Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/668

 as healthy. Of its climate I have spoken already. Buea, however, has this advantage over De Buncha, that it has a fine water-supply, the finest, indeed as far as is at present known, the only considerable water supply above 2,000 feet on the mountain. When one is in Victoria, particularly in the evening of a hot rainless day, you can see a great band of white mist girdling the mountain where the water-laden hot air rising from the forest and swamps meets the cold air of the upper mountain, which condensing, must cause it to deposit, not only the water, but the exhalations from the swamp lands, and every morning and evening you see great whiffs of mist coming up one of the forests on the foot-hills round Victoria, making the whole district look as if it were a great smouldering fire. The difficulty of getting a sick man up to either Buea or De Buncha would at present be great, but granting these difficulties removed, as one will be when the road to Buea is completed, I do not think that when a fever patient got up above the 3,000 feet level he would find much benefit, and he would run great risk of chill and dysentery. I regard this idea of the possibility of finding an elevated situation in West Africa suitable for a sanatorium, as one of the most dangerous the governmental authorities suffer from, for it induces them to build houses in out-of-the-way places, and send men suffering from fever to them to die, robbing the sick man of his great chance of recovery, namely, getting out to sea. The true sanatorium for the Coast would be a hospital vessel attached to each district, but as this is practically impossible, the next best thing would be for the indefatigable Mr. A. L. Jones and Messrs, Elder Dempster to have a special hospital cabin on every one of their vessels. The drawback to this is that getting out to a vessel through the Gold Coast surf would be risky work for a sick man, and in the Rivers the mail steamers have to go from one mangrove swamp river to another, and into places like Forcados, where, owing to Lagos Bar's iniquities, vessels are detained for days, lying idle in the sweltering heat waiting for cargo. Below the Rivers, on the South West-Coast, these objections would only hold to a lesser extent, but then the South-West Coast is by no means so much in need of sanatoriums, and the