After Taking Some Careful Compass Bearings For Future Use Regarding
The Rumby And Omon Range Of Mountains, Which Were Clearly Visible
And Which Look Fascinatingly Like My Beloved Sierra Del Cristal, I
Turned My Face To The Wall Of Mungo, And Continued The Ascent.
The
sun, which was blazing, was reflected back from the rocks in
scorching rays.
But it was more bearable now, because its heat was
tempered by a bitter wind.
The slope becoming steeper, I gradually made my way towards the left
until I came to a great lane, as neatly walled with rock as if it
had been made with human hands. It runs down the mountain face,
nearly vertically in places and at stiff angles always, but it was
easier going up this lane than on the outside rough rock, because
the rocks in it had been smoothed by mountain torrents during
thousands of wet seasons, and the walls protected one from the
biting wind, a wind that went through me, for I had been stewing for
nine months and more in tropic and equatorial swamps.
Up this lane I went to the very top of the mountain wall, and then,
to my surprise, found myself facing a great, hillocky, rock-
encumbered plain, across the other side of which rose the mass of
the peak itself, not as a single cone, but as a wall surmounted by
several, three being evidently the highest among them.
I started along the ridge of my wall, and went to its highest part,
that to the S.W., intending to see what I could of the view towards
the sea, and then to choose a place for camping in for the night.
When I reached the S.W. end, looking westwards I saw the South
Atlantic down below, like a plain of frosted silver. Out of it,
barely twenty miles away, rose Fernando Po to its 10,190 feet with
that majestic grace peculiar to a volcanic island. Immediately
below me, some 10,000 feet or so, lay Victoria with the forested
foot-hills of Mungo Mah Lobeh encircling it as a diadem, and Ambas
Bay gemmed with rocky islands lying before it. On my left away S.E.
was the glorious stretch of the Cameroon estuary, with a line of
white cloud lying very neatly along the course of Cameroon River.
In one of the chasms of the mountain wall that I had come up - in the
one furthest to the north - there was a thunderstorm brewing,
seemingly hanging on to, or streaming out of the mountain side, a
soft billowy mass of dense cream-coloured cloud, with flashes of
golden lightnings playing about in it with soft growls of thunder.
Surely Mungo Mah Lobeh himself, of all the thousands he annually
turns out, never made one more lovely than this. Soon the white
mists rose from the mangrove-swamp, and grew rose-colour in the
light of the setting sun, as they swept upwards over the now purple
high forests.
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