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LOUD SING CUCKOO!

IN the Hinterland of the Gold Coast, in the later nineties, there was a large piece of country some 250 miles from the sea, claimed by both British and Germans, and known as the Neutral Zone. Boundaries were undefined, and the claims of both nations rested on dim treaties, made by scurrying agents with the Kings, who had quite likely never set eyes on a white skin, and who to save trouble "touched pen with any one who came along and had anything to give.

Not that the other parties to these treaties relied much on their validity, but they trusted that they would be evidence on which to ground claims when the partition of the country took place.

With the fall of the Ashanti power, the occupation of Kumassi, and the deportation of King Prempeh, the Gold Coast Hinterland began to be developed, and then cropped up at once the question of the Neutral Zone. Both countries claimed it, both wrangled over it, till the Governor of the Gold Coast, taking the bull by the horns, despatched a small party of Hausas under a white officer, to travel day and night through the forests and the open plains beyond; to "jump" the "Neutral Zone," and fix the first British post in those regions at Salagha, a sacred city of the Mahommedans which lay on the left bank of the great Volta river.

So great had been the hurry when the Governor's plan was put into execution that the Officer despatched had had but a couple of hours' warning. His preparations had not been insufficient, they had been practically nil. Receiving his orders at three o'clock, he had started at five, with eight carriers, his cook, and his body boy. These with himself and his soldiers comprised his party, which was to travel night and day, post haste, cover 200 miles, and once established remain an indefinite time. The soldiers were accustomed to going through the country and living on it; the carriers would never starve and could always find their way back; but when after he had made a start he halted to arrange the march, the Officer surveyed his personal establishment with some misgivings.

Long Quashie, his cook, so called from his altitude of six feet four, was a thin soft negro with a vacant foolish face wearing a perpetual smile. He was afflicted with a stiff kneecap, which made his master wonder how long it would be before he broke down, which induced further speculation as to what would become of him when he did. He combined the duties of cook and steward indifferently well, for he cried at the least reproof.

Per contra, "Small Henry," the body servant, was a little black boy ten years of age, short in stature, very black in

skin, and of an arrogance and impudence approaching the sublime. The Officer felt but little compunction in taking him. Whatever misfortunes or hardships might befall them, he realised they would be, so far as Henry was concerned, absolutely for his good. Neither Quashie nor Henry made any difficulty as to accompanying him. The cook was imbued with a melancholy affection toward his master, and a tired feeling compelled him to accept the condition of life in which he happened to be. Small Henry boasted a dashing spirit of adventure, which promised to furnish incidents of interest should such otherwise be lacking.

The start once made and the marches arranged, the adventurers took a few hours' sleep by the wayside, and were off again before daybreak, tramping in single file along the narrow track. On that first day's march the cook's stiff knee was a perpetual joy to Henry, who would hide in the bushes and leap out on him, enjoying his jump of surprise and the consequent falling of the load of cooking pots that Quashie carried. The joke never failed, till it was explained to him through the media of the Corporal and a cleaning rod that there was a time for all things.

This taste of discipline was the first that Small Henry had experienced since he left the Wesleyan Mission, an institution he had adorned for some two years. His master listened complacently to his howls, till

he heard a gentle sobbing, and saw the long cook dissolved in tears over the misfortune of his small friend. Henry howled, Quashie sobbed, and the tiny column marched away, till as the sun was sinking they reached a ruined village, and the Officer called a halt. The men ate their rations, and the Officer ate his, but of the eight carriers only six arrived; the other two appeared no more: unable or unwilling to keep up the pace, they had thrown their loads away and gone home.

On

The load of a Gold Coast carrier is anything up to 60 lb. in weight. The way is hard and rough, the food scanty. On ordinary marches he often comes in exhausted, long after the hammock has arrived. this forced march it was inevitable he should drop farther and farther behind. At the end of the third day's scurry only four were with the column. As they plunged deeper into the forest, the marches grew more arduous, along narrow paths, amongst the giant timber, through undergrowth so dense that the air was almost unbreathable. Up rising ground where they steadily ascended and ascended, till at the ridge's summit the ground flattened, the thick undergrowth disappeared, and they marched for hours among long colonnades of stiff fan-palms rising fifty feet high in ordered columns from coarse rocky ground. Again descending, they found the jungle, and in ten minutes exchanged the

fresh cool breeze of the plateau for the hot thick air below. They reached a district where only one of the party had been before. The ground was covered with a vegetation half bamboo thicket, half thick succulent reeds resembling immense irises. These broke as they crushed through them, wetting them with a viscous fluid from head to heel, clinging like water- weeds round their limbs. Five miles of the plateau were more easily traversed than a short halfmile of that wet jungle; but in spite of all the difficulties of rocky hill and tropical undergrowth Long Quashie, soft and limping, still bore on high his cooking-pots, and swung his stiff knee valiantly in the van, while Small Henry tore along breathless into the unknown, sustained by the spirits of adventure and egoism.

By the ninth evening but two carriers were left - the one with the camp - bed, blankets, folding bath, and chair, the other who bore a heavy load of stores the most necessary. Abandoning bed, bath, and chair, the Officer threw the blankets into the hammock and divided the heavy load into two. Then he unslung the hammock; for the future he would only use it to sleep in, and would trudge the road with his

men.

And now they were nearing the forest's boundaries. The heavy timber and undergrowth gave way to lighter wood, then came patches of

open rush-covered ground and detached bushes, and then a long day of down-hill marching, over rocky ground, across mountain streams, brought them to the edge of a mighty swamp, beyond which rose the grass - covered plains of the open country. That night they slept among the trees. The swamp was three-quarters of a mile wide in its narrowest part. At its edge, one of the biggest cotton - woods that grew in the great forest had blown down into it. In the dry season, when the swamp had dried up, the tallest man standing beside the fallen giant could not touch with his finger-tips the top of its bole. Now the mud was above it, and the Hausa who crept along it to find a path through the tangle had to feel for it with his feet. They essayed that swamp at the earliest daybreak. It was ten o'clock before the first man was across. It was five before Long Quashie had achieved the passage. The short twilight was fading ere "Small Henry," so plastered with mud that he resembled a hedgehog prepared for cooking in gipsy fashion, was hauled shrieking on to firm ground by a strapping soldier. Henry, when in feather, affected to despise the military, but he clung to the grinning Hausa as a monkey to the organ-grinder.

There was no marching that evening; there was no lighting of fires; they slept where they lay,-but the worst was over. The track stretched out before them across park-like

savannah Officer received and returned the official visits of the King and Chiefs, and the occupation was a thing accomplished. The Germans at their town of Bismarck raged furious, but while Berlin and London were talking the local Government had to hold its hand.

plains and open country. The land was green with the coming of the late rains, and at the scattered villages they found yams, plantains, and millet. On the fifteenth day. they crossed the Volta, and six hours later the Officer and his men, the two carriers, four hammockbearers, Long Quashie, and Small Henry, ran into Salagha town.

To burst into a Mahommedan town without even mentioning that you are coming, to run up the Union Jack and state that you are going to stop indefinitely, is not unlikely to raise a panic that may cause your untimely decease before you can explain how blameless are your motives. The detachment at first was in great peril, but the Sergeant doffed his uniform, put on the turban and white robes, and found some of his own people among the head men of the town. He spent the day in grave and serious talk, and having seen that food and water were despatched to the camp, attended the evening prayers as as a good Mahommedan should. As for the Officer, he was so tired that he could not eat, and, after warning his men that the first who interfered with the townspeople would be flogged, lay down and slept like a dead man for eight hours. The next day the soldiers built for themselves grass shelters; the Officer chose a hut near by, making it less stuffy and more habitable by knocking holes in the mud walls. The Union Jack was run up to a tall bamboo. The

Once established in Salagha town the detachment sat down to wait. It was not a particularly interesting place. The houses built of mud, thatched with grass, and coated with white lime-wash, clustered together on a dull plain of hard red earth covered with coarse herbage, holding an occasional tree somewhat resembling an English poplar. The town itself contained some five or six thousand people, but attached to it was another town almost as large, in reality a great annexe, built to house the caravans which arrived in their season from the North and East, to procure salt, powder, and most especially Kola nut, which great Mahommedan luxury the distant forest produced in enormous quantities. Now, however, it was swept clean and deserted, for the last caravan had come and gone a month before. Outside the town grew great masses of low cactus and prickly pear, and patches of yam and cassava and ground nuts, in which the bush fowl and African partridges ran and pecked. Beyond the farms farms the the dusty plain stretched out all around, and the horizon line was unbroken by any rising ground. The trees and bushes along the river banks across which the

detachment had come, alone afforded any relief.

The inhabitants, of the usual Coast Mahommedan type, were not particularly interesting, excepting in the caravan season, and then the town presented at every turn curious and noteworthy sights. Now in its dead season a few visits exhausted its possibilities. In a raid not long before the Germans had burned it, and very many of the buildings were still in ruins, though the mosques had been rebuilt and opened by a holy man, brought all the way from Khartoum to perform the ceremony.

When he had been there a fortnight the days began to hang heavy on the Officer's hands. In a month, time seemed to stand still. The men were drilled in the early morning, the huts inspected, and the day's work was over— there was nothing more to do. It was too hot to go anywhere, had there been anywhere to go. By half-past six it was pitchdark. At first he made it his practice to walk for two hours every evening, accompanied by Small Henry, an hour out over the plain and an hour back again, or walk about the town and stare at the people sitting about the narrow streets. Then came dinner and the long black evenings. He had no literature; his only light was from a small calabash full of oil, in which floated a wick of native cotton. His one amusement was to sit and listen to the chatter of Long Quashie and Small Henry over the cooking fire, and they went to bed very

early, when they did not go into the town. Unfortunately he was not a man of hobbies. There were some lovely birds, and the long grass harboured strange beetles and insects; there was a disused pit full of weird fossils, and once on his walk he found a curiouslyveined quartz outcrop. But none of these things interested him. A collection of birds' skins, of beetles or butterflies from that region, would not only have kept a man in his position going, but have put a good round sum into his pocket. As for the fossils, but one man on the Gold Coast had interested himself in them, and in that quarry stood a door to fame, ready to be opened; while, though the boom was not due for some years, a find of quartzbearing gold was always a secret worth knowing. But the Officer cared for none of these things. He stared at the butterflies and yawned at the great fossils, plainly outlined on the red sandstone, and kicked the quartz outcrop, wondering as he walked back again what Quashie would contrive for dinner, and how long they were to be left in their isolated position. Once a fortnight he exchanged a formal visit with the King of the town, and that was his sole distraction.

Time went on and the detachment seemed forgotten. No one of the missing carriers had arrived. Two of the remaining six had been sent to bring up stores, but neither of them returned. A messenger sent at his request by the King

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