a humidity that makes you think you are breathing through a
steam-heated sponge, is as near the lower regions as I hope any of
us will go. And yet Sierra Leone is no mean competitor.

We climbed the moss-covered steps to the quay to face a great white
building that blazed like the base of a whitewashed stove at white
heat. Before it were some rusty cannon and a canoe cut out of a
single tree, and, seated upon it selling fruit and sun-dried fish,
some native women, naked to the waist, their bodies streaming with
palm oil and sweat. At the same moment something struck me a blow on
the top of the head, at the base of the spine and between the
shoulder blades, and the ebony ladies and the white "factory" were
burnt up in a scroll of flame.

[Illustration: A White Building, that Blazed Like the Base of a
Whitewashed Stove at White Heat.]

I heard myself in a far-away voice asking where one could buy a sun
helmet and a white umbrella, and until I was under their protection,
Sierra Leone interested me no more.

One sees more different kinds of black people in Sierra Leone than
in any other port along the Coast; Senegalese and Senegambians,
Kroo boys, Liberians, naked bush boys bearing great burdens from the
forests, domestic slaves in fez and colored linen livery, carrying
hammocks swung from under a canopy, the local electric hansom,
soldiers of the W.A.F.F., the West African Frontier Force, in Zouave
uniform of scarlet and khaki, with bare legs; Arabs from as far in
the interior as Timbuctu, yellow in face and in long silken robes;
big fat "mammies" in well-washed linen like the washerwomen of