To Dodowah by motor lorry—Orchard-bush country—Negro tortures—The Basel Mission factor—A personally conducted tour—Great hospitality—A dinner by moonlight—Plan a night journey—The roadway by moonlight—Barbarous hymns—Carriers who “no be fit” once more—Honesty of the African carrier—Extraordinary obedience—The leopard that cried at Akway Pool—A hard-hearted slave-driver—Krobo Hill—Blood fetishes—Terror of the carriers—Story of the hill—The dawning of a new day—Unexplained disappearances—Akuse at last—The arrival of a whirlwind—The fire on Krobo Hill.
Inland from Accra the country is what they call orchard bush, that is to say, it was rather flat country sloping in gradual gradation to the hills behind, covered now, in the end of the dry season, with yellow grass and dotted all over with trees, not close together as in the forest country but just far enough apart to give it a pleasant, park-like look. There were great tall ant heaps too, or rather the homes of the termite, the white ant which is not an ant at all I believe, and these reminded me of the ghastly form of torture sometimes perpetrated by the negroes. A Provincial Commissioner once told me that he had several times come across on these hills, which are often ten or twelve or twenty feet high, the skeleton of a man who had undoubtedly been fastened there while he was alive; and another went one better and told me how another form of torture was to place a man on the ant heap without any fastening whatever and then to surround it with men and women with knives, so that when he tried to escape he was promptly driven back. In this last case I am glad to think that the torturers are bound to have run their share of risk, and must have received many a good hard nip. But the negro mind seems to rather revel in secret societies, trial by ordeal, and tortures. Christianity, the religion of love and pity, has been preached on the Coast for many a long day now, and yet in this year of our Lord 1911 there is behind the Church of England in Accra, down on the sea beach, a rock which is generally known as Sacrifice Rock, and here those who know declare that every yam festival, which takes place just after the rains in September, they sacrifice a girl in order that the crops may not fail.
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Riding in a lorry I had plenty of time to consider these matters. My kind Basel Mission Factory haus-frau had provided me with luncheon to eat by the way, and I knew that all my goods and chattels would arrive safely at their destination without my having to worry about them. Grant was the only servant I had left. I had dismissed the cook, and Zacco had quarrelled with Grant and dismissed himself, and so while I sat on the front seat of the lorry alongside the negro driver, Grant and my goods and chattels were packed away in odd corners on top of the merchandise that was going to Dodowah. The road was bad, deeply cut by the passing of these lorries, but I arrived there about midday and was cordially received by a Basel Mission Factory man who told me my carriers had arrived, and suggested I should come to his house and have luncheon.
He was a kindly, fair-haired young German who had been in the Colony about a month and was learning English on Kroo-boy lines. The result was a little startling, but as it was our only means of communication I was obliged to make the best of it.
My carriers had been here waiting for me since Friday; this was Monday, and they wanted “sissy” money. I paid up and declared I should start the moment they had broken their fast. Meanwhile my German friend undertook to show me the sights.
Dodowah is a very pretty little place at the foot of the hills; it is embowered in palm trees and is the centre of the cocoa industry. In the yard of the factory the cocoa was lying drying in the blazing sun, and when I had been duly instructed in its various qualities, my host suggested I should “walk small.”
“I take you my house.”
It was very kind of him, but I was cautious. I do not like walking in the blazing noonday.
“How far is it?” I asked.
“Small, small,” said he, with conviction.
Grant was a very different person now from the boy in a pink pyjama coat, meek and mild and bullied by Kwesi, whom I had engaged in the distant past. He was my body servant; evidently supposed by everyone else who came in contact with me to hold a position of high trust, and thinking no end of himself. So to him I gave strict instructions. All the loads were to start at once, the hammock-boys were to follow me to the factor\'s house, and he was to go on with the carriers. We had left the protection of the “p\'lice” behind, and on the whole I thought I could do just as well without.
So I set out with my new friend and accompanied by my new headman who evidently thought it his duty to follow in my wake, though he could understand no English and I could understand not one word of his tongue. That walk remains in my mind as one long nightmare; I only did one worse, and then I thought I must be going to die. We left the plain country and plunged uphill, it was blazing noonday in April, and though there were palms and much growth on either side of the road, on the road itself was not a particle of shade. Still we went up and up and up.
“I show you, I show you,” said my friend.
Frankly I wished he wouldn\'t. It was a splendid view from that hillside, with the town nestling embowered in palms at our feet, but a personally conducted walking-tour on the Coast at midday on an April day was the very last thing I desired.
I was dripping with perspiration, I was panting and breathless before we had been on that road five minutes; in the next five I would have bartered all my prospects in Africa for a glass of iced water, and then my companion turned. “You like go through bushway, short cut.” It looked cooler, so I feebly assented and we turned into the bush which was so thin it did not shut out the sun, and the walking was very much rougher. I had given up all hopes of ever coming to the end when my companion stopped, flung up his head like a young war-horse, and said cheerfully, “Oh I tink I go lookum road.”
I sank down on a log; my new headman, an awful-looking ruffian, stood beside me, and that aggressively active young German went plunging about the bush till he returned still cheerful and remarking, “I tink we lose way. We go back.”
I draw a veil over the remainder of that walk. We did arrive at his house finally after two and a half hours\' march over very rough country, and then he gave me wine to drink and fed me and was good to me, but I was utterly tired out and didn\'t care for the moment what became of me. He showed me a bedroom and I lay down and slept, rose up and had a bath, and felt as if I might perhaps face the world again. At half-past four we had some tea and I contemplated all my new hammock-boys sitting in a row under some palm trees on the other side of the road. They looked strapping, big, strong men, and I was thankful, for Akuse they said was twenty-seven miles away and I had to do it in one march. The question was, when I should start?
“If you start now,” said the factor, “you get there one—half-past one in the morning—very good time.”
Now I really could not agree with him. To launch yourself on totally unknown people at halfpast one in the morning and ask them to take you in is not, I think, calculated to place you in a favourable light, and I demurred. But what was I to do? I did not want to inflict myself any longer on this hospitable young man, and already I had paid my carriers for four days while they did nothing. It was a full moon. Last night had been gorgeous; this night promised to be as fine. I asked the question, why could I not travel all night?
“Oh yes, moon be fine too much”; and then he went on to tell me a long story about his Kroo boys being frightened to travel that road by themselves. “But it all be foolishness.” It took me so long to discover the meaning of the words that I really paid no attention to the gist of what he was saying, besides I could not see that a Kroo boy being afraid was any reason why I should be. Finally we figured it out that I should start at nine o\'clock, which would bring me to Akuse at a little after six in the morning. This did not seem so bad, and I agreed and cordially thanked the kindness which made him plan a nice little dinner in the moonlight on the verandah. It comes back to me as one of the most unique dinners I ever had; we had no other light but that of the moon, the gorgeous moonlight of the Tropics. It shone silver on the fronds of the palms, the mountains loomed dimly mysterious like mountains in a dream, and the road that ran past the house lay clear and still and warm in the white light.
My host asked leave to dine in a cap; he said the moon gave him a headache, and strongly advised me to do likewise, but though I have heard other people say the moon affects them in that manner, it never troubles me and I declined. And he translated his German grace into English for my benefit, and I could not even smile so kindly was the intention; and we ate fruit on the verandah, and nine o\'clock came and I had the top taken off my hammock and started.
“Yi, yi, yi, ho, ho, ho,” cried the hammock-boys, clapping their hands as they went at a fast trot, far faster than the ordinary man could walk without any burden on his head, and we were off to Akuse and the Volta. The night was as light as day, and it never occurred to me that there was any danger in the path. We went through the town, and here and there a gleam of fire showed, and here and there was a yellow light in one of the window places, and the people were in groups in the streets, dancing, singing, or merely looking on. Generally they sang, and no one knows how truly barbaric a hymn can sound sung by a line of lightly clad people keeping time with hands and feet to the music. It might have been a war song, it might have been a wail for those about to die; it was, I realised with a start, “Jesu, lover of my soul,” in the vernacular. I suppose the missionaries know best, but it always seems to me that the latest music-hall favourite would do better for negro purposes than these hymns that have been endeared to most of us by old association. These new men were splendid hammock-men; they stopped for no man, and the groups melted before them.
A happy peasant people were these, apparently with just that touch of mysterious sadness about them that is with all peasant peoples. Their own sorrows they must have, of course, but they are not forced upon the passer-by as are the sordid sorrows of the great cities of the civilised world. At the outside ring of these dancers hung no mean and hungry wretches having neither part nor parcel with the singers.
Through the town and out into the open country we went, and the trees made shadows clear-cut on the road like splashes of ink, or, where the foliage was less dense, the leaves barely moving in the still night air made a tracery as of lace work on the road beneath, and there was the soft, sleepy murmur of the birds, and the ceaseless skirl of the insects. Occasionally came another sound, penetrating, weird, rather awe-inspiring, the cry of the leopard, but the hammock-boys took no heed—it was moonlight and there were eight of them.
“Yi, yi, yi, ho, ho, ho.” They clapped their hands and sang choruses, and by the time we arrived at the big village of Angomeda, a couple of hours out, I was fairly purring with satisfaction. I have noticed that when things were going well with me I was always somewhat inclined to give all the credit to my perfect management; when they went wrong I laid the blame on Providence, my headman, or any other responsible person within reach. Now my self-satisfaction received a nasty shock.
The village of Angomeda was lying asleep in the moonlight. The brown thatch glistened with moisture, the gates of the compounds and the doors of the houses were fast shut; only from under the dark shadow of a great shade-tree in the centre of the village came some............