dash me a fowl, but I decline, and accept two eggs, and give
him four heads of tobacco.
The whole place is swathed in thick white mist through
which my audience arrive.. But I am firm with them, and
shut up the doors and windows and disregard their bangings
on them while I am dressing, or rather redressing. The
mission teachers get in with my tea, and sit and smoke and
spit while I have my breakfast. Give me cannibal Fans!
I do not believe Blue Jacket is a teacher at all, but a horrible
Frankenstein parasite thing on White Jacket. He takes
everything away from White Jacket as soon as I give it him :
White Jacket feebly remonstrating. I see as we leave that
he is taking the money I gave the latter vi et armis out of his
pocket.
It is pouring with rain again now, and we go down the
steep hillock to the path we came along yesterday, keep it
until we come to where the old path cuts it, and then turn up
to the right following the old path’s course and leave Buana
without a pang of regret. Our road goes N.E. Oh, the mud
of it! Not the clearish cascades of yesterday but sticky,
slippery mud, intensely sticky, and intensely slippery. The
narrow path which is filled by this, is V-shaped underneath
from wear, and I soon find the safest way is right through
the deepest mud in the middle.
The white mist shuts off all details beyond ten yards in any
direction. All we can see, as we first turn up the path, is a
patch of kokos of tremendous size on our right. After this comes
weedy plantation, and stretches of sword grass hanging across
the road. The country is not so level as— or rather, I should say,
more acutely unlevel than— that we came over yesterday. On
we go, patiently doing our mud pulling through the valleys ;
toiling up a hillside among lumps of rock and stretches of
forest, for we are now beyond Buana’s plantations; and skirting
the summit of the hill only to descend into another valley.
Evidently this is a succession of foot-hills of the great
mountain and we are not on its true face yet. As we go on
they become more and more abrupt in form, the valleys mere
narrow ravines. Evidently in the wet season (this is only the
tornado season) each of these valleys is occupied by a raging
torrent from the look of the confused water-worn boulders.
Now among the rocks there are only isolated pools, for the
weather for a fortnight before I left Victoria had been fairly
•dry, and this rich porous soil soaks up an immense amount of
water. It strikes me as strange that when we are either
going up or down the hills, the ground is less muddy
than when we are skirting their summits, but as my
brother would say, “ it is perfectly simple, if you think about
it,” because on the inclines the rush of water clears the
soil away down to the bed rock. There is an outcrop of
•clay down by Buana, but though that was slippery, it is
nothing to the slipperiness of this fine, soft, red-brown earth
¡that is the soil higher up, and also round Ambas Bay. This
gets churned up into a sort of batter where there is enough
water lying on it, and, when there is not, an ice slide is an
infant to it.
My men and. I flounder about; thrice one of them, load and
•all, goes down with a squidge and a crash into the side grass,
and says "damn!” with quite the European accent; as a rule,
however, we go on in single file, my shoes giving out a mellifluous
squidge, and their naked feet a squish, squash. The
men take it very good temperedly, and sing in between accidents
; I do not feel much like singing myself, particularly at one
•awful spot, which was the exception to the rule that ground at
acute angles forms the best going. This exception was a long
.slippery slide down into a ravine with a long, perfectly glassy
slope up out of it. I remember one of my tutors saying,
“ Always when on a long march assume the attitude you feel
most inclined to, as it is less tiring.” There could not be the
.least shadow of a doubt about your inclinations as to attitude
here, nor to giving way to them, so we arrive at the bottom of
that ravine in a fine confused heap. As for going up out of
it, it was not mere inclination— it was passion that possessed
you. What you wanted to do was to plant your nose against the
hill-side and wave your normally earthward extremities in the
air, particularly when you were near the middle of the slope, or
close to the top. Two of the boys gave way to this impulse ; I,
•of course, did not, but when I felt it coming on like a sort of fit,
•flung myself sideways into the dense bush that edges the path,
O O