E sotto l’ombra di perpetua fronde
Mormorando sen va gelida e bruna;
Ma transparente si, che non asconde
Del imo letto sua vaghezza alcuna. Tasso.
In the heroic ages of Bruce and Mungo Park, Denham and Clapperton, Hornemann and Caillié, African travel had a prestige which, after living through a generation, came, as is the fate of all things sublunary, to a natural end. The public glutted with adventure and invention, which the ‘damnable license of printing’ ushered into the world, soon suffered from the humours of a severe surfeit: it learned to nauseate the monotonous tale of rapine, treachery, and murder; of ugly and unsavoury savagery—the mala gens, as was said anent certain South countrymen, of a bona terra—of bleared misery by day and animated impurity by night, and of hunting adventures and hair-breadth escapes, which often made the reader regret the inevitable absence of a catastrophe. It felt the dearth of tradition and monuments of the olden time, the lack of romance, variety, and history, whilst the presence of a ‘future,’ almost too remote for human interest, was rather an aggravation than a palliation of the evil. A temporary revival of interest was, it is true, recited by the Egyptian hippopotamus and Gordon Cumming’s trophies: Livingstone’s first journey and Paul du Chaillu’s gorilla also caused a transient burst of enthusiasm. But this soon had its day, and the night that followed was darker than before. In fact it still glooms.
Yet African travel still continues to fulfil all the conditions of attractiveness as laid down by that great city authority, Leigh Hunt. The theme has remoteness and obscurity of place, difference of custom, marvellousness of hearsay; events passing strange yet credible; sometimes barbaric splendour, generally luxuriance of nature, savage life, personal danger and suffering always borne (in books) with patience, dignity, and even enthusiasm. Moreover, no hours are more fraught with smiling recollections to the author: nothing can he more charming than the contrast between his vantage ground of present ease, as he takes up his pen at home, and that past perspection of want, hardships, and accidents upon which he gazes through the softening, beautifying atmosphere of time. And the animus of the writer must to some extent inspire his readers.
We arose early in the morning after making Panga-ni, and repaired to the terrace for the better enjoyment of the view. The river-vista, with cocoa avenues to the north, with yellow cliffs on the southern side, some 40 feet high, abrupt as those of the Indus, and green clad above; with a distance of plum-blue hill, upon which eye and mind both love to rest; the mobile swelling water bounded by strips of emerald verdure and golden sand, and the still and azure sea dotted with ‘diabolitos,’ little black rocks, not improperly called ‘devilings,’ wanted nothing but the finish and polish of art to bring out the infinite variety, the rude magnificence of nature. A few grey ruins upon the hills would enable it to compare with the most admired prospects of the Rhine, without looking as if it had been made picturesque by contrast, to attract tourists, and with half-a-dozen white Kiosks and Serais, minarets and latticed summer villas, it would almost rival that gem of creation, the Bosphorus.
Panga-ni[[31]] ‘in the hole,’ or ‘between the highlands,’ as was said of the River Lee, and its smaller neighbour, Kumba, hug the left or northern bank of its river: the site is a flat Maremma bounded by the sea and by a hill range, ten or eleven miles distant. Opposite are Mbweni and Mzimo Mpia, small villages built under tall bluffs of yellow sandstone, precipitous and impenetrably covered with wild growth. The stream which separates these rival pairs of settlements may be 200 yards broad: the mouth has an ugly line of bar-breakers, awash at low tide; the only fairway course is a narrow channel to the south, and the entrance is intricate, with reef and shoal. This in Capt. Owen’s time was some 12 feet deep: now it it is reduced to seven or eight: although a report had been spread that the ‘Shah Allum’ had crossed it, nothing but country craft can safely enter, as some of our enterprising compatriots have discovered, to their cost. Panga-ni Bay is shown to the mariner by its ‘verdurous wall’ of palms and by its dotting of small dark rocks; by Maziwi Island, a green-capped gem in a bezel of golden sand, bearing S. East, and southwards by the yellow cliffs of Mbweni. Vessels lie snugly in the outer roads, but when making the inner harbour even Hamid, most niggardly of Suris, expended a dollar upon a pilot. At low water in the dry season the bed of this tidal stream is partly exposed, and its produce during the flow is briny as the main: the rains cause it to swell with the hill-freshets, and then it becomes almost potable. The wells produce heavy and brackish drink, but who, ask the people, will take the trouble to fetch sweeter? The climate is said to be tolerably healthy; throughout the long and severe rainy monsoon, however, the place is rich in dysenteries and in fatal bilious remittents.
Panga-ni boasts some 19 or 20 stone houses of the usual box style: the rest is a mass of cajan huts, each with its large and mat-encircled patio or courtyard, whose outer lines form the streets, and wherein almost all the business of life is transacted. The settlement is surrounded by a thick thorny jungle, harbouring not a few leopards. One of these felines lately scaled the high terrace of our house, and seized a slave-girl: her master, the burly Wáli, who was sleeping by her side, snatched up his sword, hurried into the house and bolted the door, heedless of the miserable cry, ‘B’ana, help me!’ The wretch was carried into the jungle, and incontinently devoured. As full of crocodiles is the river: whilst we were at Panga-ni a boy disappeared. When asked by strangers why they do not kill their crocodiles and burn their bush, the people reply that the former bring good luck, and that the latter is a fort to which they can fly when need drives them. Plantains, arecas, and cocoas grow all about the town; around it are plantations of papaws, betel, and Jamlis, whilst further lie extensive Shambas, or plantations, of holcus, maize, sesamum, and other grains. The clove flourishes, and, as elsewhere upon the Zanzibar coast, a little cotton is raised for household purposes; it will be long, however, before East-African cotton can influence the English market, and as yet it has proved only a snare and a delusion. A notable and narrow-minded party-cry of these modern days, as applied to Africa, are the three Cs—Cotton, Civilization, and Christianity: they ‘pay,’ however, better than to beg in the name of roads and schools, steamers and steam engines—the true means which will eventually lead to the wished-for end.
Animals are here rare. Cows soon die after eating the grass, and even the Banyans despair of keeping them alive. Sheep are scarcely to be found, and goats, being almost wild, give very little milk, and that only before yeaning. But fish is abundant; poultry thrives, as it does all over Africa, though not so much on the coast as in the interior; and, before the late feuds began, clarified butter, that ‘one source’ of the outer East, was cheap and plentiful. Made in the interior by the Wazegura, and other Washenzi, with rich milk, stored in clean vessels, and sold when fresh, it reminded me of the J’aferabádi ‘Ghi,’ so celebrated throughout Western India.