_The kindness of Sekondi--Swanzy's to the rescue--A journey
to Dixcove--With a nursing Sister--The rainy season and wet
feet--Engineering a steep hill in the dark--Rains and brilliant
fireflies--The P.W.D. man's taste in colours--The need of a woman in
West Africa--Crossing the Whin River--My fresh-air theory confirmed._
Sekondi, from the nursing Sister outwards, was as it always has been,
awfully good to me, and I felt as if I were come home. I had the kindest
offers of help from all sides, and the railway company took my damaged
goods in hand and did their level best to repair damages. I was
bound for the goldfields and Ashanti, but I had still uneasily in my
remembrance that little bit of coast to the west of Sekondi that I had
left unvisited. If I had not written so much already about the carrier
difficulties, I might really write a book, that to me would be quite
interesting, about that day's journey to Dixcove. Swanzy's transport
came to the rescue and provided me with carriers, a most kindly gift,
for which I am for ever grateful, and I took with me a young nursing
Sister who was anxious to see something of bush travel.
There is always a fascination about the shore, the palm trees and the
yellow sand and the blue sky and bluer sea, but now the difficulties
were being added to daily and hourly, because it was the beginning of
the rainy season, and all the little rivers had “broken out,” and to
cross from one bank to another when a river is flooded, even if it is
only a little one, is as a rule no easy matter. To my great amusement I
found my companion had a great objection to getting her feet wet. I am
afraid I laughed most unsympathetically.
[Illustration: 0450]
“You can't,” I decided, and I fear she thought me a brute, “travel in
the rainy season in Africa and hope to keep dry”; and I exhorted her
not to mind if the water were up to her ankles, but to wade through. She
brought home to me difficulties of travel that I had never thought of
before. It had never occurred to me to worry as to whether I was likely
to get wet before; a little water or a little discomfort never seemed
to matter. The seat of the canoe I was sitting in broke and let me down
into the waist-deep puddle of water in the bottom, and somehow it seemed
a less thing to me than that her feet should get wet did to her. She
was a nice, good-looking girl, pleasant and smiling, but I decided that
never again as long as I lived would I travel with another woman. I know
my own shortcomings, but I never know where another woman will break
out.
And we went along that coast, where, two hundred years ago, quaint,
gossipy old Bosman had found so much of beauty and interest. Tacorady
Fort was deserted in his day. It is overgrown and forgotten now. Boutry
is on a high hill, the place of the old fort only marked by a thick
clump of trees, dark-green against the sky line; but it was getting dark
when we reached Boutry, there was a river to cross, and I was obsessed
with a sense of my responsibilities, such as I had never felt when I had
only my own skin to look after, and I was very thankful that a doctor
who was going to Dixcove had overtaken us. If I damaged my
travelling companion in any way, I felt that he at least could share
responsibility. We crossed the river, and the darkness fell, pitchy,
black darkness; it rained in a businesslike way as it does in the
Tropics, and there was a high hill to climb. It was a very steep hill,
with a very shocking track that did duty as a road, and my companion
expressed her utter inability to get up it. I was perfectly sure that
our Kroo hammock-boys could never get us up it, and I was inclined to
despair; then that doctor came to our aid. He had four Mendi boys,
the best carriers on the Coast, and we put them on to my companion's
hammock, and gaily she went off. She knew nothing of the dangers of the
way. I did, but I did not feel it necessary to enlighten her. I don't
know what the doctor did, but I put on my Burberry and instructed two of
my carriers that they must help me over the road. It was a road. When
I came back over it in the light, three days later, I wondered how
on earth we had tackled it in the dark; still more did I wonder how a
heavily laden hammock--for she was a strapping young woman, a good deal
bigger than I am--had been engineered up and down it. But Mendi carriers
are wonderful, and there was a certain charm in walking there in the
night. When the rain stopped, the fireflies came out, and the gloom
beneath the trees was lightened by thousands of brilliant sparks of
fire. I don't know whether fireflies are more brilliant after rain,
but I remember them most distinctly on those two wet nights when I was
travelling, once on my way to Dixcove and once on the way to Palime.
Up the hill we went and down the hill, along the sands, across the
shallows of a river just breaking out--and the lantern light gleamed
wetly on the sand--through little sleepy villages and across more
hilly country, and at last, just as the moon was rising stormily in the
clouded sky, we were opposite a long flight of wide steps, and knew we
had reached Dixcove.
There was one white man, a P.W.D. man, in Dixcove, and a surprised
man was he. Actually, two women had come out of the night and flung
themselves upon him. Of course, we had brought servants and provisions
and beds, so it was only a question of providing quarters. Now I smile
when I think of it. We crossed the courtyard, we climbed the stairs, we
entered the modern house that was built on top of the little fort, and
out of a sort of whirlpool a modified disorder emerged, when we
found ourselves, two men and two women, by the light of a fluttering,
chimneyless Hinkson lamp, all assembled in the room that two camp-beds
proclaimed the women's bedroom, and we all partook of a little whisky to
warm ourselves while we waited for dinner. The P.W.D. man was fluttered
and, I think, pleased, for at least our coming broke the monotony, and
the nursing Sister undertook the commissariat and interviewed his cook.
Altogether we made a cheerful little week-end party in that romote
corner of the earth, and when it rained, as rain it did most of the
time, we played bridge as if we had been in London.
Dixcove is a pretty little place, literally a cove, and the fort is
built on high ground on a neck of land that forms the head of the cove.
Round it grow many orange groves, and altogether it is a desirable and
delightful spot, but it must be very lonely for the only white man who
was there. He had just repainted the bungalow on top of the fort, and
whether he had used up the odds and ends of paints, or whether this was
his taste, or whether he had desired something to cheer him, or whether
he was actuated by the same spirit that seems to move impressionist
painters, I do not know, but when I got up next morning and walked on
the bastion, that bungalow fairly took my breath away. It was painted
whole-heartedly a violent Reckitt's blue; the uprights and the other
posts that criss-crossed across it were a bright vivid green, and they
were all picked out in pink. There was the little white fort set in the
midst of tropical greenery, everything beautiful, with the bungalow on
top setting the discordant note. It was pitiful, but at the same time
the effect was so comic that the nursing Sister and I laughed till we
cried, and then our host came out and could not understand what we
were laughing about. We came to the charitable conclusion he must be
colour-blind.
[Illustration: 0456]
The two men wanted us to stay. They said it was more comfortable, and
when I compared the luncheon the doctor gave us to the meals we had when
I provided the eatables and the nursing Sister gave her attention to
the cuisine, I must say I agreed with them, and resolved once again to
proclaim the absolute necessity for having women in West Africa. But she
had to go back to her work, and I had to go on my travels, and so, like
the general who marched his army up the hill and marched it down again,
presently I was on my way back. And not a moment too soon. It was
raining when we started, and our host and the doctor pressed us to stay,
but I had not been on the Coast all this time without knowing very well
what that rain would mean. The rivers that had been trickles when we
set out would be roaring torrents now, and I knew in a little time they
would be impassable; then the only thing would be to go back to Sekondi
by surf boat, and I had had enough of the surf to last me for many a
long day. Besides, our provisions were getting low. We started early; we
had less to carry, for we had eaten most of the provisions, and we had
more men, for we brought back most of the doctor's following, but still
it took us all we knew to get across those rivers, and the Whin River
was nearly too much for us. It had been bad when we came, now the sea
was racing across the sands, the flooded, muddy water of the river was
rushing to meet it, and the two black men who were working a surf
boat as a ferry came and asked an exorbitant sum to take us across.
My headman demurred and said we wouldn't go. I left it to him, and the
bargaining was conducted in the usual slatternly Coast English at the
top of their voices. I must confess, as my companion and I sat on the
sand and watched the wild waters, I wondered what we would do if we did
not cross, for Dixcove was fully fourteen miles behind us. Down came the
price by slow degrees, in approved fashion, till at last it appeared
I, my companion, our goods, chattels, hammocks, and our followers,
numbering fully twenty men, were to be taken across for the sum of two
shillings and sixpence. I sent the gear first, and then some of the men,
and finally the nursing Sister and I went. Unfortunately there was not
room in the boat for the two last men, and I could not help being amused
when the ferryman came to be paid, and the men all clustered round
vehemently demanding that I should do no such thing till their two
companions were also brought over. Not a scrap of faith had they in the
ferryman keeping his word, so I had to sit down on the sand among the
short, coarse grass and the long stalks of the wandering bean, and
wait till those two men were fetched, when I paid up, and we went on to
Sekondi.
The journey was short; it is hardly worth recording, hardly worth
remembering, but for those wonderful fireflies, and for another thing
that bears strongly on my theory regarding health in West Africa.
The nursing Sister I took with me was a tall, goodlooking girl,
considerably younger than I am, and she looked as if she ought to have
been very much stronger. She had barely been on the Coast a short three
months, but she had already had one or two goes of fever, a thing I have
never had, and she did not like it. She was very careful of herself,
and she abominated the climate. At night I noticed she shut herself away
from all chance of draughts, drawing curtains and shutting doors so as
to insure herself against chill. When we started on our journey she
was not well, “the climate was not agreeing with her,” and they were
beginning to think she “could not stand it.” We spent a day in the open
and we got somewhat wet. When night came we shared a room and she wanted
to close, at least, a shutter. Partly that was to have privacy and
partly to keep away draughts. Then I brutally put down my foot.
I considered it dangerous to be shut in in Africa, and as I was
engineering that expedition I thought I ought to have my way. One thing
I did not insist upon, I did not have the windows open all round, but
I had them wide on two sides, so that a thorough draught might blow
through the room. My bed I put right in it, but I allowed her to put
hers in the most sheltered part of the room she could find, and, of
course, I could not prevent her wrapping her head in a blanket.
She put in those two nights in fear and trembling, I know, but she went
back to Sekondi in far better health than she had left it. That she
acknowledged herself, but she does not like Africa; the charm of it had
passed her by, and I wonder very much if she will complete her term of
service.