Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

The Sapele, they said, should come and take me back to Sekondi or, at least, to Accra, but the Sapele did not come, and if my hosts had not been the kindest in the world I should have begun to feel uncomfortable. I would gladly have gone overland, but carriers were not, even though some of my precious pots had been broken in the surf, and so my loads were reduced.

But every day there was no steamer, till at last a German steamer was signalled, and the bar steamer, a steamer of 350 tons, which usually lay at the little wharf just outside my bedroom window alongside the shipbuilding yard, prepared to go out. All my gear was carried down and put on board, and then suddenly the captain appeared on the verandah and pointed out to us two waiting women a threatening dark cloud that was gathering all across the eastern sky.

He shook his head, “I dare not go out till that is over.” And so we stood and waited and watched the storm gather.

It was a magnificent sight. The inky sky was reflected in an inky river, an ominous hush was over everything, one felt afraid to breathe, and the halfnaked workmen in the yard dropped their tools and fled to shelter. The household parrot gave one loud shriek, and the harsh sound of his call cut into the stillness like a knife.

From the distance we could hear the roaring of the surf, as if it were gathering strength, and then the grasses in the swamp to the west bent before a puff of air that broke on the stillness. There was another puff, another, and then the storm was upon us in all its spendour. Never have I seen such a storm. Though it was only four o'clock in the afternoon, it was dark as night, and the lightning cut across like jagged flame, there came immediately the crash of thunder, and then a mighty roaring wind, a wind that swept everything before it, that bent the few trees almost to the ground, that stripped them of their leaves as if they had been feathers shaken out of a bag, that beat the placid river into foam, and tore great sheets of corrugated iron from the roofs of the buildings and tossed them about the yard as if they had been so many strips of muslin.

The bar steamer's captain had gone at the first sign to see that his moorings were safe, and we two women stood on the verandah and watched the fury of the elements, while my hostess wondered where her husband was, and hoped and prayed he was not out in it. The inky blackness was all over the sky now, the wind was shrieking so as to deaden all other sounds, and the only thing we could hear above it was the crash of the thunder. And then I looked at the horizon away to the south-west. There, about a mile away as the crow flies, was the shore, and there against the inky darkness of the sky I could see tossed high into the air great sheets of foam. The surf on that shore must have been terrific. I would have given a good deal to go and see it, but, before I could make up my mind to start, down came the rain in torrents, the horizon was blotted out, the road through the swamp was running like a mill race, and it looked as if it would be no light task to beat my way through wind and rain to the shore.

And when the storm was subsiding back came the bar steamer's captain.

“No going out to-day,” said he; “I wouldn't dare risk the bar. Look at the surf!” and he pointed across the swamp to where we could again see the great white clouds of foam rising against the horizon. “To-morrow,” he said, “very early”; and he went away, and my host, soaked through and through, came back and told us what the storm had looked like from Beachtown.

The next morning was simply glorious. The world was fresh and clean and newly washed, and the river, from my window, looked like a brightly polished mirror.

“It'll be a bad bar, though,” said my host, shaking his head. “Better stay.”