CHAPTER VII

ALEDJO-KADARA--THE SWITZERLAND OF TOGO

The march from Paratau to Aledjo-Kadara, or Aledjo, as it is generally called for short, was a very tedious one, and took us two days. One reason for this was that the men so kindly provided for us by the officials at Sokode were ordinary station labourers and not used to carrying; consequently they made but slow progress.

I was carried all the way to our camp at Amaude by hammock, reaching there at two o'clock, accompanied by Schomburgk as escort, but it was getting dark before the rest of the caravan turned up, shepherded by Nebel and Hodgson. They had had a terrible time with the men, and at one period during the worst heat of the day they had almost given up hope of accomplishing the stage at all. The poor fellows staggered in under their loads in a terrible condition, some of them so utterly collapsed that I could not bear to look at them. The baggage was only got up at all, Nebel informed us, by requisitioning the help of the natives--other than carriers--who accompanied the caravan in a permanent capacity. Even the interpreters, and our personal boys, had to take turns in carrying loads, greatly to their disgust, for these people consider themselves to be on a higher plane altogether than the porters. It was as if one should ask the office staff at, say, a big contractor's place of business, to doff their black coats and white shirts, and start in to shovel clay or carry bricks.

As for me, I felt more dead than alive on arrival. My head ached terribly; not the ordinary headache of civilised climes, which if painful is at least endurable, but a burning, throbbing, rending torture, that seemed at times as if it would drive me to the verge of insanity. The heat, the dust, and the added anxiety as to the whereabouts of the caravan, made matters worse. There was no proper rest-house; only a tumble-down hut, dirty and evil-smelling, into which, however, I was glad to crawl and seek refuge from the blinding glare outside. After a while I fell asleep, and awoke feeling much better, but ravenously hungry. As, however, the carriers had not yet arrived, there was no food available, and by the time they did turn up I was nearly dead with hunger. This was not surprising, as I had had nothing to eat for twelve solid hours, from six o'clock in the morning until six o'clock at night. When the kitchen boxes did at last put in an appearance, we lost no time. The cook was put upon his mettle, and in rather less than a quarter of an hour we were doing full justice to a glorious meal of delicious little Frankfort sausages, tinned vegetables, and potatoes, washed down--this was an extra special treat--by a bumper of champagne, which had been kept cool in bottle by being wrapped in wet blankets. Afterwards I crawled into my hut, wrapped myself in a horse-rug, and with a saddle for a pillow, I cried myself to sleep. My last thoughts were, I remember, of a most doleful character. I wished most fervently that I had never come to Africa; I was quite sure that I was going to die out there in the wilds, and I even contemplated seriously cancelling my contract and insisting on returning to Europe.

Next morning, however, I awoke feeling very much better, and all the dark misgivings of the night before were completely dispelled as soon as I stepped out into the glorious air of the early African dawn. The men, I discovered, had slept out in the open all night, it having been too dark to see to pitch the tents when the last of the carriers with the heavy baggage had straggled in, and the boys too utterly exhausted into the bargain. They, however, like me, were feeling much better, and we made a good start; I on horseback, as I felt that the exercise in the open air was preferable to the stuffy hammock, and might help towards my recovery.

Nor was I mistaken. We were now leaving the lowlands, and mounting upwards, and ever upwards, by a winding serpentine mountain road, and after the first few miles I could feel my health and strength coming back almost with every yard we progressed. I was not destined to reach Aledjo, however, without further mishap. Misfortunes, they say, seldom come singly, and it was most certainly so on this occasion as regards myself. Schomburgk and I had cantered on ahead of the caravan, and on reaching a little native village we called a short halt, in order to rest awhile and allow the carriers to come up. Our two horses were tethered close together, and out of sheer devilment Schomburgk's horse edged back behind mine and bit him on the tail. He lashed out with his hind feet at his offending mate, and, fearing further trouble, I went up to stroke him, and try to pacify him. Usually I could do anything with him. He would follow me about the camp like a dog, whinnying for sugar, and poking his soft nose about my shoulders and bosom. But on this occasion no doubt he was angry and terrified, and the moment I laid my hand on his flank he lashed out with both hind feet, kicking me in the calf of the leg, and sending me flying head over heels clean off the path and into the middle of a small corn patch. Half-stunned and dazed, I tried to pick myself up, but found that I could not stand. The pain in my injured leg was awful. I never experienced anything like it in my life. Schomburgk and the others thought that it was broken, and were naturally very much concerned, since it would have taken at least a week to get a doctor up. They tried to get my riding-breeches off, but I could not stand the agony, and had to beg of them to desist. Meanwhile our boys stood round in a circle, muttering "Poor Pussy! Poor little Pussy!" and showing in their black countenances the concern they felt at my sufferings. I was greatly touched.

After about an hour the pain began to abate, and I was able to endure the removal of my riding-breeches. Then, to my great relief, I discovered that the limb was not fractured, but terribly bruised and swollen. Luckily the horse was not shod, or one or more bones would almost inevitably have been broken. The poor beast was not to blame, and as showing how sorry he was for what he had done, I may mention that for fully a week afterwards he would shrink away and hang his head whenever I approached him. He seemed to know that he had unwittingly caused me pain, and no doubt if he could have spoken he would have told me how he had let fly on the spur of the moment, without looking round, not knowing that it was me, but imagining it to be the other horse, intent on inflicting further annoyance.

When we at length reached Aledjo, the boys, owing to our being delayed by the above incident, had got there before us, and had begun preparations for camping. Now we had heard on the way up that there was a very nice, large dining-table in the Aledjo rest-house, and as dining-tables in the African bush are rare luxuries, affording a welcome change from the usual ricketty folding things carried in a caravan, we naturally looked for it the first thing on our arrival. To our surprise it was nowhere to be seen, and on inquiring we discovered that it had been calmly annexed by Messa, our cook, who had carted it over to his kitchen, and arranged all his pots and pans on it in beautiful apple-pie order. He was greatly chagrined and annoyed at having to submit to their being all dumped unceremoniously on the ground, and the table returned to its proper place. We dined off it later in state, and enjoyed an extra good meal owing to the thoughtful kindness of the good fathers of the Aledjo Roman Catholic Mission, who sent us over a supply of fresh vegetables, a treat which only a prolonged course of tinned stuff enables one to appreciate fully.

The next day I felt as fit as a fiddle as regards my bodily health, although my leg still pained me somewhat. It is simply marvellous the difference a few thousand feet of elevation seem to make in equatorial Africa. From out of the depths of a steaming cauldron, so to speak, one is transported in the course of a few hours to a region where the air seems as pure and bracing as that of, say, the Austrian Tyrol. Of course it isn't. It is the force of contrast. If a European could be transported straight from such a climate to that which prevails in the dry season at Aledjo, he would probably laugh to scorn its claim to be entitled the Switzerland of Togo. But to poor, jaded me, it was as the very elixir of life itself.

And it is not the climate only. Aledjo itself is a beautiful place, and beautifully situated on a lofty plateau nearly 3000 feet above the level of the sea. Here Dr. Kersting has built for himself an everlasting monument. Foreseeing how in time it would be needed, he laid out the place as a health resort for Europeans, and built beautiful roomy and airy rest-houses overlooking a wide expanse of plain and mountain, the plain in front, the mountains behind.

These Aledjo rest-houses consist of a series of enormous round huts, connected by covered corridors. All the rooms are very large, and have big windows and doors, so that the fresh air can come in everywhere. The dining-room especially is big enough for a circus to perform in. And what delighted me perhaps more than all was that there were the very finest set of stables for our horses that I had seen anywhere in Africa.

In time Aledjo is bound to become a place of considerable importance. Already there is in course of erection there a fine Catholic Mission Station. I am not a Catholic myself, nor is Schomburgk, but nevertheless we became great friends with the good fathers who were there superintending the work. We dined together nearly every night, and organised jointly some sports--target shooting and so forth--which were very well attended.

We also utilised our stay here to film what afterwards proved to be one of our very best dramas. We called it _The Outlaw of the Sudu Mountains_, and in the beginning we merely intended to use the play as a sort of setting for the beautiful scenery around Aledjo, much of which is, as I have already intimated, grand beyond description. When, for example, the harmattan is not in evidence, and the atmosphere is consequently clear, one can see right away to the Bassari Mountains, and the lofty outstanding peak of Mafakasa, meaning "Long Gun." At night, too, when the moon is shining as only it does in the tropics, the landscape takes on a new, mysterious beauty, on which I was never tired of gazing. Other nights, when there was no moon, the grass fires lit up the country for miles around, so that I thought I had never seen anything so awe-inspiring and magnificent. These grass fires are started by the natives at regular intervals during the dry season, as otherwise the country would be covered with an altogether too luxuriant vegetation. It is simply marvellous how quickly nature repairs the ravages of the flames. After two or three days, new green grass shoots up through the ash-covered soil, and clothes the whole of the burnt areas with a beautiful carpet of verdure three or four inches high, on which the antelope, and other small four-footed game, feed greedily. The natives call this "the sweating of the country," a most expressive phrase. The flames did not as a rule sweep onward with a wide front, but ate broad streets and roads, as it were, through the bush; and we used to amuse ourselves after dinner of an evening by making imaginary comparisons between these fiery thoroughfares and places we knew. "There is the Strand," we would say, "and over there the Unter den Linden. Yonder are the long-drawn-out lights of the Thames Embankment, and that is the Boulevarde des Italiens. This is the White City, that is Earl's Court, and so on." It was all very amusing, and served to recall memories of home and friends, and of happy hours spent in far different surroundings. Later on, I may add, when our caravan had to make long detours to avoid these same grass fires, I was not so greatly in love with them. Our horses, however, were not in the least frightened of them, which was one comfort. They would even gallop through some of the lesser ones, and seemed to have a perfectly marvellous knack of finding openings in the advancing line of dancing flames, through which they trotted unconcernedly. The reason for this is, of course, that these African horses have been used to grass fires all their lives. An animal fresh from Europe would probably go wild with terror, if confronted with one for the first time.

We evolved the plot of the _Outlaw_ film practically on the spot, and I have very good reason to remember it, for while playing in it I met with yet another of those mishaps which seem to be inseparable from the profession of cinema acting. Briefly the story of the play is as follows. A white man is outlawed from amongst his fellows, and takes to the bush, living as a native amongst the natives. Prowling about one day in the vicinity of a settlement, he approaches a farmer's homestead, and is ordered off by the farmer's wife--myself. Cursing and threatening, he goes away to his lair in the hills, where he has collected together a lot of black scalliwags, of whom he is the self-elected chief. He sits apart on a knoll, brooding over the slight that has been put upon him, and vowing revenge.

His chance comes sooner than he had anticipated. From his eerie in the hills he sees me walking along a lonely path, decides to kidnap me, and does so, carrying me, struggling wildly, to his lair, over steep and dangerous mountain tracks. Part of the way led along the brink of a precipice, where the foothold was extra precarious, but of course I had to keep on struggling and squirming, as obviously a robust young woman of two-and-twenty is not going to submit to be abducted in this rough-and-ready fashion without making a fight for it.

It was this that was the cause of the accident. The camera man was grinding away at his machine, and calling out "Capital! Capital! Keep it up! Keep it up!" while Schomburgk sat a little way off on a rock out of range and beamed approval. Everything, in short, was going on first-rate, when suddenly Nebel, who was playing the part of the outlaw, stumbled over a boulder that lay in his way. At the same moment I, over-anxious perhaps to do perfect justice to the situation by making it as realistic as possible, gave a more than usually energetic wriggle. The result was that he lost his balance completely, and we tumbled head over heels on the very brink of the precipice. As the scene had been originally mapped out, he ought to have been carrying me in his arms. But he had insisted that this was not the way an outlaw would carry off a woman, and had hoisted me across his shoulder. As a result, when he fell, I flew clear of him, and landed within less than a foot of the edge of the cliff. Had I gone over, it goes without saying that I should most certainly never have played in a cinema drama again. As it was, I was cut and bleeding, and pretty badly bruised, but my professional instinct caused me to ask almost automatically as they picked me up, "What sort of a picture did it make?" As a matter of fact, except that it did not show the depth of the precipice, it made a very good one, for the operator had never ceased all the while turning the handle of his machine. Nothing short of an earthquake, and a pretty big earthquake at that, would, I am convinced, upset the equanimity of a cinema photographer to the extent of making him stop grinding away at his beloved camera.

Whether it was the effect of this little upset or not, I am unable to say, but the fact remains that soon afterwards Nebel got homesick, and gave out that he must return to Europe then and there. So, as we still had to film one or two scenes in our _Odd Man Out_ drama, in which we wanted him to act, we went to a place called Bafilo, only about eight or nine miles from Aledjo, where we had previously decided to act them. I might mention here that all the dramas we played in Togo were entirely the work of Major Schomburgk, who wrote the scenarios, produced them, and also acted in all of them. The germ idea of _The White Goddess of the Wangora_, however, was given him by Mr. L. Dalton, a young London journalist.

We had a tremendous reception at Bafilo, the Uro and all his people turning out to do us honour. It was very flattering, no doubt, but all the same I could not help wishing that they would not be quite so demonstrative. The din was simply terrific, and the heat and the clouds of dust together were well-nigh overpowering.

The station at Bafilo is perched on a plateau, with a sheer drop down to the native town, which is a very large one; and here one night, soon after our arrival, I was witness to a scene that at the time made a deep impression on me. It was pitch dark, no moon, but millions on millions of stars twinkling like points of fire out of a coal-black sky. We were sitting on a sort of platform, which Dr. Kersting had had built on the extreme edge of the plateau, jutting out over the valley. The native village, or rather the cluster of native villages that constitute Bafilo, lay beneath us, but for all that we could see or hear of them they might have had no existence. Neither sight nor sound came from the depths to indicate that hereabouts were the homes of many thousands of people.

I had just commented upon this strange and altogether unusual stillness, when there was borne upwards on the night air a curious, almost uncanny, sort of rustling sound, like the sudden soughing among trees of a newly-awakened wind, and which yet had something human about it, as of a vast multitude bestirring itself uneasily. Then, all at once, in every village for miles around, thousands of lighted torches twinkled into being, and a chorus of delighted shouts burst from as many savage throats.

It was the beginning of the festival of Bairam, the great Mohammedan period of rejoicing which marks the end of the fast of Ramadam, mentioned in a previous chapter. From what I heard and saw, I am quite sure that the Bafilo people paid little or no attention to the fast, but they certainly let themselves go on the festival. Many of them threw the torches that they carried high in the air, so that they resembled very much a flight of rockets. And they seemed to vie with one another in running swiftly about with them all over the place. Eventually they all converged at a level spot just outside the principal village, where the half-burnt torches were thrown together in a huge heap, making a very presentable bonfire. One has only to remember that the Moslem festival of Bairam commemorates the offering of Isaac by Abraham on Mount Moriah to appreciate the significance of this bonfire. But of that these savages knew naught. It was to them just an occasion for merry-making. Had they known of the word they would doubtless have called it a "beano." All that night, at intervals when I awoke, I heard the weird negro music, and the singing of men and women. It sounded not unmusical--heard afar off.

We were kept very busy filming at Bafilo. First we played the scenes in _Odd Man Out_ that I wrote about, so that Nebel could leave for home. These occupied us off and on, and counting the preliminary rehearsals, for about a week, from December 1st to 8th, on which latter date Nebel left us, with many expressions of regret and best wishes on both sides, to start on his journey down to the coast.

One incident of this drama caused us a good deal of amusement. Nebel, acting the part of the brutal husband, had to throw a plate at my native boy; and in order to get exactly the right expression we decided not to tell him anything about it beforehand. The result was eminently satisfactory from our point of view. Hodgson having been previously warned to have his camera in readiness, Nebel pretended at breakfast-time one morning to find fault with his porridge--served purposely cold for the occasion--and seizing hold of the plate and contents he hurled them at the boy, who was standing behind my chair. I never saw a native so completely flabbergasted in my life. His whole face, attitude, and manner expressed unbounded amazement, not unmixed with fear. I take it that he imagined that Nebel had suddenly gone mad. For perhaps half a minute he remained rooted to the spot. Then he turned and ran as fast as his legs could carry him to the shelter of the cook-house. Of course the nature of the incident was explained to him later on, whereat he laughed heartily, quite entering into the spirit of the joke.

After disposing of the _Odd Man Out_ drama, we started on some industrial films, and these I found extremely interesting. Among others we took, was a series showing the various processes in the native cotton industry from start to finish. A great deal of cotton is grown round about Bafilo, and the people are exceedingly clever in cultivating it, preparing it, and making it up into garments.

First we filmed the cotton growing in little plots, or fields, which the natives clear from time to time, in the midst of the virgin bush, and where it was being tended and picked by the native girls. Then we photographed one by one the various processes, such as ginning, spinning by means of hand-worked spindles manipulated by the women, dyeing, and so on, down to the final process of weaving the cloth on the queer, old-fashioned native hand-looms, the pattern of which has been handed down unchanged probably for thousands of years. These looms are most curious, and likewise extremely primitive. The cloth can only be woven on them in strips about four to five inches wide, and these have afterwards to be laboriously sewn together by hand in order to make of them whatever garment is required. The native tailors are, however, marvellously expert with their needles, the stitches they put in being so tiny, and so close together, and the thin strips of cloth so evenly matched, that at a little distance the finished garment appears as if it had been woven in one piece.

The ginning is done by hand, and mostly by the women and girls, who tease it out very finely and quickly. In other parts of Togo, however, I have seen the natives accomplish this same process even more expeditiously by rolling it on a stone. The skeining is done by boys. Men everywhere undertake the important work of weaving, with the one exception that there exists at Bafilo a sort of class, or guild, of women weavers. These, however, work on quite different principles, and with altogether different looms, to those used by the men; and the cloth, instead of being woven in narrow strips, is made all in one piece, and of practically any width. It is a sort of primitive home industry, occupying women in their spare time, and is carried on inside their huts. When we wanted to film one of these women weavers at work, we had to get her to bring her loom out from her hut, and set it up in the open. I may add that these workers' guilds are common in Togo, not only amongst women, but to an even greater degree amongst men. They are very strict and conservative as regards the qualification for admission to membership; and as regards their aims and objects, they correspond in some respects to our European trade unions, while in other directions they approximate very closely indeed to the caste system of India.

The dyeing is also women's work, a beautiful dark blue colour being obtained from a preparation of native indigo. Most interesting of all from my point of view was the process of spinning. The hand-worked spindles are merely hard round sticks, which are inserted through a hole drilled in a flat disc--more rarely pear-shaped--of soft stone, or of clay baked hard, the weight of which helps to keep the spindle revolving, and also regulates its speed--performing, in fact, the functions of the governor of a steam-engine. The women, who do all the spinning, are marvellously expert with this exceedingly primitive contrivance. Resting one end of the spindle in the hollow of a calabash placed upon the ground, and sanding their fingers from time to time so as to get a grip, they make it revolve evenly and rapidly, and seemingly with little or no exertion. Sometimes one sees a woman revolving the spindle on her knee. A white woman trying the experiment would probably succeed in drilling a hole in her knee-cap, that is, if she continued the experiment for any length of time, but the skin of a native woman's knee is calloused by continual kneeling to almost the consistency of bone. I have occasionally, too, seen a spinner of more than ordinary dexterity throw the spindle away from her, and draw it back by the thread, keeping it revolving in the air all the while.

Another industry which we filmed, and one which, so far as Schomburgk could discover, is peculiar to the district, I can lay claim to be the discoverer of. I was out one day after butterflies, when I came unexpectedly on a number of girls busily engaged, by the banks of a little stream, in grinding and polishing a number of small objects, the exact nature of which I could not at first determine. Inquiry revealed the fact that they were palm nuts, out of which they were manufacturing artificial pearls to make up into waist-belts. By marshalling a bevy of the girls together, and setting them to work, we were able to secure a number of most interesting photographs of their unique industry, showing the whole process, from the first cutting of the nuts, drilling the holes, stringing the "pearls," and so on, down to the moment when the native belle, broadly smiling her manifest delight, puts the finished girdle round her ample waist.

I quite forgot to mention that while we were at Aledjo, Nebel went out one day and shot a "dog monkey," otherwise a baboon. It was as big as me, and looked so human that I could not bear to gaze upon it. In the evening I inquired casually what had become of the carcase, and was informed that our boys had cooked and eaten it. I shuddered. To me it seemed only one remove from cannibalism. Another queer little animal we shot here was called a rock-rabbit. It was exactly like a rabbit as to the body, but its feet reminded me very much of an elephant's hoofs.