But I'm bound to say that they very often arrange it shall not be a white man's and emphatically not a white woman's country. It suits somebody's plan that the country should have an evil reputation.
Goldfields, too, must never be judged in the same category as one judges the ordinary settlements in a country. When I was a tiny child I learned to discriminate, and to know that “diggers” must not be judged by the rules that guide the conduct of ordinary men. The population of a goldfield are a wild and reckless lot, and they lead wild and utterly reckless lives, and die in places where other people manage to live happily enough.
When the gold first “broke out” in Victoria, my father was Gold Commissioner on the Buckland River, among the mountains in the north-eastern district, and I have heard him tell how the men used to die like flies of “colonial” fever, and the theory was that there was some emanation from the dense vegetation that was all around them. Nowadays the Buckland is one of the healthiest spots in a very healthy country, and no one ever gets fever of any sort there. Now I do not wish to say that West Africa is one of the healthiest countries in the world, but I do say that men very very often work their own undoing.
“You should see Tarkwa,” said a man to me, who was much of my way of thinking, “when an alcoholic wave has passed over it!”
Eduaprim was another mine I went to see from Tarkwa. But it was in direct contrast to Prestea, though it too was in the heart of the forest country. No railway led to it; I had to go by hammock, and so I got my first taste of forest travelling, and enjoyed it immensely.
It is a solitary mine about nine miles from Tarkwa, and I started off early in the morning, and noticed as I went that the industry is, for good or ill, clearing the forests of West Africa, opening up the dark places, even as it did in my country over fifty years ago. Along the hillsides we went to Eduaprim, past mines and clearings for mining villages; sometimes the road was cut, a narrow track on the side of the hill, with the land rising up on one side and falling sheer on the other, sometimes a little river had to be bridged, and the road went on tunnel-like through the forest that must disappear before the furnaces, but at last I arrived at the top of the hill, and on it, commanding a wonderful view over the surrounding country, stood a bungalow, in a garden that looked over the tops of range upon range of high hills. I saw a storm come sweeping across the country, break and divide at the hilltop upon which I stood, and pass on, veiling the green hills in mist, which rolled away from the hills behind, leaving them smiling and washed and clean under a blue sky. If for no other sight than that, that journey into the hills was worth making.
The wife of the manager of the mine was a fellow-countrywoman of mine. She liked West Africa, kept her health there, and felt towards it very much as I did. No one likes great heat. The unchanging temperature is rather difficult to bear for one unaccustomed to it, but she thought it might be managed by a woman interested in her work and her husband, and as for the other discomforts—like me, she smiled at them. “The people who grumble should live in Australia,” said she, “and do their own work, cooking, washing, scrubbing. Do it for a week with the temperature averaging 100 degrees in the shade, and they wouldn't grumble at West Africa, and wouldn't dream of being sick.” And yet this contented woman must have led a very lonely life. Some wandering man connected with the mines, or a stray Commissioner, would come to see her occasionally, and the news of the world would come on men's heads from Tarkwa. And, of course, I suppose there was always the mine, which was her husband's livelihood. They took me into the bush behind the bungalow and showed me a great mahogany tree they had cut down, and then they showed me what I had seen many and many a time in my life before, but never in Africa—men washing the sand for gold. They were “dollying” it first, that is crushing the hard stone in iron vessels and then washing it, and the “show,” I could see for myself, was very good.