Soon after daybreak on the second morning after my departure from Quittáh, the fishing canoe, which had been sent to fetch me ashore, swept round the bluff into the quieter waters of Winneba Bay, and presently took the ground not far from the mouth of the little river Ainsu; and as I jumped out on to the beach, I found myself folded in the embrace of no less a person than Mr. David Annan.
He seemed very pleased to see me, and not without reason, as I presently discovered, for it appeared that, relying on my assumed opulence, he had refrained from burdening himself with an undue amount of that which is vulgarly known as "the ready," and was even now in a state of some pecuniary embarrassment. The "carrier men" were, in fact, "not fit," to use his expression, and refused to lift a load until they had received tangible evidence of their employer's solvency.
A sovereign from my purse, rapidly converted into eighty "thor-pennies" at an adjacent store, revived the flagging confidence of our followers, and half an hour after landing, we formed up our little caravan and stepped out briskly up the steep street of the town. I looked around me with growing pleasure and interest, for everything was new and strange. The little church with its tower of sun-dried clay, that had looked so imposing from the anchorage and now appeared so mean; the bright red walls of the houses, so different from the grimy hovels of Quittáh, built of the black lagoon-mud; the steep rocky road, the strange trees, the gay and comely Fanti women, were all elements of novelty that came upon me with singular force after my long sojourn amidst the sandy flats and changeless horizon of the Bight of Benin.
Even when we descended into the wide plain the novelty was not abated, for the meadow-like expanse, with its pink soil and waving grass, was as great a change from Quittáh as the rocky upland. And so, while Isabel was mourning my absence in the dull and silent house, here was I striding gaily along the narrow track, watching the little zebra mice and the white-breasted crows and the circling vultures, with an exhilaration that I blush to reflect on.
We walked on at a good swinging pace until nearly noon, when, reaching a belt of woodland, we halted in the shade of a silk-cotton tree to rest and take our midday meal. I had left the commissariat arrangements to Annan, and now reaped the harvest of my folly, for that child of Belial had laid in, with my money, a supply of kanki—a disgusting mess of boiled maize which I had never tasted before, and hope never to taste again. It was highly satisfying, however, and its flavour encouraged moderation, so that when we resumed our march after an hour's rest I was completely refreshed.
The road through which we passed during the afternoon exceeded in beauty my wildest dreams. In the open, indeed, the prospect was merely that of a fine breezy, rolling country covered with grass and bushes; but where the winding path led through shady woodland or rustling groves of oil palms, the richness and luxuriance of the vegetation filled me with astonishment and delight. My opportunities for examining the landscape were not indeed great, for our bare-footed carriers covered the rough ground at a pace that was a revelation to me, and kept it up, too, until I was ready to drop with fatigue; and when, towards sunset, we entered a straggling village, I learned from Annan, with profound relief, that this was the end of our day's march.
My trunk had been set down by the carrier against the wall of a house, so I took my seat on it and leaned back with great comfort. Soon a little crowd of women and children gathered round and stood watching me with the expectant interest that a group of rustics at home would manifest in a foreign organ-grinder. I drew out my pipe and filled it to their complete satisfaction, but my matches had become spoiled by the damp of the woodland and would not strike, seeing which, a young woman with a glossy brown baby fastened on to her back, hurried away and presently returned rolling a glowing cinder in the palm of her hand. This she very adroitly laid on the tobacco in my pipe and then blew it softly until it glowed white hot and the smoke ascended in blue clouds, and when I thanked her with some warmth she laid her hands together and curtseyed prettily, murmuring "Ya wura," and then retired bashfully behind her friends.
Suddenly the calf-like voice of Annan was heard, "shooing" the children away from me, and my conductor appeared wreathed in smiles and glorious with rich apparel. For in this short time he had exchanged his rough travelling costume for the garb of ceremony, and now displayed the splendour of a velvet smoking cap, a suit of pink pyjamas, the ankles tucked into a pair of scarlet socks, and carpet slippers of prismatic brilliancy.
"You get no servant now, Mr. Englefield," said he with an oily smile, "but never fear, sah, I shall be your steward and I do you proper."
"You are very good," said I. "What are we going to do about food? I have had enough kanki for to-day; and where am I to sleep to-night?"
"I get you fine dinner, sah—de chief's wife cook it now—and very fine bed in de chief's house. But," here he dropped his voice and pulled a most lugubrious face, "dis headman no good at all. He get a dry eye."
"A dry eye?" I exclaimed.
"Yes; he never want to give anyting unless you dash him some money first."
"Well, I don't expect him to give me food and lodging for nothing. If you pay him what you think right, or what he thinks right, I will let you have it back."
Annan groaned and pulled out of his pocket a gaudy purse which he opened and held upside down.
"Dose carriers take all dat you give me dis mornin' and spend it 'fore we start. Now de headman say he won't give us nutting for chop widout you dash him first."
I began to suspect that Mr. Annan "get a dry eye," but it was useless to wrangle over a few shillings, so I handed him another sovereign, which he received with a gleeful guffaw and departed—ostensibly to make an advance payment to the headman—leaving me speculating curiously as to how he proposed to get change for a sovereign in this primitive hamlet. Apparently he managed to do so, for I came upon him unawares shortly after, doling threepenny pieces to the carriers for subsistence; and mightily disconcerted he seemed, for some reason, at being discovered.
His account of the dinner that was in preparation was not exaggerated. It was a colossal feed. The black clay bowls came in one after another until the little ricketty table would hold no more, and Annan's eyes fairly bulged with anticipation. He was indeed "doing me proper," as he expressed it, and as he was to share the meal he evidently intended to "do himself proper"; indeed, I fancy that, recollecting my inability to make headway with native dishes when we dined together at Adena, he hoped to consume the major part of these delicacies himself. If this was his idea when he ordered the feast, my appetite must have been a revelation to him, for, having decided that henceforth I must subsist on native food, and being nearly famished, I assaulted the dishes with indiscriminate ferocity, devouring yams, cassava, fowl, goat, stink-fish, palm oil and peppers with supreme disregard of their appearance or flavour until the affrighted Annan abandoned all attempts at conversation in a frantic effort to keep pace with me.
The apartment in which we dined was converted into a bedroom by the simple device of taking out the table and laying down two mattresses formed of bundles of rushes; and although, after dark, the village resounded with the shrieks of the potto calling to his unmelodious mate in the forest, and sundry scufflings and rustlings about our room were unpleasantly suggestive of rats and cockroaches, I almost instantly fell into a delicious slumber which lasted until I was awakened by Annan dragging at my arm.
"Cock-o'-peak-time,[Cock-crow—Cock go speak.] sah," said he with a bland smile. "All de carrier men wait outside; dey say dey ready to start one time."
"But I haven't had any breakfast or bath," I objected, getting up and stretching myself.
Annan laughed. "Plenty rivers in dis country," said he, "and if you want to take chop, I get some here." He displayed a gritty-looking collection of roasted plantains in a dirty red handkerchief and moved towards the door, where a crowd of the villagers had assembled to see us depart.
It was cheerless and chilly when we emerged from the village on to the narrow woodland track. A dense mist enshrouded the landscape and made the trees look ghostly and unreal. Everything reeked with moisture. The dew pattered down from the trees, the grass and herbage was saturated and the ground sodden with the wet. Five minutes after starting I was soaked to the skin and my teeth were chattering.
"You still want a bath, Mr. Englefield?" inquired Annan with a delighted chuckle as he noted my saturated clothing.
"I want my breakfast," I retorted savagely, visions of the steaming "early coffee" at Pereira's house flitting across my memory.
Annan opened his bundle, and taking out a blackened plantain, handed it to me after removing the superfluous ashes by wiping it down the leg of his pyjamas; and despite its repulsive aspect, I chewed it up thankfully, cinders and all, to his undissembled joy and amusement.
"You like dis country chop proper," he remarked, as I licked my fingers and held out my hand for another plantain; but his amusement gave way to apprehension when I proceeded to eat yet a third.
We were meantime entering the fringe of the forest, and the scenery appeared to me unspeakably lovely. The trees grew more lofty and umbrageous, and their trunks were clothed in a garment of creepers and ferns. Once we passed through a grove of oil palms, and I was charmed with the delicate grace of this plant, so different from the scraggy cocoa-nut palm of the coast, so soft and feathery and symmetrical, and so beautifully adorned with the long trailing ferns that hang down in lacy streamers from the crown of the stem.
Annan's promise as to the rivers, too, was amply fulfilled, but although they were pleasant enough to look at, they were a great annoyance, as they kept my legs continually wet from wading through them; and I rather envied the carriers, whose scanty clothing made this a matter of less consequence to them.
After a couple of hours of steady tramping we entered the large village of Essekúma, where Annan decided to halt for a meal; and it was quite pleasant to sit in the open compound and dry one's clothing in the sun.
A substantial meal of oily and pungent fowl-stew accompanied by a liberal allowance of tenacious plantain fufu, made me inclined to loll at my ease and quietly study the village life and meditate upon the queer sculptured ornaments on the houses; but Annan would hear of no delay, and having cleaned his fingers on the ever-ready pyjamas, gave the word to proceed. These Africans were certainly indefatigable walkers, and their powers of endurance quite remarkable—so remarkable, indeed, that I began to doubt if I should be able to keep up with our carriers, burdened as they were with loads varying from thirty to sixty pounds.
We travelled on, with rare and brief halts for rest at wayside hamlets, until near sunset, when we reached a small, primitive village called Obedumássi, at which we brought up for the night, and where our experiences of the previous evening were repeated. The headman, at whose house we lodged, kept a civet in a kind of wooden hutch for the purpose of extracting the perfume, and I had an opportunity of witnessing the operation. The animal was first poked with a stick to make it fly round its narrow cage until in the course of its gyrations it allowed its tail to project between the bars. This was immediately grabbed by the operator and pulled so that the unfortunate beast was jammed helplessly against the bars, when the perfume was scooped out of the scent-gland by means of a wooden implement like a marrow-spoon. This curious unctuous substance had a disgusting odour somewhat like that of a recently-extinguished tallow candle, mingled with the scent of musk, but Annan assured me that "the Hausa men find it sweet too much," so I purchased a small quantity with a view to future contingencies.
The next day was one of almost continuous trudging along a path that was far from good to walk upon. This everlasting marching would have been as monotonous as it was fatiguing but for the novelty of the surroundings, which were almost as strange to me as if I had but just come from England. Our route on this day lay through an extensive swamp, some parts of which were overgrown with bamboos, and here the aspect of nature was most singular and impressive. The bamboo could be seen as we approached it, an immense cloudy mass of moving green with mysterious cavern-like openings which led into a dim interior like that of some colossal crypt. The canes rose out of the ground in huge bundles like great clustered columns, and interlaced overhead in an impenetrable vault, so that the gloomy interior was broken up into a maze of aisles and transepts, some leading away into absolute black darkness, others showing a distant spot of bright light—the opening on the further side of the thicket.
We were threading our way through one of these passages, treading daintily on the crackling débris that formed the floor (for the mysterious twilight of the place somehow induced a silent and stealthy manner of movement), when Annan, who was leading, suddenly stopped dead, and peering down a dark side-aisle began to talk in a loud, startled tone. At the same moment I noticed a group of men crouching and almost hidden in the deeper shadow of one of the clusters of canes, and our carriers, catching sight of them too, hastily laid down their burdens, and broke out into excited and voluble jabbering, so that the previously silent crypt was a Babel of noise. In a few moments the men came forth from their hiding-place into the dim light of the passage in which we stood, and a sinister-looking crowd they were, quite nude, with the exception of the narrow loin-cloth, and each provided with a long flintlock gun with a red-painted stock and a large knife in a leopard-skin sheath. They were evidently not travelling far from home, for none of them carried any baggage or provisions beyond the bottle-shaped gourd which served as a powder flask, and a bag of slugs.
A tall, elderly man, apparently the leader of the party, came forward and made a long statement to Annan, gesticulating and grimacing in the native fashion and pointing frequently in the direction in which we were going; then, after Annan had replied in a quieter tone, the carriers took up their burdens and we moved forward, while the armed men returned to their retreat.
"Who are those men?" I asked, as we came out once more into the light of day.
"Dose men," replied Annan, "is Akotádi people, and dey tell me some very bad news. Dey say all de roads shut everywhere."
"What do they mean? Who has shut the roads?"
"Because of de war palaver," replied Annan. "Dey say dat 'Shanti people fight wid Békwe, and Adánsi people fight wid 'Shanti and Akém. Plenty war palaver everywhere."
"Then it won't be very safe going through Ashanti, will it?" said I.
"Safe!" yelled Annan. "I tell you all de roads shut. Spose 'Shanti man see us he tink we Adánsis and he shoot us. Spose Békwe man see us, he say we Akém and he shoot us. Eberybody shoot us. Shia! m'nyohum!" He shook his fist in the air and spat on the ground.
I could not help laughing at this outburst, for, apart from the highly inappropriate application of a disgusting and untranslatable Fanti expletive, the picture that Annan drew of our progress through the country was farcical in the extreme. We were Ishmaelites indeed!
"Why de debbil you laugh?" exclaimed Annan, looking as if he could have cut my throat with pleasure. "You no laugh if 'Shanti man catch you."
"No," I agreed, "I suppose not. But what shall you do? You won't turn back, will you?"
"Me turn back!" he shouted. "I tell you, sah, I come to get monkey skin, and I fit for get monkey skin. 'Shanti man can go to hell."
I never felt more friendly to the sturdy rascal than on hearing him speak thus. I could have shaken his dirty hand—if it had been necessary. When he had spoken of the closed roads I had feared that our expedition would collapse after all, so this exhibition of dogged pluck came as a great relief.
The sun had already sunk below the tree tops, and the shades of evening were gathering fast as we came out of the forest into the open village of Pra-su. By the fading light I could see that this was different in appearance from the hamlets we had passed through, for, in addition to the ordinary Fanti houses, there were groups of beehive-shaped huts of palm thatch, such as I had seen in the Hausa quarter at Quittáh, each group enclosed by a fence of palm leaves. There were also a number of rough sheds of a larger size, and a one-storey house of European construction—the residence of the commandant. For Pra-su was the outpost of the British Protectorate, and had a small garrison of Hausa troops, commanded by an officer of the Gold Coast Constabulary, to protect the ferry across the river Pra.
We had hardly entered the village when we came upon a group of the soldiers. They had scratched upon a smooth patch of earth a kind of primitive chess-board, and two of them were hurriedly finishing a game by the last of the twilight while the others stood round and watched. As we came abreast of the group, I heard my name called, and an elderly sergeant stepped forward with a salute and a grin of friendly recognition.
"Welcome to Pra-su; hope you well, sah," said he.
"Why, it's Sergeant Aba!" I exclaimed, shaking him by the hand. "Well, now, I never thought to meet a friend at Pra-su."
He seemed highly gratified at my addressing him thus, and asked if he could render me any service, remarking that the Commandant had gone to Cape Coast and had left him in charge of the station.
"I should be very glad to get something to eat," said I, "and perhaps you can find me a clean house to sleep in to-night."
"You fit to eat country chop?" he asked a little shyly.
I replied that I was fit to eat anything, and the more the better.
"Den, sah, you come wid me and I give you chop, and you look my house. He be new house, quite clean, spose you like him you sleep dere."
I thanked him warmly for his offer, and, although Annan looked rather sourly upon the arrangement, I went off with the Sergeant to inspect my lodgings.
We wandered down several narrow lanes between high fences of palm leaf and reeds, until, presently, Aba halted and, separating two of the mats forming the fence, we entered his compound. The twilight had already faded into night, and I could but dimly make out the beehive-shaped houses ranged round the enclosure or the shadowy forms flitting about in the darkness, but I could see that the compound was an open space some twenty yards square. In the centre of it a dull red fire was burning, and an aged man in a turban and riga squatted by it on a mat and occasionally stirred it with a stick. The special object of his regard, however, was not the fire itself but a singular little fence that encircled it, which fence I found, on nearer inspection, to consist of a number of pointed sticks stuck in the earth, each stick having impaled on it several pieces of meat with a lump of fat as a crowning ornament.
Aba leaned over the fence and sniffed. "You fit chop dis sort, sah?" he asked.
I replied with a most emphatic affirmative, for my mouth fairly watered at the delicious odour of the roasting meat; so Aba fetched a mat from his house and laid it down before the fire, and we squatted on it together and watched the meat roasting.
Aba endeavoured to divert me with conversation until the meat should be ready, but the time seemed endless, and I found my famished gaze continually wandering towards the kabobs and noting the lumps of fat frizzling in the heat, and the little streams of oil that trickled over the meat and dripped upon the ground. And the way in which the old man slowly turned the skewers, sniffed critically and shook his head, and Aba's gaunt Bornu wife came forth, examined the kabobs and vanished again, wrought me to the verge of frenzy.
At last the old man seemed satisfied, for he plucked up one of the skewers, and having turned it round and round in the firelight, he sang out in a cracked voice, "Fatima! Ya karé!" and I breathed a sigh of relief and licked my lips.
To this day I look back upon that meal with a kind of greedy pleasure. After the pungent, greasy, Fanti stews, this wholesome food seemed doubly delicious, and in truth those kabobs might have raised the ghost of an alderman. Then, too, there was cus-cus in clean wooden bowls, and flat baskets piled high with masa—little pancakes of pea-flour fried in clay moulds—and after all this a great calabash of mangoes was passed round, so that when I at length washed my hands in the bowl of water that was brought to each of the guests by Aba's youngest girl, I was a better fed man than I had been since leaving Quittáh.
We sat by the fire—new fed with crackling faggots—till far into the night, and Aba, in his halting English, gave me much information and sage advice. He shook his head with grave disapproval of my journey into Ashanti, which country he said was "no place for white man," especially just now, for "'Shanti man find blood sweet too much." He also warned me against Annan.
"Dat man bery bad man. I sabby him long time. He fit to teef your money and kill you, and den say 'Shanti shoot you. He dam rascal too much."
As a practical comment on his opinions, Annan stole into the compound just then and came and bent over me.
"Mr. Englefield, sah," he whispered confidentially, "I come to beg you, sah."
"What is it?" I asked.
"De chop for to-morrow. We go to strange country; we must take plenty chop wid us because of de war palaver."
"Very well," said I, "you know what is necessary, and you have enough money to get it, I suppose."
"No, sah," exclaimed he, "dat is where you mistake. De money all finish to-night."
"Nonsense," said I. "You can't have spent all that money since yesterday."
"I tell you it finish," he declared excitedly. "De carrier chop it all. You look yourself!" He whisked his purse out with a flourish, opened it and held it upside down. Unfortunately, he had brought out the wrong purse, and, as he inverted it, the two sovereigns that I had given him dropped out on to the mat; at which he was so completely disconcerted that he hastily picked them up and departed without a word.
"Dere, what I tell you, sah?" exclaimed Aba, shaking his fist at the retreating "scholar man." "Dat man proper rascal. He teef every ting you get. I beg you, sah, you no go for bush country wid him."
I laid my hand affectionately on the honest fellow's shoulder as I got up from the mat and stretched myself.
"Never fear for me, Aba," said I; "I look him proper. If he trouble me I show him my pistol."
Aba shook his head sadly but said no more, and, as it was now late, he dragged the mat into a new thatch hut, laid a pillow on it and wished me good-night.
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