The kindness of Sekondi—Swanzy\'s to the rescue—A journey to Dixcove—With a nursing Sister—The rainy season and wet feet—Engineering a steep hill in the dark—Rains and brilliant fireflies—The P.W.D. man\'s taste in colours—The need of a woman in West Africa—Crossing the Whin River—My fresh-air theory confirmed.

Sekondi, from the nursing Sister outwards, was as it always has been, awfully good to me, and I felt as if I were come home. I had the kindest offers of help from all sides, and the railway company took my damaged goods in hand and did their level best to repair damages. I was bound for the goldfields and Ashanti, but I had still uneasily in my remembrance that little bit of coast to the west of Sekondi that I had left unvisited. If I had not written so much already about the carrier difficulties, I might really write a book, that to me would be quite interesting, about that day\'s journey to Dixcove. Swanzy\'s transport came to the rescue and provided me with carriers, a most kindly gift, for which I am for ever grateful, and I took with me a young nursing Sister who was anxious to see something of bush travel.

There is always a fascination about the shore, the palm trees and the yellow sand and the blue sky and bluer sea, but now the difficulties were being added to daily and hourly, because it was the beginning of the rainy season, and all the little rivers had “broken out,” and to cross from one bank to another when a river is flooded, even if it is only a little one, is as a rule no easy matter. To my great amusement I found my companion had a great objection to getting her feet wet. I am afraid I laughed most unsympathetically.



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“You can\'t,” I decided, and I fear she thought me a brute, “travel in the rainy season in Africa and hope to keep dry”; and I exhorted her not to mind if the water were up to her ankles, but to wade through. She brought home to me difficulties of travel that I had never thought of before. It had never occurred to me to worry as to whether I was likely to get wet before; a little water or a little discomfort never seemed to matter. The seat of the canoe I was sitting in broke and let me down into the waist-deep puddle of water in the bottom, and somehow it seemed a less thing to me than that her feet should get wet did to her. She was a nice, good-looking girl, pleasant and smiling, but I decided that never again as long as I lived would I travel with another woman. I know my own shortcomings, but I never know where another woman will break out.

And we went along that coast, where, two hundred years ago, quaint, gossipy old Bosman had found so much of beauty and interest. Tacorady Fort was deserted in his day. It is overgrown and forgotten now. Boutry is on a high hill, the place of the old fort only marked by a thick clump of trees, dark-green against the sky line; but it was getting dark when we reached Boutry, there was a river to cross, and I was obsessed with a sense of my responsibilities, such as I had never felt when I had only my own skin to look after, and I was very thankful that a doctor who was going to Dixcove had overtaken us. If I damaged my travelling companion in any way, I felt that he at least could share responsibility. We crossed the river, and the darkness fell, pitchy, black darkness; it rained in a businesslike way as it does in the Tropics, and there was a high hill to climb. It was a very steep hill, with a very shocking track that did duty as a road, and my companion expressed her utter inability to get up it. I was perfectly sure that our Kroo hammock-boys could never get us up it, and I was inclined to despair; then that doctor came to our aid. He had four Mendi boys, the best carriers on the Coast, and we put them on to my companion\'s hammock, and gaily she went off. She knew nothing of the dangers of the way. I did, but I did not feel it necessary to enlighten her. I don\'t know what the doctor did, but I put on my Burberry and instructed two of my carriers that they must help me over the road. It was a road. When I came back over it in the light, three days later, I wondered how on earth we had tackled it in the dark; still more did I wonder how a heavily laden hammock—for she was a strapping young woman, a good deal bigger than I am—had been engineered up and down it. But Mendi carriers are wonderful, and there was a certain charm in walking there in the night. When the rain stopped, the fireflies came out, and the gloom beneath the trees was lightened by thousands of brilliant sparks of fire. I don\'t know whether fireflies are more brilliant after rain, but I remember them most distinctly on those two wet nights when I was travelling, once on my way to Dixcove and once on the way to Palime.

Up the hill we went and down the hill, along the sands, across the shallows of a river just breaking out—and the lantern light gleamed wetly on the sand—through little sleepy villages and across more hilly country, and at last, just as the moon was rising stormily in the clouded sky, we were opposite a long flight of wide steps, and knew we had reached Dixcove.

There was one white man, a P.W.D. man, in Dixcove, and a surprised man was he. Actually, two women had come out of the night and flung themselves upon him. Of course, we had brought servants and provisions and beds, so it was only a question of providing quarters. Now I smile when I think of it. We crossed the courtyard, we climbed the stairs, we entered the modern house that was built on top of the little fort, and out of a sort of whirlpool a modified disorder emerged, when we found ourselves, two men and two women, by the light of a fluttering, chimneyless Hinkson lamp, all assembled in the room that two camp-beds proclaimed the women\'s bedroom, and we all partook of a little whisky to warm ourselves while we waited for dinner. The P.W.D. man was fluttered and, I think, pleased, for at least our coming broke the monotony, and the nursing Sister undertook the commissariat and interviewed his coo............