Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

LET
CHAPTER I
First Fears Justified
TT/^ HEREIN the reader^ landing
at Benguellay finds himself faced
with Africa s first and final law — to
put down a lot one must put up with
a lot,
us begin at the beginning. Coasting down
West Africa the year of grace 1889, the first
thing to strike you in the ever-shifting drama is
the sarcastic significance of Milton's mention of these lands
in such a poem as Paradise Lost, '
' the Realm of Congo
and Angola farthest South." For, as he safely guessed.
Paradise is lost, very much lost in these latitudes. There
is tropical treachery even in those poor brown palms you
see flitting past, for where is defeat so common for a white
man as just there on those sands of the seaboard, the air
all a- dance with heat ? A taunting palm over a tin shanty,
symbol not of victory but disaster. Each and every
solar ray giving the exile two knocks : the first, en route
to earth, striking the man on its way down, the second
getting him again on the rebound from the sparkling
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