[CHAPTER XX]
KAMINA—LOME—HOME
We were expected in Kamina by our old friend Baron Codelli von Fahnenfeld, and by the baroness, his wife, a young woman of about my own age, whom he had recently brought out from Europe, a new-wed bride, to share his home and fortunes in this out-of-the-way corner of the German colonial empire.
All the week long I had been looking forward to this meeting with the wife of one of my best friends, and picturing it in the rosiest colours. We should have so much to say to each other, I said to myself, for I had been so long cut off from all association with my own sex—the meeting with Mrs. Dehn at Sokode being only a casual one—that I was simply dying for a good long chat about—well, about the things women love to talk of. Yet now, when the hour had come for our mutual introduction, I felt a strange kind of bashfulness creep over me. I had been so long in the bush, practically cut off from civilised society. True, I had met a few men. But then men friends and acquaintances are so different from women friends and acquaintances. They are less critical; more apt to take one at one's own valuation.
Shall I like her? What is she like? Shall we get on together? The questions one woman always asks herself of another woman whom she hopes to favourably impress, surged uppermost. But my doubts and fears were quickly dispelled. A tall, graceful girl, golden-haired and blue-eyed, advanced towards me with hands outstretched in warm welcome. Soon we were deep in an earnest, animated conversation; she asking all sorts of questions about the "back of the beyond" of the country that was now her home; I anxious to hear the latest "gup" of Berlin, of Paris, of Vienna. But there was one piece of information that I wanted to acquire, now and at once, that to me was all-important, and at the risk of being thought ill-mannered, I blurted out the personal query: "My boxes? My treasured boxes? What had become of them?"
It will be remembered that a wire had been forwarded to us by post-runner from Mangu, telling us of their destruction by a fire that had burned down Baron von Codelli's house at Kamina while he was away in Europe. Since then we had received several more or less contradictory reports from his employés. Some personal luggage had been rescued from the flames, we were told at one time; at another, the rumour reached us that everything that was on the premises when the fire broke out had gone up in smoke. Now, to my unbounded relief and delight, I learnt that all the boxes containing my personal belongings were safe; only a few parcels containing hats, lingerie, and comparatively valueless articles of personal apparel, had been burned.
I owed their safety, it transpired, to the efforts of my black boy, Kabrischika, who had been with me during our stay at Kamina on the upward journey, and who had become very much attached to me. It appeared that a big grass fire was burning near Kamina, and that a sudden change in the strength and direction of the wind had sent it, roaring and raging, straight for Codelli's house, which was of wood, thatched with many thicknesses of straw for coolness. The house was unoccupied, of course, and, it being the end of the dry season, about as inflammable as a box of matches. Kabrischika, quick to realise the danger, had dashed through the flames and smoke and lugged my boxes out of danger. He knew them, it seemed, because they were new; my name, which was stamped in big letters upon each one of them, meaning nothing to him.
We spent ten days in Kamina, recuperating, and filming the big wireless station which Codelli is building there, and about which I wrote in an earlier chapter. I was amazed at the progress which had been made during our six months' absence. Kamina itself had changed utterly; had grown tremendously. Everywhere were substantial stone houses; mostly finished and ready for occupation, some few in course of erection. The great steel towers, and the immense power-station, were finished, contrasting curiously with the little wattle and straw huts that had lodged the hundreds of workmen, whose labours were now nearing completion. When the dynamos and turbines are installed, which they will be by the time this book is in print, Kamina will be able to talk direct with Berlin, 3450 miles distant. Even during my stay there, although messages could not yet be transmitted, they could be received, and each morning on our breakfast-table there lay a little type-written broadsheet, our morning paper as it were, summarising for us the news that had come through to the station overnight. In this way we knew what was happening in Europe, almost as quickly as if we had been living in, say, London, or Paris, or Berlin.
I need hardly say, however, that it is not for such comparatively trivial purposes as these that this powerful installation has been erected in the heart of the wilderness. The wireless station at Kamina is intended to be the chief receiving and distributing centre for the whole of Africa; so far, that is to say, as Germany is concerned. It will communicate with the similar but smaller wireless station in the Cameroons, and also with that at Windhuk in German South-West Africa, as well as with Tabora in German East Africa. Furthermore, it will in course of time constitute one of the principal links in the chain of wireless stations with which Germany, like Britain, is seeking to girdle the globe; connecting her East and West African possessions with German New Guinea, with Samoa, and with the German protectorate of Kiao-Chau, in the Chinese province of Shantung, which she holds from China on a ninety-nine years' lease since January 1898.