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a thing of the past
# 1
Everything considered, South Africa is a country of big things—big pay, big prices, big opportunities, big [Pg 247] obstacles, big resources, big rewards—and she needs young men to help her fight her battles and solve her problems. So, if I were a youngster, with the sheep-skin of a technical or agricultural school in my pocket, a few hundred dollars in my purse, and a longing for fortune and adventure in my heart, I think that I should walk into one of those steam-ship offices in Bowling Green and book a passage for that land of which some one has said, “Fortune knocks at a man's door once in most countries, but in South Africa she knocks twice.”
CHAPTER XI THE FORGOTTEN ISLES
THERE can be no doubt about it: real cannibal kings are getting scarce. Ever since, as a youngster, I read of Du Chaillu's adventures among the man-eating natives of Equatoria, I had hankered to see a real live cannibal in the flesh. But when, in later years, I made inquiries about them from missionaries and traders and officials in Senegal and Uganda and Nyasaland, I invariably received the reply: “Oh, that's all over now; except among a few of the West Coast tribes, cannibalism is.” So when the captain of the little German cargo boat on which I was loitering up and down Africa's Indian seaboard remarked at breakfast one morning that he had decided to put in to Mahé, in the Seychelle group, and that I might care to pass the time while he was taking on cargo by visiting the colony of cannibal royalties who were in exile there, I felt that one of my boyhood dreams was to be realised at last the scene
of a violent and murderous attack..
Do you happen, by any chance, to have been to Mahé, in the Seychelles? No? Of course not. Then you must picture an emerald island dropped down in a turquoise sea. Peacock-coloured waves ripple on a silver strand, and this loses itself almost immediately in a dense forest of giant palms, which, mounting leisurely, [Pg 249] dwindles and straggles and runs out in a peak of bare blue rock, which disappears, in turn, behind a great, low-hanging, purple heat cloud. To reach these delectable isles one must have time and patience a-plenty, for they lie far from the ocean highways and are visited by scarcely a dozen vessels, all told, each year. Draw a line straight across the Indian Ocean from Colombo to Zanzibar, and where that line intersects the equator are the Seychelles, mere specks in that expanse of ocean. Mahé, the largest of the group, is everything that a tropical island should be, according to the story-books, even to its inaccessibility, for, barring the French mail steamer which touches there every other month on its way to Madagascar, and an occasional German freighter or British tramp which drops in on its way from Goa to Kilindini, on the chance of picking up a cargo of copra, it is as completely cut off from the outside world as though it were in Mars.
CHAPTER XI THE FORGOTTEN ISLES
THERE can be no doubt about it: real cannibal kings are getting scarce. Ever since, as a youngster, I read of Du Chaillu's adventures among the man-eating natives of Equatoria, I had hankered to see a real live cannibal in the flesh. But when, in later years, I made inquiries about them from missionaries and traders and officials in Senegal and Uganda and Nyasaland, I invariably received the reply: “Oh, that's all over now; except among a few of the West Coast tribes, cannibalism is.” So when the captain of the little German cargo boat on which I was loitering up and down Africa's Indian seaboard remarked at breakfast one morning that he had decided to put in to Mahé, in the Seychelle group, and that I might care to pass the time while he was taking on cargo by visiting the colony of cannibal royalties who were in exile there, I felt that one of my boyhood dreams was to be realised at last the scene
of a violent and murderous attack..
Do you happen, by any chance, to have been to Mahé, in the Seychelles? No? Of course not. Then you must picture an emerald island dropped down in a turquoise sea. Peacock-coloured waves ripple on a silver strand, and this loses itself almost immediately in a dense forest of giant palms, which, mounting leisurely, [Pg 249] dwindles and straggles and runs out in a peak of bare blue rock, which disappears, in turn, behind a great, low-hanging, purple heat cloud. To reach these delectable isles one must have time and patience a-plenty, for they lie far from the ocean highways and are visited by scarcely a dozen vessels, all told, each year. Draw a line straight across the Indian Ocean from Colombo to Zanzibar, and where that line intersects the equator are the Seychelles, mere specks in that expanse of ocean. Mahé, the largest of the group, is everything that a tropical island should be, according to the story-books, even to its inaccessibility, for, barring the French mail steamer which touches there every other month on its way to Madagascar, and an occasional German freighter or British tramp which drops in on its way from Goa to Kilindini, on the chance of picking up a cargo of copra, it is as completely cut off from the outside world as though it were in Mars.