Page:The land of fetish.pdf/308

 mantle of vapour, as under a shroud through the rifts of which the moonbeams faintly struggled in a deathly silence, broken only now and then by the weird cries of the tree-sloth, which, to a fanciful mind, might sound like the wailing of a spirit of one of the many scores of Europeans whose lives have been sacrificed to the spectral stream. The approach to the camp, on the side where the main road came in, was in an indescribable condition of filth, which might easily have been prevented had proper precautions been only taken at first; and on the other sides, where the forest had been cleared, the rank vegetation had been allowed to lie where it fell, putrefying and poisoning the air.

Had there been much mortality at Prahsu a storm of indignation would have burst out in England at a camp having again been established there in spite of the warnings of history; but, because no deaths occurred actually on the spot, the breaking of the West African golden rule was not the less-advised; this rule forbids, except in cases of urgent necessity, the removal of Europeans from the health-giving sea-breezes and from such poor comforts as the wretched