“To keep off the sun, of course,” said he.
“The trees,” I began; and then he felt I really was silly, for every medical man knows the proper thing is to get rid of the trees, and have some artificial form of shade. At least, that is what I gathered from his subsequent explanation. The idea is apparently to cut down all the forest trees, and when the place is bare, they can be replaced by fresh trees, planted exactly where they ought to grow. Since they are not English trees it does not matter how beautiful they are, and that they take at least two hundred and fifty years to come to perfection is a matter of small moment. So the medical officer and I disagreed, till we came to Tanosu, a little town on the Tano River.
The Chief here had just built a new rest-house, thank heaven, on the comfortable Ashanti pattern, and I was given it by the courteous medical officer, who disapproved of me on trees, while he sought shelter in the village.
The people were very curious. The Chief, who it appears is a poor man, sent the usual presents, and then the people came and looked, and looked, till after about a couple of hours of it I grew weary, and shut the doors of the courtyard. Then they applied their eyes to every crank and cranny, and I had an uneasy feeling that whatever I did unseen eyes were following me. I wanted to rejoice in the Coronation, so I asked the doctor to come to dinner and celebrate, but unfortunately my kitchen was at least a quarter of a mile away, and there were such terrible long waits between the courses that again and again I had to ask my guest if he would not go and see what had happened. We finished at last, and I wanted to drink the King's health in whisky-and-soda which was the only drink I had, but my guest was a teetotaller, so I sent for the servants, only to be informed that every one of them refrained from liquor. And as a rule I approve so highly of temperance. Only for this once did I find it rather depressing. However, we stood up and drank the King's health, and I expect the eyes that were watching us wondered what on earth we were doing. They performed on tom-toms after that, and I fell asleep in the pleasant, damp night air, to a sort of barbaric fantasia on horns and drums.
We were nearing our journey's end. Early next morning we crossed the Tano River, which is full of sacred fish, and the medical officer took my photograph in the stream, and I took his, as he crossed on his boy's shoulders, and when we crossed to the other side we found we had left every vestige of the road, the good road that had so surprised me, behind. We went along a track now, a track that wound in and out in the dense, tropical forest. Generally the trees met overhead and we marched through a tunnel, the ground beneath our feet was often a quagmire, and if we could not see the sun often, neither could we feel the rain that fell on the foliage above our heads. On either side we could see nothing but the great trunks and buttresses of the trees, and the dense undergrowth. Possibly to go for days and days through a forest like this might give a sense of oppression, but to go as I did, for but a short time, was like peeping into a new world. Never a bird or beast I saw, nothing but occasionally a long stream of driver ants, winding like a band of cut jet across the path. And so we went on and on, through the solemn forest, till at last it cleared a little. There was the sky above again, and then no forest, but on my left cornfields and the brown splash of a native town, and in front a clearing, with the rim of the forest again in the distance, and right ahead, on the top of the gently sloping rise, the European bungalows of Sunyani. I had arrived, the first white woman who had come so far off the beaten track.
