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PART I

THOUGHTS ON TREK

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CHAPTER I

ON WHAT HAS BEEN AND MAY BE

After trekking on horseback five hundred miles or so, you acquire the philosophy of this kind of locomotion. For it has a philosophy of its own, and with each day that passes you become an apter pupil. You learn many things, or you hope you do, things internally evolved. But when you come to the point of giving external shape to them by those inefficient means the human species is as yet virtually confined to—speech and writing—you become painfully conscious of inadequate powers. Every day brings its own panorama of nature unfolding before your advance; its own special series of human incidents—serious, humorous, irritating, soothing—its own thought waves. And it is not my experience that these long silent hours—for conversation with one’s African companions is necessarily limited and sporadic—induce, by what one would imagine natural re-action, descriptive expansiveness when, pen in hand, one seeks to give substance to one’s impressions. Rather the reverse, alack! Silent communing doth seem to cut off communication between brain and pen. You are driven in upon yourself, and the channel of outward expression dries up. For a scribbler, against whom much has been imputed, well-nigh all the crimes, indeed, save paucity of output, the phenomenon is not without its alarming side, at least to one’s self. In one’s friends it may well inspire a sense of blessed relief.

One day holds much—so much of time, so much of space, so much of change. The paling stars or the waning moon greet your first swing into the saddle, and the air strikes crisp and chill. You are still there as the orange globe mounts the skies, silhouetting, perchance, a group of palms, flooding the crumbling walls of some African village, to whose inhabitants peace has ceased to make walls necessary—a sacrifice of the picturesque which, artistically, saddens—or lighting some fantastic peak of granite boulders piled up as though by Titan’s hand. You are still there when the rays pour downwards from on high, strike upwards from dusty track and burning rock, and all the countryside quivers and simmers in the glow. Sometimes you may still be there—it has happened, to me—when the shadows fall swiftly, and the cry of the crown-birds, seeking shelter for the night on some marshy spot to their liking, heralds the dying of the day. From cold, cold great enough to numb hands and feet, to gentle warmth, as on a June morning at home; from fierce and stunning heat, wherein, rocked by the “triple” of your mount, you drowse and nod, to cooling evening breeze. You pass, in the twenty-four hours, through all the gamut of climatic moods, which, at this time of the year, makes this country at once invigorating and, to my thinking, singularly treacherous, especially on the Bauchi plateau, over which a cold wind often seems to sweep, even in the intensity of the noontide sun, and where often a heavy overcoat seems insufficient to foster warmth when darkness falls upon the land.

So much of time and change—each day seems composed of many days. Ushered in on level plain, furrowed by the agriculturist’s hoe, dotted with colossal trees, smiling with farm and hamlet; it carries you onward through many miles of thick young forest, where saplings of but a few years’ growth dispute their life with rank and yellow grasses, and thence in gradual ascent through rock-strewn paths until your eye sees naught but a network of hills; to leave you at its close skirting a valley thickly overgrown with bamboo and semi-tropical vegetation, where the flies do congregate, and seek, unwelcomed, a resting-place inside your helmet. Dawning amid a sleeping town, heralded by the sonorous call of the Muslim priest, which lets loose the vocal chords of human, quadruped and fowl, swelling into a murmur of countless sounds and increasing bustle; it will take you for many hours through desolate stretches, whence human life, if life there ever was, has been extirpated by long years of such lawlessness and ignorance as once laid the blight of grisly ruin over many a fair stretch of English homestead. Yes, you may, in this land of many memories, and mysteries still unravelled, pass, within the same twenty-four hours, the flourishing settlement with every sign of plenty and of promise, and the blackened wreck of communities once prosperous before this or that marauding band of freebooters brought fire and slaughter, death to the man, slavery to the woman and the infant—much as our truculent barons, whose doughty deeds we are taught in childhood to admire, acted in their little day. The motive and the immediate results differed not at all. What the ultimate end may be here lies in the womb of the future, for at this point the roads diverge. With us those dark hours vanished through the slow growth of indigenous evolution. Here the strong hand of the alien has interposed, and, stretching at present the unbridged chasm of a thousand years, has enforced reform from without.