CHAPTER XVI
Homesick—Off to England—At Colombo—The Stowaway—Home Again—The Wandering Fever returns—Reflections—Outbound for West Africa—On the West Coast—King Lobenguela—A Native Chief speaks—The Jungle—King Buloa and the Native Ceremony—An African Caprice—Music—A White Man among Wild Men—Nigeria—A Native Funeral—Night in the Jungle—Gold Mines—The African Drum
ABOUT this time I became homesick and tried to find a berth on one of the homebound boats. I eventually secured a job on a tramp steamer, the s.s. P——. There was nothing exceptional on the trip except the monotony of the ship’s routine. We called at Hobart, Tasmania, and after experiencing stiflingly hot weather crossing the Indian Ocean eventually arrived at Colombo. The natives came clambering on board and attempted to take possession of all our portable property. They are a dark mahogany-coloured people, a cheerful-looking folk. All their actions seem to be guided by a strong commercial instinct. Loaded with bunches of bananas, and baskets of oranges and limes, they ran about the decks, bargaining for old shirts and cast-off clothing. Over the vessel’s side floated their outrigger catamarans, swarming with dark, almost nude men and women. Swimming in the sea were their children, shouting, “I dive, I dive,” as they looked up to the passengers on deck, who threw pennies into the sea. As the coin reached the water down went their heads and up their legs, as like frogs they all dived down into the depths in a mad race to secure the coveted coin, which is never lost. At the moment when it seems impossible for them to live so long under the water the calm surface of the sea trembles at the spot where the coin was thrown in and up come a score of frizzly heads from the ocean’s depth, and the winner holds the prize between his teeth.
About a week or so after leaving Colombo we entered the Suez Canal. It was night. As the boats enter the canal a searchlight is fixed on to the fo’c’sle head to illumine the narrow waterway that flows ninety miles across the desert. It must be an impressive sight from the desert, the steamer going across like some mammoth beast, with a monster eye in front and the port-holes pulsing light in the iron sides as the steamer moves along.
I remember one incident that happened before we passed the canal that night. I was standing by the starboard alleyway dreaming, and watching the stars glittering over the desert, as the engines took the steamer along at about four knots an hour, when a rustling noise behind some barrels startled me. It was quite dark, and the decks were silent, for most of the passengers were asleep. Wondering what on earth could be stirring in the gloom, I leaned forward and saw two bright eyes looking out between some casks, and a soft voice crying out said something to me in a language which I did not understand. It was a pretty little Arab maid, a stowaway, who had crept on board at Ismailia, where we had stopped for one hour. I lifted her up tenderly; she was as black-skinned as night and only wore a tiny loin-cloth. She raised her bright eyes and was crying; but I took her along the alleyway and down below, and by kindness reassured her. We gave her a good feed and then, tired out, she fell asleep in my bunk, and I slept on the sea-chests in the cabin. In the morning she danced to us in our berth and caused us great merriment. We sneaked her ashore at Port Said, where she had friends; she had stowed away so as to reach them. We gave her plenty of food to take off with her, and we were sorry to see her go; she was only about seven years old!
Three weeks after leaving Port Said we arrived in England and berthed at Tilbury Docks. The atmosphere of primeval lands, shining under tropic suns and glorious stars, faded to a far-off dream as the dull, drab-grey of English skies drenched the wharves and the shouting dock labourers.
As the days wore on once again the roaming fever turned my thoughts to the sea, with all the splendour of its grand uncertainty, its devilish irony and vicissitudes. Though the glamour of romance had faded, yet my wanderings and turbulent experiences had completely unsettled me; indeed they had unfitted me for the humdrum commercial existence which I should have had to follow had I made up my mind to settle in my own country, assume respectability, and hide, as beneath a cloak, my inherent vagabond nature. The feathered quill pen at the desk would have fluttered to fly, held by my sympathetic hand.
The old wandering fever still gripped me. I was always wanting to be off into the uncertainty, to be buffeting round the capes of unknown seas, exploring for the marvellous unexpected, standing on the decks of imagination, under the flying moonlit sails of glorious illusion, singing wild, mad chanteys over wonderful argosies of schemes that could never be realised!
Yes, to be ashore on some far-away isle, clasping the savage maid in your arms by the coco-palms, gazing in the delicious orbs of the Universe—infinity in beams of eyelight. To breathe the present, yet be alive in the past, far away down the centuries of the modern dark ages! To walk by primeval forest and tumbling moonlit seas where they break over coral reefs. To rest by camp fires and huts, talking with bush women and men, and girls with sparkling eyes, eyes clear as heaven with her moon and stars. To be back in the splendid aboriginal darkness of—as it was in the beginning.