Whether he was right or not I do not know, but I realised as I had never done before why men get sick in the bush, worse, why they take to drink and why they go mad. I looked out from the verandah, and when I saw a black figure slip silently in among the trees I wondered what it portended. I looked behind me to see if one might not be coming from behind the kitchen. The fool-bird in the bush crying, “Hoo! hoo! hoo!” all on one note seemed but crying a suitable dirge. Fear hid on the verandah; I could hear him in the creak of a door, in the “pad, pad” of the slave-boy's feet; I could almost have sworn I saw him skulking under the mango tree where were kept the thermometers; and when on Easter Sunday a tornado swept down from the hills, blotting out the vivid green in one pall of grey mist, he was in the shrieking wind and in the shuddering rain.
Never was I more impersonally sorry to leave a man alone, for if I saw my host again I doubt if he would recognise me, but it seemed wicked to leave a fellow white man alone in such a place. If there had been any real danger, of course I should only have been an embarrassment, but at least I was company of his own kind and I kept that haunting fear at bay.
I stayed two days and then I felt go I must. I was also faced with my own carelessness and the casual manner in which I had dropped into the wilderness. Anum mountain was a steep climb of five miles, and beyond that again I had, as far as I could gather, several days' journey in the wilds before I could hope to reach rail-head in German Togo, and I had actually never remembered that I should want a hammock. The Cotton-growing Association didn't possess one, and, like Christian in the “Pilgrim's Progress,” I “cast about me” what I should do. I could not fancy myself walking in the blazing noonday sun. My host smiled. He did not think it was a matter of any great consequence because he felt sure I could not get through, but he came to my rescue all the same and sent up a couple of labourers to the Basel Mission at Anum to see what they could suggest. The labourers came back with a hammock—rather a dilapidated one—on their heads, and an invitation to luncheon next day.
“It's as far as you'll go,” said my friend, “if nothing else stops you; you can't possibly get carriers. Remember, I'll put you up with pleasure on your way back.”
But I was not going to face the Volta again by myself, though I did not tell him that. Those black men insulted me by making me fear them.
It was a very hot morning when we started to climb up Anum mountain. The bush on either side was rather thick, and the road was steep and very bad going. It was shaded, luckily, most of the way, and there arose that damp, pleasant smell that comes from moist earth, the rich, sensuous, insidious scent of an orchid that I could not see, or the mouselike smell of the great fruitarian bats that in these daylight hours were hidden among the dense greenery of the roadside. It was a toilsome journey, and my new friend walked beside me, but at last we reached Anum town, a mud-built, native town, bare, hot, dirty, unkempt, and we passed beyond it to the grateful shade once more of the Basel Mission grounds.
CHAPTER XIV—INTO THE WILDS
Anum Mountain—The Basel Mission—A beautiful spot—An old Ashanti raid—A desolate rest-house—Alone and afraid; also hungry—A long night—Jakai—Pekki Blengo—The unspeakable Eveto Range—Underpaid carriers—A beautiful, a wealthy, and a neglected land—Tsito—The churches and the fetish—Difficulties of lodging in a cocoa-store—The lonely country between Tsito and the Border—Doubts of the hammock-boys—The awful road—Butterflies—The Border.