The rainy season was upon us, and it was time for me to go back. The medical officer, who had just been relieved, was coming down with me, and this medical officer was very sick with a poisoned hand. It was my last trek in the bush, and I should have liked to linger, but the thought of that bad hand made me go faster, for I would not keep him from help longer than I could help. So we retraced our steps exactly, doing in four days what I had taken five to do on the way up, and this was the more remarkable because now it rained. It rained heavens hard, and the little streams that our men had carried us through quite easily on the way up, were now great, rushing rivers that sometimes we negotiated with a canoe, and sometimes laboriously got over with the aid of a log. It really is no joke crossing a flooded African stream on a slimy log. I took a picture of one, with the patient Wangara crossing. Then my men carried me in my hammock to the log, and with some little difficulty I got out of that hammock on to it. I had to scramble to my feet, and the man beside me made me understand that I had better not fall over, as on the other side the water was deep enough to drown me. I walked very gingerly, because the water beneath looked unpleasantly muddy, up that tree-trunk, scrambled somehow round the root and down the other branch, till at last I got into water shallow enough to allow of my being transferred to my hammock and carried to dry land, there to sit and watch my goods and chattels coming across the same way. I felt a wretch too, for it had taken close on twenty men, more or less, to get me across without injury, and yet here were a company of Wangaras or Hausas, and the patient women had loads on their heads and babies on their backs. No one worried about them.
For perhaps the first time in my life I was more than content with that station in life into which it had pleased my God to call me. I do not think I could wish my worst enemy a harder fate than to be a Wangara woman on trek, unless perhaps I was extra bitter, and wished him to taste life as an African fowl. That must be truly a cruel existence. He scratches for a living, and every man's hand is against him. I used to feel sometimes as if I were aiding and abetting, for I received on this journey so many dashes of fowls that neither I nor the medical officer could possibly eat them all, and so our servants came in for them. More than once I have come across Grant sitting resting by the roadside with a couple of unfortunate fowls tied to his toes. In Grant's position I should have been anything but happy, but he did not seem to mind, and as I never saw the procession en route, I was left in doubt as to whether he carried them, or insisted on their walking after him. I saw that he had rice for them, and told him to give them water, but I dare say he did not trouble.
The last night out, my last night in the bush I fear me for many a long day, we stopped at a village called Fu-fu, and I went to the rest-house, which was built European fashion, and was on the edge of the forest, at some distance from the village.
I found my men putting up my bed in a room where all the air came through rather a small hole in the mud wall, and I objected.