Again, On One
Occasion I Saw A Bakele Woman Make Fire By Means Of A Slip Of Rafia
Palm Drawn Very Rapidly, To And Fro, Across A Notch In Another Piece
Of Rafia Wood.
In most domesticated tribes, like the Effiks or the
Igalwa, if they are going out to their plantation, they
Will enclose
a live stick in a hollow piece of a certain sort of wood, which has
a lining of its interior pith left in it, and they will carry this
"fire box" with them. Or if they are going on a long canoe journey,
there is always the fire in the bow of the canoe put into a calabash
full of sand, or failing that, into a bed of clay with a sand rim
round it.
By 10 o'clock we are off down to Buea. At 10.15 it pours as it can
here; by 10.17 we are all in our normal condition of bedraggled
saturation, and plodding down carefully and cheerfully among the
rocks and roots of the forest, following the path we have beaten and
cut for ourselves on our way up. It is dangerously slippery,
particularly that part of it through the amomums, and stumps of the
cut amomums are very likely to spike your legs badly - and, my
friend, never, never, step on one of the amomum stems lying straight
in front of you, particularly when they are soaking wet. Ice slides
are nothing to them, and when you fall, as you inevitably must,
because all the things you grab hold of are either rotten, or as
brittle as Salviati glass-ware vases, you hurt yourself in no end of
places, on those aforesaid cut amomum stumps. I am speaking from
sad experiences of my own, amplified by observations on the
experiences of my men.
The path, when we get down again into the tree-fern region, is
inches deep in mud and water, and several places where we have a
drop of five feet or so over lumps of rock are worse work going down
than we found them going up, especially when we have to drop down on
to amomum stems. One abominable place, a V-shaped hollow, mud-
lined, and with an immense tree right across it - a tree one of our
tornadoes has thrown down since we passed - bothers the men badly, as
they slip and scramble down, and then crawl under the tree and slip
and scramble up with their loads. I say nothing about myself. I
just take a flying slide of twenty feet or so and shoot flump under
the tree on my back, and then deliberate whether it is worth while
getting up again to go on with such a world; but vanity forbids my
dying like a dog in a ditch, and I scramble up, rejoining the others
where they are standing on a cross-path: our path going S.E. by E.,
the other S.S.W. Two men have already gone down the S.W. one, which
I feel sure is the upper end of the path Sasu had led us to and
wasted time on our first day's march; the middle regions of which
were, as we had found from its lower end, impassable with
vegetation. So after futile attempts to call the other two back, we
go on down the S.E. one, and get shortly into a plantation of giant
kokos mid-leg deep in most excellent fine mould - the sort of stuff
you pay 6 shillings a load for in England to start a conservatory
bed with. Upon my word, the quantities of things there are left
loose in Africa, that ought to be kept in menageries and greenhouses
and not let go wild about the country, are enough to try a Saint.
We then pass through a clump of those lovely great tree-ferns. The
way their young fronds come up with a graceful curl, like the top of
a bishop's staff, is a poem; but being at present fractious, I will
observe that they are covered with horrid spines, as most young
vegetables are in Africa. But talking about spines, I should remark
that nothing save that precious climbing palm - I never like to say
what I feel about climbing palms, because one once saved my life -
equals the strong bush rope which abounds here. It is covered with
short, strong, curved thorns. It creeps along concealed by
decorative vegetation, and you get your legs twined in it, and of
course injured. It festoons itself from tree to tree, and when your
mind is set on other things, catches you under the chin, and gives
you the appearance of having made a determined but ineffectual
attempt to cut your throat with a saw. It whisks your hat off and
grabs your clothes, and commits other iniquities too numerous to
catalogue here. Years and years that bush rope will wait for a
man's blood, and when he comes within reach it will have it.
We are well down now among the tree-stems grown over with rich soft
green moss and delicate filmy-ferns. I should think that for a
botanist these south-eastern slopes of Mungo Mah Lobeh would be the
happiest hunting grounds in all West Africa.
The vegetation here is at the point of its supreme luxuriance, owing
to the richness of the soil; the leaves of trees and plants I
recognise as having seen elsewhere are here far larger, and the
undergrowth particularly is more rich and varied, far and away.
Ferns seem to find here a veritable paradise. Everything, in fact,
is growing at its best.
We come to another fallen tree over another hole; this tree we
recognise as an old acquaintance near Buea, and I feel disgusted,
for I had put on a clean blouse, and washed my hands in a tea-cupful
of water in a cooking pot before leaving the forest camp, so as to
look presentable on reaching Buea, and not give Herr Liebert the
same trouble he had to recognise the white from the black members of
the party that he said he had with the members of the first
expedition to the peak; and all I have got to show for my exertion
that is clean or anything like dry is one cuff over which I have
been carrying a shawl.
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