We did not take our usual noonday rest, for we both knew that if I should stop walking for a little while I would be unable to go on. We usually chatted together as we walked, but that day from noon until we reached the beach, I do not recall that a word was spoken. Dr. Good was too wise to express the sympathy that I knew he felt. We had always taken turns in setting the pace; but at noon I said to him: “You go ahead; I am not equal to the extra mental exertion of setting the pace: it will be easier for me to keep up with you.”
The last hour of that interminable day was through a grass field where we were exposed to the sun and the heat. The rank grass was much higher than our heads and intercepted the sea-breeze. It also cut my arms and face till I was covered with blood; for I was too tired to protect myself. Each successive step required a new decision, and an effort involving the utmost conjoint exertion of mind and body. My teeth were set and I was breathing audibly. At last we entered a native town and as we passed through the long street, the people and their chief, Bivinia, came trooping forward with cordial greetings and hands extended towards us; but I neither extended my hand nor replied to their salutations. Indeed, my mind was so concentrated on the effort that it required to keep on walking that I was only half-conscious of the presence and attention of the natives; they were like forms moving to and fro in an uneasy dream. But the longest day has an end. We reached Dr. Good’s house and I threw myself into a chair while he dispatched a messenger to Mr. Gault who lived two miles further, asking Mr. Gault to send men with a hammock to carry me on to his house where I was going to stay.
It is doubtful whether one ever recovers from such an unnatural straining of nerves and muscles. The muscles in a few days may regain their elasticity and the joints their suppleness; but somewhat of the power of endurance is lost and especially the quality of resiliency, the power of quickly recovering from mental or physical prostration, leaving one an easier victim of virulent disease; and nerves so overwrought may from time to time wreak the vengeance of untold misery through all the after years.
During the following dry season we employed a force of men in making a new road, the present road from Batanga to Efulen. It is practically straight, and therefore much shorter than the old road, so that a good walker can make the journey in three days. Moreover, it follows higher ground and is more dry. We also cut down many trees along the way, which relieved the gloom, although the road still passes beneath a leafy arcade sufficient to protect from the sun. We improved the bridges and wherever possible made a bridge by felling a tree. But the native roads, except the few that have been improved by white men, are still such as I have described. It happened also that most of our journeys were at first made in the wet season. After the first year, however, that was no longer necessary, and we began to feel that the pioneer period was drawing to a close. But I presume that those who now live at Efulen and other interior stations, in journeys to the further interior, especially to towns off the main road, if they travel in the wet season, find just such roads as we first travelled.
The last time I walked from Efulen during my first term in Africa, I enjoyed the journey. The forest was more dry than I had believed it could be. The ground was strewn with leaves suggestive of our autumn. Nor was it dark and depressing as before. Upon the forest-canopy of green, supported by tall columns of sombre gray, the light danced and played like sunshine on rippling water and shone through in silvery streams and shifting golden bars. The forest floor was a humus of soft mould and light, dry leaves. The low green undergrowth, closing the path before and behind me, now that it was not dripping with water, was attractive, and gave a pleasant sense of privacy combining with the subtle sense of companionship with the vast life of the great forest. For it was no longer the dead, repellent jungle of some months ago, but a real forest in which one loves to walk alone, a forest full of mystery and spiritual suggestion, whose stillness speaks to us in a language that we strive to understand, or gives, as Tennyson says, “A hint of somewhat unexprest:”
“’Tis not alone the warbling woods,
The starred abysses of the sky,
The silent hills, the stormy floods,
The green, that fills the eye.—
These only do not move the breast;