A white man at Labolabo! How surprised I was. Of course I would go, and Mr Olympia apologising for the absence of hammock or cart, we set off to walk.
Those African ten minutes! It took me a good forty minutes through the blazing heat of an African afternoon, and then I was met upon the steps of the bungalow by a perfectly amazed white man in his shirt sleeves, who hurriedly explained that when he had seen the luggage coming along in charge of the faithful Grant, who made the nearest approach to a slave-driver I have ever seen, he had asked him, “Who be your master?”
“It be no massa,” said Grant, “it be missus.”
“And then,” said my new friend, “I set him at the end of the avenue and told him he was to keep you off till I found a coat. But I couldn't find it. I don't know where the blamed thing's got to.”
He went on to inquire where I had come from and how I had come. I told him, “Up the river.”
“But,” he protested, “it requires a picked crew of ten preventive service men to come up the Volta.”
I assured him, I was ready to take my oath about it, you could do it fairly easily with six ordinary, hired men, but he went on shaking his head and declared he couldn't imagine what Rowe was thinking of. He thought I had really embarked on the maddest journey ever woman dreamt of, and while getting me a cool drink, for which I blessed him, went on murmuring, “Rowe must have been mad.” I think his surprise brought home to me for the first time the fact that I was doing anything unusual. Before that it had seemed very natural to be going up the river, to be simply wanting to get on and see the great waterway and the country behind.
I did not go on to Anum as I had intended. It was Easter Saturday, and my new friend suggested I should spend Easter with him. I demurred, and he said it would be a charity. He had no words to express his loneliness, and as for the canoe-men, who could not stay to carry my things to Anum, let them go. He would see about my gear being taken up there. And so I stayed, glad to see how a man managed by himself in the wilderness.
The British Cotton-growing Experimental Farm at Labolabo is to all intents and purposes a failure. It was set there in the midst of gorgeously rich country to teach the native to grow cotton, and the native seeing that cocoa, with infinitively less exertion, pays him very much better, naturally firmly declines to do anything of the sort. So here in this beautiful spot lives utterly alone a solitary white man who, with four inefficient labourers, tries desperately to keep the primeval bush from swallowing up the farm and entirely effacing all the hard work that has been done there. This farm should be a valuable possession besides being a very beautiful one. The red-roofed bungalow is set in a bay of the high, green hills, which stretch out verdure-clad arms, threatening every moment to envelop it. The land slopes gently, and as I sat on the broad verandah, through the dense foliage of the trees I could catch glimpses of the silver Volta a mile and a half away, while beyond again the blue hills rose range after range till they were lost in the bluer distance. Four years ago this man who was entertaining me so hospitably had planted a mile-long avenue to lead up to his bungalow, and now the tall grape-fruit and shaddock in front of his verandah meet and have regularly to be cut away to keep the path clear. I am too ignorant to know what could be grown with profit, only I can see that the land is rich and fruitful, and should be, with the river so close, a most valuable possession. As it is, it is one of the most lonely places in the world. I sympathised deeply with the man living there alone. The loneliness grips. If I went to my room I could hear him tramping monotonously up and down the verandah. “Tramp, tramp, tramp,” and when I went out he smiled queerly.