Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/652

 mechanical virtue, why not pursue the plan of the elder Pliny? Herr Liebert planes away at his door, and says it’s not in his orders to make scientific observations on volcanoes in a state of eruption. When it is he'll do so—until it is, he most decidedly will not. He adds Pliny was an admiral and sailors are always as curious as cats.

Buea seems a sporting place for weather even without volcanic eruptions, during the whole tornado season (there are two a year), over-charged tornadoes burst in the barrack yard. From the 14th of June till the 27th of August you never see the sun, because of the terrific and continuous wet season downpour. At the beginning and end of this cheerful period occurs a month’s tornado season, and the rest of the year is dry, hot by day and cold by night.

They are talking of making Buea into a sanatorium for the fever-stricken. I do not fancy somehow that it's a suitable place for a man who has got all the skin off his nerves with fever and quinine, and is very liable to chill; but all Governments on the Coast, English, German, or French, are stark mad on the subject of sanatoriums in high places, though the experience they have had of them has clearly pointed out that they are valueless in West Africa, and a man’s one chance is to get out to sea on a ship that will take him outside the three-mile-deep fever-belt of the coast. I hear grand accounts of other people who have gone up the peak, or tried to; I gather most of the failures have been on account of the porters. Herr Leist went up once from Babundi, and once this side. This side he failed because the three boys he had with him nearly died from the cold, and would have done so entirely if he and Herr Yost, who was with him, had not taken a world of trouble to wrap them in blankets, and rub them, and then, on the boys' account, return down. My Head man, Bum, was with Herr Leist when he tried the sea face side from Babundi and he says they turned back then because it was too steep. I am sure the boys collapsed on that side too, if the truth were known. The only point I congratulate myself on is having got my men up so high, and back again, undamaged; but, as they said, I was a Father and a Mother to them, and a very stern though kind set of parents I have been.