advance!" I retorted that he ought to have impressed upon me more carefully what mean, underhand skunks niggers were.
Gloomily we marched to the next camp, and I could hear Schomburgk grumbling to himself at intervals whenever I got near enough to him, which was not often. "No cook! Whatever shall we do? And Messa was a good cook. A better one I never had. And good cooks cannot be picked up in the bush like paw-paws." And so on, and so on.
We marched eighteen miles that morning, the longest stage we had done so far, then halted for breakfast.
"Sardines and crackers!" sneered Schomburgk.
"For gracious sake go away somewhere for half an hour," I retorted hotly. "I'm going to run this chop."
He picked up his gun, and strolled off into the bush—grumbling. I set to work to prepare breakfast. It was hard work to bring my self-imposed task to a successful issue, for I had only the most rudimentary cooking utensils, and an open fire.
By dint of much labour and perseverance, however, I managed in the end to prepare a very decent dish of eggs and bacon, with hot rolls, and strong steaming coffee. Schomburgk grunted approval when he came to partake of it, and afterwards was quite genial, despite the affair of the missing Messa. "Feed the brute!" I forget the name of the tactful woman who first gave our sex that very excellent piece of advice, but she knew what she was talking about. She had studied men, and to some purpose.
An hour later our truant cook turned up. He explained that just prior to starting on trek with us he had married a young wife, and having regard to her attractiveness and inexperience he had, on mature reflection, deemed it inadvisable to leave her behind. He had therefore gone back to fetch her, borrowing the bicycle and the sovereign for that purpose.
By dint of cross-examination I elicited that he had not left our previous camp until midnight. He had therefore cycled twenty-five miles to Kamina, and the same distance back again, plus the eighteen miles we had marched that morning, or nearly seventy miles in all in rather less than nine hours, a wonderful performance for a native, and on a native road.
I asked him about his wife. "Oh," he replied, "she come presently. She walking."
Sure enough she turned up that afternoon, having trudged the whole distance from Kamina, forty-three miles. When I saw her I did not blame Messa for not caring to leave her behind. She was as pretty a girl, for a native, as I ever wish to see. Fourteen or fifteen years old, probably, but quite fully developed and beautifully proportioned, with a pair of roguish alluring eyes, and a face all smiles. She accompanied us throughout the trip, and proved herself quite an acquisition.
As for Messa, we ought of course to have chided him severely. But, as a matter of fact, we were so exceedingly glad to get him back again that but little was said to him at the time. Later on, however, he was taken pretty sternly to task, and warned that any similar breach of discipline would in future be very seriously dealt with.
CHAPTER V
ATAKPAME TO SOKODE
I forgot to say that shortly after leaving Kamina, at a village called Anâ, we were overtaken by another caravan convoying a European, a certain Dr. Berger, who was travelling up-country as far as Sokode, with a view to vaccinating the natives there.
The meeting came about in this wise. On arriving at Anâ, we discovered that the rest-house there was already occupied by a Mr. Lange, an engineer, who was building a bridge across the Anâ river.
He was away at work when we got there, and Schomburgk sent his (Lange's) boy to tell him of our arrival. Presently Lange turned up, looking rather perplexed, and not a little worried. The statement made to him by his boy, it appeared, had been couched in the following terms: "Master, two white men have arrived, and one of them looks like a woman."
Lange had guessed from this the identity of our party, for he had known Schomburgk during his previous trip, and had heard of his re-arrival in the colony, and of my presence there with him. His worried appearance, we found out, was due to the fact that he had practically run out of provisions just then, and so was unable to show us the hospitality he would have desired; and he was greatly relieved when we asked him to be our guest during our stay at Anâ. I may add that this was Schomburgk's invariable practice, and I have often heard him inveigh against the thoughtlessness sometimes shown by a certain type of globe-trotting European travellers in Africa in planting themselves upon other Europeans, sometimes for days together, and eating up food which is perhaps badly needed, and may be very difficult to replace. Of course hospitality under such circumstances is never refused. It is the unwritten law of the bush that white man shares with white man. But all the same there are times when it works hardly on the individual who does the sharing.
Well, luncheon was served and eaten, and we were enjoying our coffee and cigarettes, when a new lot of carriers hove in sight.
"Hullo!" remarked Lange to Schomburgk, "this looks like a white man's caravan"; and the two fell to discussing the foolishness of the individual, whoever he might be, in travelling thus during the heat of the day.
Presently the owner of the caravan, the Dr. Berger mentioned above, turned up, looking very hot and tired. Of course we made him welcome—it is wonderful how bush life makes one relish the advent of a white stranger—and we spent a very pleasant time together during the rest of the day.
He was the most even-tempered man as regards his dealings with the natives that I have ever come across. Nothing that they did or said seemed to disturb him in the least.
Curiously enough, although he was a Government official, he was travelling unprovided with an interpreter; and he himself, of course, understood no word of any of the native dialects.
When he wanted anything he simply asked his boy for it, addressing him at considerable length and with much circumlocution in German. Now this boy, whose name by the way was Joa, had been specially engaged by the worthy doctor because he had represented himself to be a fluent German scholar.
As a matter of fact, beyond a few phrases that he had learned to repeat parrot-like, he knew nothing whatever of the language, and the result of their joint efforts to make themselves understood was laughable in the extreme, and was not rendered the less amusing owing to the fact that the doctor would not allow our interpreter to intervene to straighten out the verbal tangle. He wanted, he said, to train his boy to understand German sufficiently well to minister to his wants.
As a result we nearly laughed ourselves into fits over scenes like the following, repeated at intervals, and with variations, all through the day.
"Joa," the doctor would say, "my friends would like a whisky and soda, and I myself could do with a drop. A small modicum of alcohol, Joa, after the day's march, certainly does no harm to a white man, and may conceivably do him good. Therefore, Joa, you may bring us a syphon of soda, please, together with a bottle of whisky"; and the doctor would imitate in dumb show the process of drawing a cork out of a bottle.
"Yah!" Joa would say, his face all one broad grin; and off he would go to his master's tent, to return presently with—a telescope.
"Now, Joa," the doctor would remark genially, "a telescope is a very good thing in its way, but one cannot drink telescopes, Joa. What we now want, Joa, is a whisky and soda, especially the soda." And he would start to imitate the pressing down of the lever of a soda-water syphon.
A new light would then break on Joa's face. "Ah! Yah!" he would cry, and trot off again, to reappear a minute or so later carrying with due care and circumspection his master's double-barrelled rifle, loaded, and at full-cock.
And so the pantomime would proceed, master and man both in the best of tempers, until at last, perhaps at the fourth or fifth attempt, perchance at the tenth or twelfth, the native would hit upon the right article, either by accident, or by the slower process of elimination.
Whereupon the doctor would smile gravely yet