The Congo and the Cameroons by Mary Kingsley

Author:Mary Kingsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141963167
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

‘The moving Moon went up the sky,

And nowhere did abide:

Softly she was going up,

And a star or two beside.’

Only she was a young and inefficient moon, and although we were below the thickest of the mist band, it was dark.

Finding our own particular hole in the forest wall was about as easy as finding ‘our particular rabbit hole in an unknown hay-field in the dark,’ and the attempt to do so afforded us a great deal of varied exercise. I am obliged to be guarded in my language, because my feelings now are only down to one degree below boiling point. The rain now began to fall, thank goodness, and I drew the thick ears of grass through my parched lips as I stumbled along over the rugged lumps of rock hidden under the now waist-high jungle grass.

Our camp hole was pretty easily distinguishable by daylight, for it was on the left-hand side of one of the forest tongues, the grass land running down like a lane between two tongues here, and just over the entrance three conspicuously high trees showed. But we could not see these ‘picking-up’ points in the darkness, so I had to keep getting Xenia to strike matches, and hold them in his hat while I looked at the compass. Presently we came full tilt up against a belt of trees which I knew from these compass observations was our tongue of forest belt, and I fired a couple of revolver shots into it, whereabouts I judged our camp to be.

This was instantly answered by a yell from human voices in chorus, and towards that yell in a slightly amiable – a very slightly amiable – state of mind I went.

I will draw a veil over the scene, particularly over my observations to those men. They did not attempt to deny their desertion, but they attempted to explain it, each one saying that it was not he but the other boy who ‘got fright too much.’

As the black sergeant was nominally our guide, I asked him for his views on the situation. He said that when he got back to the camp the boys were drunk, which I daresay was true, but left the explanation of why he went back out of the affair. I pointed this out, and Bum, the Head man, charged into the gap with the statement that Black boy had got ‘sick in him tummick, he done got fever bad bad too much,’ and so he and the rest had to escort Black boy back to camp. This statement, though a contribution to the knowledge of the reason of the return, was manifestly untrue; because Black boy, who did not know English, sat laughing and talking at the fire during this moving recital of his woes. Those men should have rehearsed their explanations, and then Black boy could have done a good rousing writhe to support poor Bum’s statement.

I closed the palaver promptly with a brief but lurid sketch of my opinion on the situation, and ordered food, for not having had a thing save that cup of sour claret since 6.

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