The Narrow Path Which Is Filled By This, Is V-Shaped
Underneath From Wear, And I Soon Find The Safest Way Is Right
Through The Deepest Mud In The Middle.
The white mist shuts off all details beyond ten yards in any
direction.
All we can see, as we first turn up the path, is a patch
of kokos of tremendous size on our right. After this comes weedy
plantation, and stretches of sword grass hanging across the road.
The country is even more unlevel than that we came over yesterday.
On we go, patiently doing our mud pulling through the valleys;
toiling up a hillside among lumps of rock and stretches of forest,
for we are now beyond Buana's plantations; and skirting the summit
of the hill only to descend into another valley. Evidently this is
a succession of foot-hills of the great mountain and we are not on
its true face yet. As we go on they become more and more abrupt in
form, the valleys mere narrow ravines. In the wet season (this is
only the tornado season) each of these valleys is occupied by a
raging torrent from the look of the confused water-worn boulders.
Now among the rocks there are only isolated pools, for the weather
for a fortnight before I left Victoria had been fairly dry, and this
rich porous soil soaks up an immense amount of water. It strikes me
as strange that when we are either going up or down the hills, the
ground is less muddy than when we are skirting their summits, but it
must be because on the inclines the rush of water clears the soil
away down to the bed rock. There is an outcrop of clay down by
Buana, but though that was slippery, it is nothing to the
slipperiness of this fine, soft, red-brown earth that is the soil
higher up, and also round Ambas Bay. This gets churned up into a
sort of batter where there is enough water lying on it, and, when
there is not, an ice slide is an infant to it.
My men and I flounder about; thrice one of them, load and all, goes
down with a squidge and a crash into the side grass, and says
"damn!" with quite the European accent; as a rule, however, we go on
in single file, my shoes giving out a mellifluous squidge, and their
naked feet a squish, squash. The men take it very good temperedly,
and sing in between accidents; I do not feel much like singing
myself, particularly at one awful spot, which was the exception to
the rule that ground at acute angles forms the best going. This
exception was a long slippery slide down into a ravine with a long,
perfectly glassy slope up out of it.
After this we have a stretch of rocky forest, and pass by a widening
in the path which I am told is a place where men blow, i.e. rest,
and then pass through another a little further on, which is Buea's
bush market.
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