But still to it there cling the mystery, the hazard, the cruelty of
those earlier times. It is not of palm oil and rubber one thinks
when he reads on the ship's itinerary, "the Gold Coast, the Ivory
Coast, the Bight of Benin, and Old Calabar."
One of the strange leaps made by civilization is from Southampton to
Cape Town, and one of its strangest ironies is in its ignoring all
the six thousand miles of coast line that lies between. Nowadays, in
winter time, the English, flying from the damp cold of London, go to
Cape Town as unconcernedly as to the Riviera. They travel in great
seagoing hotels, on which they play cricket, and dress for dinner.
Of the damp, fever-driven coast line past which, in splendid ease,
they are travelling, save for the tall peaks of Teneriffe and Cape
Verde, they know nothing.
When last Mrs. Davis and I made that voyage from Southampton, the
decks were crowded chiefly with those English whose faces are
familiar at the Savoy and the Ritz, and who, within an hour, had
settled down to seventeen days of uninterrupted bridge, with, before
them, the prospect on landing of the luxury of the Mount Nelson and
the hospitalities of Government House. When, the other day, we again
left Southampton, that former departure came back in strange
contrast. It emphasized that this time we are not accompanying
civilization on one of her flying leaps. Instead, now, we are going
down to the sea in ships with the vortrekkers of civilization, those
who are making the ways straight; who, in a few weeks, will be
leaving us to lose themselves in great forests, who clear the paths
of noisome jungles where the sun seldom penetrates, who sit in
sun-baked "factories," as they call their trading houses, measuring
life by steamer days, who preach the Gospel to the cannibals of the
Congo, whose voices are the voices of those calling in the
wilderness.
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