From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to NorthGrogan, Ewart Scott
History
From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North
Grogan, Ewart Scott
Africa -- Description and travel; Grogan, Ewart Scott, 1874-1967
The continual wetting and rock-climbing had the most disastrous effect
on my already attenuated wardrobe, and for two or three days I was
compelled to disport myself clad in a simple shirt, which, thanks to a
classical education and consequent ignorance of the art of washing, had
contracted to the modest and insufficient dimensions of a
chest-preserver, while assuming the durable but inappropriate
consistency of a piece of oil-cloth. The roseate hues of early dawn
"weren’t in it" with my nether limbs after the first day’s exposure to a
pitiless sun, and I became a sort of perambulating three-tiered
Neapolitan ice, coffee, vanilla and raspberry, a phenomenon that greatly
astonished a savage who surprised me in my bath, and who immediately
fetched all his kith and kin to see; on the second day, however, the
alarming desertion of a third of my epidermis so pained me mentally and
physically, that after a great effort I produced a double-barrelled
garment that in the absence of Poole-bred critics served its turn.
Of the various arts and crafts that one is called upon to undertake in
Africa, such as cooking, shoe-mending, washer-womaning, doctoring,
butchering, taxiderming, armoury work, carpentering, etc., _ad
infinitum_, I think perhaps tailoring is the most trying; the cotton
will _not_ go into the eye of the needle, and the needle _will_ go into
one’s fingers, and then when you think it is all over, you find you have
sewn the back of your shirt to the front, or accomplished something
equally unexpected and equally difficult to undo.
At Nsessi, two miles south of Kiboko, there is a superb waterfall; it
has a drop of about 500 ft., and is divided into three stages, all at a
different angle to one another, falling 100 ft., then swirling round at
an angle, plunging into the next pool, and then a last long slide to the
level of the lake. Stupendous silver-trunked trees, with foliage the
colour of the ilex and brilliant splashes of scarlet bloom, crowd round
on either side of the gorge wherever the wild rocks afford a footing;
above towers a pointed peak showing bright above the dense gloom of the
gorge, and a white stripe of sand fringes the little village, nestling
in its banana grove, at the base.
These natives lead a curious existence, shut in between precipitous
hills and the lake, their sole means of communication with one another
being their leaky little 10 ft. dug-outs. They are wonderfully clever
at handling them, and perform the extraordinary feat of crossing the
lake, dodging in and out between the waves in the most marvellous
manner. As a means of transport they are not to be recommended; the
shape of a cross-section being that of an egg with its top off, one
slides in with comparative ease like a pickle into a pickle-jar: once
in, as with the pickle, extrication is a matter of time and patience.
It needs one of Lear’s Jumblies to feel thoroughly at home, as they leak
like a sieve, and only perpetual bailing will keep them afloat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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