Of the details of my life during the time that I remained in charge of the store it is not my intention to speak, for, although every day brought with it some new incident which interested me then as it does now to recall, yet few of the events of my busy and laborious life had any relation to those subsequent adventures and strange occurrences which it is the purpose of this narrative to describe.
I shall therefore content myself by giving a brief account of my manner of life at Quittáh, and of the one or two events that determined my subsequent destiny.
When I first took charge of the store, being ignorant alike of all the native languages and of the value of both the trade goods that I sold and the produce that I was to buy, the Captain secured for me the assistance of Vanderpuye, who, although a Fanti by birth, had been settled many years in Quittáh. But in a week I was able to manage the business alone, or, at least, with the aid of one native assistant only.
It was a curious life, less distasteful than I had expected, but very hard work, for I had to be in the store soon after daybreak and remained until near sunset, with only a short interval at midday.
I would earnestly recommend any explorer who wishes to attain to an intimate knowledge of the people amongst whom he is dwelling, to open a store and trade with them, for by so doing he will obtain an acquaintance with their language, appearance, dress, habits, tastes, disposition, and the natural productions of their country, which it is practically impossible to reach under any other circumstances. To the trader, as to one engaged in a rational and intelligible pursuit, the native exhibits himself as he is, without any more reserve or deception than the particular transaction seems to require, while to the professed explorer he shows himself full of suspicion and perversity. The mere pursuit of knowledge he neither understands nor believes in, but attributes to the investigator some hidden and sinister motive for his inquiries; whereas the actions and objects of the trader, differing in nowise from those of native merchants, are perfectly comprehensible to him. Hence the trader is treated by the native with a frank familiarity in great contrast to the cautious reserve that is exhibited towards the traveller, the official or the missionary.
It thus happened that, before I had been ashore a month, I had begun to get some insight into the manners and customs of the negro as applied to commerce. My natural facility in picking up languages, too, to which I have already referred, stood me in good stead, for I soon acquired a quite useful collection of phrases in the local dialects, particularly in the barbarous and unmusical Efé language which was spoken around Quittáh, and the hardly more euphonious Adángme of the people who came from beyond the Volta River.
I also began to learn, but in a more systematic manner, the simpler and really melodious language of Hausa, of which Pereira had on his shelves a dictionary and some selections by Dr. Schn. This was indeed less useful than the local tongues, but I was not without the means of exercising it, for it was spoken by the native troops, or Hausa constabulary, who were constantly making small purchases at the store, and by the itinerant merchants from the interior, whose visits were somewhat rare, but who, when they did come, were rather extensive buyers.
It was from one of these travelling merchants that I received the first of the series of impulses that finally sent me wandering into the unknown interior. This man, a Hausa named Amádu Dandaúra, arrived at Quittáh when I had been there about two months, in company with his two sons and a small caravan of slaves.
He was a man of some substance, and as he came day after day to purchase goods for the markets of the interior, I used to have a mat spread for him in the store, on which he would sit and make his purchases in the leisurely, chaffering manner so characteristic of the native trader.
But it was impossible to keep his attention fixed on business matters, for, being a perfectly indefatigable talker and having apparently had many strange adventures, he used to collect quite a considerable audience of his countrymen from the Fort and the lines to listen to his spirited narrations. While he was discoursing in this manner I would often, if I had leisure, lounge hard by and listen, trying to follow the conversation but never succeeding, for, not only was my acquaintance with the language insufficient, but, as I presently discovered, neither Amádu nor the soldiers pronounced the words as they were spelt in my books.
But although unable to make out the matter of Amádu's discourse, I succeeded in picking out one or two phrases, which, as they often recurred and were received by the listeners with a great show of surprise, I conjectured to be an important part of the merchant's story.
One of these phrases was "Matári 'n seliki" or "King's treasure house"; another was "Makáfi dayáwa," "a number of blind men." When I had with some difficulty translated these phrases and committed to memory some detached words which seemed to be the names of places—such as Diádasu, Tánosu, Insúta, and Kumási—I had learned all that I was destined to learn of Amádu's story, for my assistant, Daniel Kudjo, spoke not a word of Hausa, and few of the Hausas spoke more than half a dozen words of English; and thus my curiosity, which had been strongly aroused by these mysterious phrases, had to remain unsatisfied.
But a curious light was thrown on the subject by Pereira in the course of a conversation that I had with him one evening.
It was my invariable custom at this time, on returning home from the store, heated and fatigued with the endless weighing of rubber, kernels and copra, and measuring of countless demijohns of palm oil in the glaring compound, or rummaging amongst the bales and cases in the store, to spend the long evenings, after my bath and dinner, lolling in a great chair, pipe in mouth, while the old gentleman reclined in a hammock and entertained me with his reminiscences of life in West Africa.
We were talking on this occasion about the Ashanti war, then just concluded, and were discussing the indemnity of sixty thousand ounces of gold claimed by the British Government.
"It seems an enormous sum," I remarked. "Nearly two hundred and forty thousand pounds. One would not expect the king of a barbarous tribe like the Ashantis to possess such a reserve of wealth as that."
"Probably he does not," replied Pereira, "and probably the indemnity will never be paid. Perhaps," he added with a dry smile, "your judicious Government never intended it to be paid. A debt that cannot be met is sometimes of great use to the creditor."
"Then you think that the king of Ashanti doesn't possess sixty thousand ounces?"
"Who knows?" replied Pereira, deliberately rolling a cigarette. "One hears wonderful stories of the store of gold in the Royal Treasury at Bantamá, but then no one has seen it, and an African's idea of a large sum is so different from that of a rich European Government."
He lighted his cigarette and stared absently at a gecko that was creeping stealthily along the ceiling towards a corpulent black moth.
"It is probable," he remarked presently, after blowing a cloud of smoke up towards the unconscious gecko, "that there are really large hoards of gold scattered about the country, but these are not available for the king's use."
"How is that?" I asked.
"Why, you see, among the African tribes the custom exists of making over certain treasures to particular fetishes. Here a rich gold mine is shut down and given to one fetish; here a river that has alluvial gold in its bed is made sacred to another fetish; here a mountain containing a rich vein of quartz is 'busum'—sacred; here a temple has a hoard of gold raised from the sacred mine, or washed from the sacred river. If you travel in the interior you will constantly meet with fetish mountains—you can see one, the Adáklu mountain, from this verandah on a clear day—and every river of any size that you cross is sacred to some fetish or other; and probably nearly all those rivers and mountains are rich in gold."
"It is a curious custom," I remarked.
"Not so very unlike our own," the old man replied, with a dry smile, that spread out a fan of wrinkles on either temple; "think of the South American churches that your countrymen looted; think of the shrines in my own poor country, and think of the fetish treasures that your king Henry laid his strong hands upon. No, Englefield, man is much the same all the world over—love, war, greed, and superstition are the forces that move him, whether his skin be white, black, red or yellow, and whether his house is in the frozen North or the sunny Tropics."
I was amused at this philosophic outburst on the part of my host, who, having delivered himself of these truths, resumed his abstracted observation of the gecko.
That reptile, having captured the moth, proceeded to devour it, scattering fragments of its wings down on to the table; after which it suddenly started in pursuit of another gecko, presumably a female, which had made its appearance on the ceiling.
Pereira nodded at the lizard.
"See, Englefield," he said, "even the little house-master is no different. He has his business to attend to like us, and now that he has filled his belly, he finds leisure to attend to the affairs of his cold little heart."
I laughed at this mild pleasantry, but as the old gentleman appeared to be wandering away from the subject of our talk I gently led him back to it.
"Is the situation of any of these fetish hoards known?" I asked.
"To the natives a good many of them are," replied Pereira. "You see, they are quite safe; no native would incur the displeasure of the fetish by attempting a robbery—not even an invading tribe, for the invader believes in and respects the local fetish. Of course, towards the white men the natives preserve a good deal of secrecy, but still I have heard indirectly of one or two of the sacred hoards."
"Have you really?" I exclaimed.
"Yes. The accounts have been generally rather vague, but one or two were quite clear, although I can't vouch for their truth. It is said, for instance, that by the side of the caravan road from Ashánti to Kong there is a mass of gold sticking up out of the ground like an ant-hill. Nobody can touch it because it is guarded by a fetish who would instantly destroy the sight of any person who should attempt to seize it; and this, it seems, is firmly believed even by the Mahommedans of Kong. Then there is a queer story about the Aboási pool near the source of the Tano River in the north of Ashánti. It is said that the head waters gush out of a great rock with tusks like an elephant—whence the name Abo-ase, under the rock—and fall into a still pool, the floor of which is thickly coated with gold dust. Now all this gold is sacred to the great Tano fetish (or abúsum, to speak more correctly), and it is said to be protected from possible pilferers by a bodyguard of huge, ferocious fishes, which swim about in the depth of the pool."
"That sounds pretty far fetched," I remarked.
"It does," agreed Pereira, "although it doesn't do to be too sceptical, you know. However, the rest of the story is, I must admit, quite incredible. It is reported that near Aboási is a large cavern which forms the treasure-house of the Tano fetish, and here the fetish priests live with a number of slaves or prisoners, all of whom have had their eyes put out. Once a month a party of the prisoners are taken on to the lake in a canoe and are made to dredge up the gold-bearing sand in copper buckets, and when they have got up a sufficient quantity they are taken back to the cave. There it is supposed that they spend their time in washing out the gold under the direction of the priests, and working it into ingots or ornaments, and it is said that the treasure accumulated in the cave is enormous. Twice a year the King of Ashánti is reported to send to Aboási a party of his executioners with a fresh batch of prisoners whose eyes are put out as soon as they arrive. Then a similar number of the oldest prisoners are killed as a sacrifice to the fetish, and their bodies thrown into the lake to the sacred fishes; after which the executioners receive a tribute of the fetish gold for the king, and return to Kumási."
"You don't suppose that there is any truth in that story, do you?" I asked, as Pereira finished his recital.
"I certainly do not imagine it to be true," he replied. "But as I have said, we should not be too incredulous, for the longer one lives in Africa the more does one realise that it is a land of wonders."
This story of Pereira's, wildly improbable as it was, made a considerable impression upon me, for not only is it true, as my host had remarked, that Africa is a land of strange and unexpected happenings, but to a newcomer like myself, the novelty of the surroundings, and the total contrast to the conditions of life in prosaic, workaday England, produce an impression of unreality that vitiates the standard of probability. I recalled, too, the mysterious references of Amádu Dandaúra to the "treasure-house" and the "blind men" of Tánosu, and bitterly regretted that I had not taken the opportunity of learning from him more about the weird and dreadful cavern of Aboási, if such a place really existed.
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