Finally T—— and I took boat for Lagos and arrived on the coast of Nigeria, where we saw native life and tropical bush that differed very little from that which I have already described. All the villages were similar, and their semi-barbarian population lived under their old customs, modified to suit the requirements of the British Commissioners. The natives all seemed prosperous and fat; rent and clothes did not trouble them, so they traded, and kept the proceeds for their immediate requirements. The bush was dotted with mahogany, ebony, camwood and yellow-wood trees; rubber and oil-palm were cultivated.
Long stretches of dry weather prevailed, and then a thunder-storm came along and seemed to shake the very mountains; the natives put their gourds and calabashes out and the deluge filled them in five minutes. Rivers that were tiny brooks rose in half-an-hour and tore along in foaming, swirling torrents, washing a village away. T—— and I saved the life of a native child as it passed us on the thundering flood; it was still in its sleeping-basket and looked up and yawned, only that moment wakened from sleep, as we grabbed it and pulled it ashore. The naked mother came flying towards us, waving her arms; when she saw her baby, and realised we had saved it, she embraced us and wailed with gratitude. We blushed, and after the storm T—— got his camera ready and took her photograph. She was extremely self-possessed; indeed semi-savage African women lack the virtue that white women have—their colour does not reveal their blushes.
One day we saw a native funeral; I think it was at a village called Awakar. We were walking along a jungle track some miles from Ediba, on the Cross river, when we came to the village. It was the evening, in drought weather, and we smelt the village as we approached the clearing. The village orchestra was in full swing. Drums, native pipes, clappers, tom-toms and bamboo rattlers, horns made of elephant tusks, all were being used, and made, as you can imagine, a weirdly impressive combination of sounds. A chief was being carried to his last resting-place. We were deeply interested in the scene that met our curious gaze. Wailing old men carried the coffin slowly along, and kept spitting, for the weather was muggy and hot. The chief had been dead some days; the coffin lid was unfastened, and we could see the dark, frizzly hair of the dead chief’s head at one end and the toes at the other. Myriads of winged insects and flies buzzed above the body and the procession as it moved along. The head chief, who was just behind, kept drinking tumbo (palm wine), which an ebony girl handed to him; and they followed him with a large calabash full to supply his thirst. T—— and I kept to the windward of the procession, and puffed vigorously at our pipes, and holding our noses we walked just by the side of the native military band, that played the death march behind the group. Right ahead of the procession, just in front of the hearse of wailing natives, walked eight elderly, stalwart chiefs, who carried a monstrous Ju-Ju. Its hideous, half-human face, with big glass eyes, stared backwards at the coffin and the procession as the whole group moved along. “Give me a pull at your flask, T——,” I said; immediately he handed it to me and then took a gulp himself. Presently the procession stopped at the far end of the village before a large hut. We made inquiries, and found it was the corpse’s late homestead: the custom was to bury him under the floor.
As they stopped, the sweating hearse of twenty mouths spat, and they lowered their grim burden before the hut-tomb. All the mourners commenced a weird monotone of melody, a melody that had bars in it resembling an English hymn. As we stood at the end of the village watching that heathenish burial, and the high priest lifted his hands and chin up to the big Ju-Ju’s wooden face in earnest supplication to the gods for that dead man of his diocese, the scent of the jungle blooms came in whiffs to our nostrils. Sunset was fading, and as the coffin disappeared in the doorway, and darkness drifted over the whole scene, I seemed to be standing in the dark ages, alone in some vast dream of life’s sad drama. But the jungle bird in the mahogany-tree started to sing sweetly, and then reality stole over the village, and I heard the wails of the mourners sorrowing over the blight of creation; real sorrow it was, and for all its grotesqueness the same as the sorrow of the civilised races. Still the bird sang over my head; it was a jungle nightingale passionately pouring forth melody as the native voices afar died away; and I dreamed on till T—— touched me on the arm, for it was getting late and we did not wish to stay on in that particular village.
We slept that night in another village called, I think, Eko. I shall always remember it because of the look on my friend’s face as I shaved him. We only had one razor between us, and that was rusty. T—— was terribly scrubby and he said: “Can you shave, Middleton?” “Yes,” I said; and I lathered his smiling face with a mixture of fat and swamp water for twenty minutes, to make up for the razor’s bluntness, and then started on him. He was a handsome fellow, but as I pulled the hairs out in batches his face twisted and contorted till he looked like a Ju-Ju, and the tiny black piccaninnies of the native village jumped and screamed with joy to see the white man’s terrible grimaces. “Be brave,” I said, and away came the skin of his chin. Then he performed on me; but I was younger, and only suffered half as much as he had done as he scraped the down from my cheeks.
A few weeks later we bade each other good-bye. I promised to write to him but lost his address. I never saw him again, but I have not forgotten him, as he will see if ever he reads this. I have seldom had a more cheerful or intellectual comrade in my travels than T—— was, and I am sure he created fame by his facial contortions among the village children in the African village Eko years ago.
You are never really lonely in the African bush, for as you tramp along the bush tracks with your swag—a flask of whisky and insect powder wrapped up in your mosquito net—strange things follow you, singing and blowing tiny flutes in your ears as they circle round your head, a dancing ring of tiny bodies on wings. Some of them hum at sunset, and if you feel poetical you can fancy you are out on the lonely track, with all the stars singing round you, as like some burdened creator you mumble to yourself and move along with your myriad satellites following you. At night you are not companionless, for the festering heat makes you feverish and imaginative. As you lie down to sleep, after closely fortifying yourself from all living, creeping things, the African moon steals up the sky and noises sound in your ears. The hideous Ju-Ju faces that you saw yesterday in the native village emerge, grinning, from the jungle, to peep and dance all round you; some of them bend over you, put their wooden mouths to your ears and whisper: “Englishman, Englishman, go home to your people before you are dead.” The fat lizards, gliding up and down the moonlit mahogany tree trunks, swell to a monstrous size as you watch, and jump right through your head; but pale shadow faces creep out of the jungle, faces with blue, kind eyes, and you recognise your own memories as caressing fingers, made of homeland dreams, touch your brow and at last you fall asleep.
I have often rested by the track in the lonely bush while birds puffed their throats and sang to me some sweet refrain that winged my heart overseas to England; and often at sunset a bird would sing a strange song that made me feel as though I had been dead for ages, and the sounds of the native drums in the distant village came from ghostly battalions of the Pharaohs, calling me across hills of sleep. My dreams have made me one of the wealthiest travellers on earth. If I can take my best dreams to my grave I shall be happy enough, for I shall own my own heaven and the memory of life’s hell will pass away.
I remember once when I was tramping the Australian bush alone I fell asleep in a hollow, and my dead brother, who was lost overboard at sea whilst going out as a sailor to Australia, crept out of the gum clumps just by my camp bed and lay beside me. I was happy, and put my arm round him all night long; but I felt very miserable when I awoke and tramped on alone at daybreak. I tell you how I felt, because men feel as well as see when they travel the world.
If we could only creep across the years, and gather in a harvest of our boyish dreams, and live them all again, how happy some of us would be; now our days rush away like the waters of the rivers to the sea: we still call the rivers by the old names, but the singing waters of yesterday have gone for ever.