Many men in Africa count themselves exiles, but never saw I more clearly the attributes of exile than in Dr von Raven. Comforts he had none, and his house was bare almost to poverty. Here he had lived for two and a half years without going home, and here he intended to live till some experiments he had in hand were complete. A devotee to science truly, but a cheerful, intensely interested one, with nothing of the martyr about him. Very few white people he must have seen, and he said himself he had only been down to the nearest town of Palime three times in two years, but he looked far better in health than many a man I have seen who has been on the Coast only as many months.
From the doctor's house there curves a road about a kilometre in length, and off this are the houses of the sleeping sickness patients. Two and two they are built, facing each other, two rooms in each house and plenty of space between. They are built of mud, with holes for doors and windows, and the roofs are of grass—native huts of the most primitive description. Each patient has a room, and each is allowed one relative to attend him. Thus a husband may have a wife, a mother her daughter, and between them they have an allowance of sevenpence a day for food, ample in a country where the usual wage for a day labourer is ninepence. There are one hundred and fifty-five patients in all, and besides them there are a few soldiers for dignity, because the neighbouring chiefs would think very lightly of a man who had not evidences of power behind him, and so whenever the doctor passes they come tumbling out of the guard-room to salute him. There are also a certain number of labourers, because though many of the sick are quite capable of waiting on themselves, it would never do for them to go beyond the confines of the camp, and possibly, or probably, infect the flies that abound just where wood and water are to be had.
Of course there is a market where the women meet and chat and buy their provisions; there are cookhouses and all the attributes of a rather poor native village, but a village where the people are among the surroundings to which they have been accustomed all their lives and in which they are more thoroughly at home than in a hospital. Part of the bareness may be attributed to economy, but the effect is greatly heightened by the absence of all vegetation. Anything that might afford shelter for the flies or shut out the strong, health-giving breezes that blow right across the plateau is strictly forbidden. And here were people in all stages of the disease—those who had just come in, who to the ordinary eye appeared to have nothing wrong with them, great, strong, healthy-looking men, men of thews and sinews who had been completely cured, and those who were past all help and were lying waiting for death.
“You would like to see them?” asked the doctor.
I said I would, and I would like to take a photograph or two if I might. My stock of plates was getting woefully scarce.
“Yes,” he said, and we went down the roadway.
A man was borne out of one of the huts and laid on the ground in the brilliant sunshine. He was wasted to skin and bone, his eyes were sunken and half-open, showing the whites, his skeleton limbs lay helpless, and his head fell forward like a baby's. The doctor pointed to him pitifully.