others by dry, rocky watercourses. The
effects produced by the seed-ears of the long grass round us are
very beautiful; they look a golden brown, and each ear and leaf is
gemmed with dewdrops, and those of the grass on the sides of the
hillocks at a little distance off show a soft brown-pink.
After half an hour's climb, when we are close at the base of the
wall, I observe the men ahead halting, and coming up with them find
Monrovia Boy down a hole; a little deep blow-hole, in which, I am
informed, water is supposed to be. But Monrovia soon reports "No
live."
I now find we have not a drop of water, either with us or in camp,
and now this hole has proved dry. There is, says the sergeant, no
chance of getting any more water on this side of the mountain, save
down at the river at Buea.
This means failure unless tackled, and it is evidently a trick
played on me by the boys, who intentionally failed to let me know of
this want of water before leaving Buea, where it seems they have all
learnt it. I express my opinion of them in four words and send
Monrovia Boy, who I know is to be trusted, back to Buea with a
scribbled note to Herr Liebert asking him to send me up two
demijohns of water. I send cook with him as far as the camp in the
forest we have just left with orders to bring up three bottles of
soda water I have left there, and to instruct the men there that as
soon as the water arrives from Buea they are to bring it on up to
the camp I mean to make at the top of the wall.
The men are sulky, and Sasu, Peter, Kefalla, and Head man say they
will wait and come on as soon as cook brings the soda water, and I
go on, and presently see Xenia and Black boy are following me. We
get on to the intervening hillocks and commence to ascend the face
of the wall.
The angle of this wall is great, and its appearance from below is
impressive from its enormous breadth, and its abrupt rise without
bend or droop for a good 2,000 feet into the air. It is covered
with short, yellowish grass through which the burnt-up, scoriaceous
lava rock protrudes in rough masses.
I got on up the wall, which when you are on it is not so
perpendicular as it looks from below, my desire being to see what
sort of country there was on the top of it, between it and the final
peak. Sasu had reported to Herr Liebert that it was a wilderness of
rock, in which it would be impossible to fix a tent, and spoke
vaguely of caves. Here and there on the way up I come to holes,
similar to the one my men had been down for water. I suppose these
holes have been caused by gases from an under hot layer of lava
bursting up through the upper cool layer. As I get higher, the
grass becomes shorter and more sparse, and the rocks more
ostentatiously displayed. Here and there among them are sadly tried
bushes, bearing a beautiful yellow flower, like a large yellow wild
rose, only scentless. It is not a rose at all, I may remark. The
ground, where there is any basin made by the rocks, grows a great
sedum, with a grand head of whity-pink flower, also a tall herb,
with soft downy leaves silver grey in colour, and having a very
pleasant aromatic scent, and here and there patches of good honest
parsley. Bright blue, flannelly-looking flowers stud the grass in
sheltered places and a very pretty large green orchid is plentiful.
Above us is a bright blue sky with white cloud rushing hurriedly
across it to the N.E. and a fierce sun. When I am about half-way
up, I think of those boys, and, wanting rest, sit down by an
inviting-looking rock grotto, with a patch of the yellow flowered
shrub growing on its top. Inside it grow little ferns and mosses,
all damp; but alas! no water pool, and very badly I want water by
this time.
Below me a belt of white cloud had now formed, so that I could see
neither the foot-hillocks nor the forest, and presently out of this
mist came Xenia toiling up, carrying my black bag. "Where them
Black boy live?" said I. "Black boy say him foot be tire too much,"
said Xenia, as he threw himself down in the little shade the rock
could give. I took a cupful of sour claret out of the bottle in the
bag, and told Xenia to come on up as soon as he was rested, and
meanwhile to yell to the others down below and tell them to come on.
Xenia did, but sadly observed, "softly softly still hurts the
snail," and I left him and went on up the mountain.
When I had got to the top of the rock under which I had sheltered
from the blazing sun, the mist opened a little, and I saw my men
looking like so many little dolls. They were still sitting on the
hillock where I had left them. Buea showed from this elevation
well. The guard house and the mission house, like little houses in
a picture, and the make of the ground on which Buea station stands,
came out distinctly as a ledge or terrace, extending for miles
N.N.E. and S.S.W. This ledge is a strange-looking piece of country,
covered with low bush, out of which rise great, isolated, white-
stemmed cotton trees. Below, and beyond this is a denser band of
high forest, and again below this stretches the vast mangrove-swamp
fringing the estuary of the Cameroons, Mungo, and Bimbia rivers. It
is a very noble view, giving one an example of the peculiar beauty
one oft-times gets in this West African scenery, namely colossal
sweeps of colour. The mangrove-swamps looked to-day like a vast
damson-coloured carpet threaded with silver where the waterways ran.
It reminded me of a scene I saw once near Cabinda, when on climbing
to the top of a hill I suddenly found myself looking down on a sheet
of violet pink more than a mile long and half a mile wide. This was
caused by a climbing plant having taken possession of a valley full
of trees, whose tops it had reached and then spread and interlaced
itself over them, to burst into profuse glorious laburnum-shaped
bunches of flowers.
After taking some careful compass bearings for future use regarding
the Rumby and Omon range of mountains, which were clearly visible
and which look fascinatingly like my beloved Sierra del Cristal, I
turned my face to the wall of Mungo, and continued the ascent. The
sun, which was blazing, was reflected back from the rocks in
scorching rays. But it was more bearable now, because its heat was
tempered by a bitter wind.
The slope becoming steeper, I gradually made my way towards the left
until I came to a great lane, as neatly walled with rock as if it
had been made with human hands. It runs down the mountain face,
nearly vertically in places and at stiff angles always, but it was
easier going up this lane than on the outside rough rock, because
the rocks in it had been smoothed by mountain torrents during
thousands of wet seasons, and the walls protected one from the
biting wind, a wind that went through me, for I had been stewing for
nine months and more in tropic and equatorial swamps.
Up this lane I went to the very top of the mountain wall, and then,
to my surprise, found myself facing a great, hillocky, rock-
encumbered plain, across the other side of which rose the mass of
the peak itself, not as a single cone, but as a wall surmounted by
several, three being evidently the highest among them.
I started along the ridge of my wall, and went to its highest part,
that to the S.W., intending to see what I could of the view towards
the sea, and then to choose a place for camping in for the night.
When I reached the S.W. end, looking westwards I saw the South
Atlantic down below, like a plain of frosted silver. Out of it,
barely twenty miles away, rose Fernando Po to its 10,190 feet with
that majestic grace peculiar to a volcanic island. Immediately
below me, some 10,000 feet or so, lay Victoria with the forested
foot-hills of Mungo Mah Lobeh encircling it as a diadem, and Ambas
Bay gemmed with rocky islands lying before it. On my left away S.E.
was the glorious stretch of the Cameroon estuary, with a line of
white cloud lying very neatly along the course of Cameroon River.
In one of the chasms of the mountain wall that I had come up--in the
one furthest to the north--there was a thunderstorm brewing,
seemingly hanging on to, or streaming out of the mountain side, a
soft billowy mass of dense cream-coloured cloud, with flashes of
golden lightnings playing about in it with soft growls of thunder.
Surely Mungo Mah Lobeh himself, of all the thousands he annually
turns out, never made one more lovely than this. Soon the white
mists rose from the mangrove-swamp, and grew rose-colour in the
light of the setting sun, as they swept upwards over the now purple
high forests. In the heavens, to the north, there was a rainbow,
vivid in colour, one arch of it going behind the peak, the other
sinking into the mist sea below, and this mist sea rose and rose
towards me, turning from pale rose-colour to lavender, and where the
shadow of Mungo lay across it, to a dull leaden grey. It was soon
at my feet, blotting the under-world out, and soon came flowing over
the wall top at its lowest parts, stretching in great spreading
rivers over the crater plain, and then these coalescing everything
was shut out save the two summits: that of Cameroon close to me,
and that of Clarence away on Fernando Po. These two stood out
alone, like great island masses made of iron rising from a formless,
silken sea.
The space around seemed boundless, and there was in it neither sound
nor colour, nor anything with form, save those two terrific things.
It was like a vision, and it held me spell-bound, as I stood
shivering on the rocks with the white mist round my knees until into
my wool-gathering mind came the memory of those anything but sublime
men of mine; and I turned and scuttled off along the rocks like an
agitated ant left alone in a dead Universe.
I soon found the place where I had come up into the crater plain and
went down over the wall, descending with twice the rapidity, but ten
times the scratches and grazes, of the ascent.
I picked up the place where I had left Xenia, but no Xenia was
there, nor came there any answer to my bush call for him, so on I
went down towards the place where, hours ago, I had left the men.
The mist was denser down below, but to my joy it was warmer than on
the summit of the wind-swept wall.
I had nearly reached the foot of this wall and made my mind up to
turn in for the night under a rock, when I heard a melancholy croak
away in the mist to the left. I went towards it and found Xenia
lost on his own account, and distinctly quaint in manner, and then I
recollected that I had been warned Xenia is slightly crazy. Nice
situation this: a madman on a mountain in the mist. Xenia, I
found, had no longer got my black bag, but in its place a lid of a
saucepan and an empty lantern. To put it mildly, this is not the
sort of outfit the R.G.S. Hints to Travellers would recommend for
African exploration. Xenia reported that he gave the bag to Black
boy, who shortly afterwards disappeared, and that he had neither
seen him nor any of the others since, and didn't expect to this side
of Srahmandazi. In a homicidal state of mind, I made tracks for the
missing ones followed by Xenia. I thought mayhap they had grown on
to the rocks they had sat upon so long, but presently, just before
it became quite dark, we picked up the place we had left them in and
found there only an empty soda-water bottle. Xenia poured out a
muddled mass of observations to the effect that "they got fright too
much about them water palaver."
I did not linger to raise a monument to them, but I said I wished
they were in a condition to require one, and we went on over our
hillocks with more confidence now that we knew we had stuck well to
our unmarked track.
"The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside."
Only she was a young and inefficient moon, and although we were
below the thickest of the mist band, it was dark. Finding our own
particular hole in the forest wall was about as easy as finding "one
particular rabbit hole in an unknown hay-field in the dark," and the
attempt to do so afforded us a great deal of varied exercise. I am
obliged to be guarded in my language, because my feelings now are
only down to one degree below boiling point. The rain now began to
fall, thank goodness, and I drew the thick ears of grass through my
parched lips as I stumbled along over the rugged lumps of rock
hidden under the now waist-high jungle grass.
Our camp hole was pretty easily distinguishable by daylight, for it
was on the left-hand side of one of the forest tongues, the grass
land running down like a lane between two tongues here, and just
over the entrance three conspicuously high trees showed. But we
could not see these "picking-up" points in the darkness, so I had to
keep getting Xenia to strike matches, and hold them in his hat while
I looked at the compass. Presently we came full tilt up against a
belt of trees which I knew from these compass observations was our
tongue of forest belt, and I fired a couple of revolver shots into
it, whereabouts I judged our camp to be.
This was instantly answered by a yell from human voices in chorus,
and towards that yell in a slightly amiable--a very slightly
amiable--state of mind I went.
I will draw a veil over the scene, particularly over my observations
to those men. They did not attempt to deny their desertion, but
they attempted to explain it, each one saying that it was not he but
the other boy who "got fright too much."
I closed the palaver promptly with a brief but lurid sketch of my
opinion on the situation, and ordered food, for not having had a
thing save that cup of sour claret since 6.30 A.M., and it being now
11 P.M., I felt sinkings. Then arose another beautiful situation
before me. It seems when Cook and Monrovia got back into camp this
morning Master Cook was seized with one of those attacks of a desire
to manage things that produce such awful results in the African
servant, and sent all the beef and rice down to Buea to be cooked,
because there was no water here to cook it. Therefore the men have
got nothing to eat. I had a few tins of my own food and so gave
them some, and they became as happy as kings in a few minutes,
listening and shouting over the terrible adventures of Xenia, who is
posing as the Hero of the Great Cameroon. I get some soda-water
from the two bottles left and some tinned herring, and then write
out two notes to Herr Liebert asking him to send me three more
demijohns of water, and some beef and rice from the store, promising
faithfully to pay for them on my return.
I would not prevent those men of mine from going up that peak above
me after their touching conduct to-day. Oh! no; not for worlds,
dear things.