The kindness of these people in Africa! Can I ever repay it? I know, of course, I never can. The head of Swanzy's transport and his pretty wife sent over to say they would be delighted to have me, and I was to come at once and consider myself at home. And, moreover, they had sent a cart for me, drawn by three Kroo boys.
I have said many hard things about the English women in West Africa. I had begun to think, after my visit to Accra, that only the nursing Sisters were worthy of the name of capable women; but, when I went to Addah, my drooping hopes revived. For I met there, in Mrs Dyson, the transport officer's wife, a woman, charming, pretty, and young, who yet thought it not beneath her dignity to look after her husband's house, to see that he lived well here in the wilderness, and who enjoyed herself and made the very best of life.
And Addah, I must admit, takes a deal of making the best of. It has been settled for long years. In Beachtown you may see old guns; in Big Addah, a native town six miles up the Volta, you may see more of them lying about the rough, uncared-for streets, and you may see here a clump of tamarind trees that evidently mark the spot where once the fort has been. Not one stone of it remains. The authorities say that these “old shells of forts” are not worth preserving, and the natives have taken them literally at their word, and incorporated the very stones in their own buildings.
I am sorry, for Addah at the mouth of the great river must have been a great slaving station once; trade must have come down the river in the past, even as it does now, as it will do, doubled and trebled, in the future.
The house I stayed in was close on the river, and my bedroom opened out on to a verandah that overlooked it. In the shipbuilding yard below perpetually rings the clang of iron on the anvil, for always there are ships to be built or repaired; and there, grown into a great cotton tree in that yard, may be seen the heavy chains that the slavers of oldtime used to hold their ships to the shore. The slavers have gone, the past is dead; but, knowing that wonderful river, I do not mind prophesying that, in spite of that dangerous surf, in spite of those threatening swamps, there is a big future in store for that lonely outpost of the Empire. That sixty-five miles of unimpeded waterway that lies between it and Akuse is not to be lightly disregarded, and the rich country goes far beyond that.
But, at present, there is not much to see at Addah. There is the swamp, apparently miles of it, there is a great, wide, mangrove-fringed river, and there are the never-to-be-forgotten mosquitoes. The mosquitoes of Addah are the sort that make you feel you should go about armed, and that made me feel for once that a mosquito-proof house was an actual necessity. One thing, there is always a strong breeze blowing at Addah, and my hostess was always very particular to have her wire-netting swept down carefully every day so that every scrap of air that could come in did so, and I conclude it was owing to this that I did not feel the air so vitiated and oppressive as I have in other houses. I hope one of the next public works of the Gold Coast will be to fill in that swamp, and so rid the place of those terrible mosquitoes. One solace the white people have, if there are mosquitoes, there is no undergrowth, and so there are no tsetse flies, and they can keep horses. My hostess's two solitary amusements—because she was a smiling, happy-faced girl she made the best of them—were to ride along the beach and to play tennis after it had grown cool in the evening, as it always does in Africa before the sun goes down. And those sunsets across the swamp, too, were something to wonder at. Purple and red and gold were they. Every night the sun died in a glory over swamp and heath; every morning he rose golden and red across the wide river, as if he would say that if Addah had naught else to recommend it there was always the eternal beauty of the skies.
But having got there it was rather difficult to get away.