The town has been a fine town once. The houses are substantially built of stone, they are approached by fine flights of stone steps, there are the ruins of an old casino, and picturesque in its desolation is an old Dutch garden. If I were to describe the magnificent old Castle, I should fill half the book; it is so well worth writing about. I walked up the hill behind the Castle where they have built up the roadway with discarded cannon, and there I took photographs and wished I had a little more time to spare for the place, and vowed that when I reached England the British Museum should help me to find out all there is to be known about this magnificent place and the men who have gone before.
For the man of the present it must be a little difficult to live in, if it is only for the intense loneliness. It must be lonely to live in the bush with the eternal forest surrounding you, but at least there a man is an outpost of Empire, the trade is coming to him, he may find interest and amusement in the breaking of a road or the planning of a garden, while the making of a town would fill all his time, but in Elmina there are no such consolations. The place is dead, slain by the English; the young men go away following the trade, and the old mammies with wrinkled faces and withered breasts lounge about the streets and talk of departed glories.
I had not expected to find one white man here, and I found two, the other being a school-inspector who was on his way along the Coast inspecting the native schools. He was in a fix, for he had sent on his carriers and stores and could get no hammock-boys. They had promised to send them from Cape Coast and they had not come. The medical officer made both us strangers hospitably welcome, but stores are precious things on the Coast and one does not like to trespass, so he was a troubled school-inspector.
“I think I'll walk on to Kommenda,” said he.
“I wouldn't,” said I, the only one who knew that undesirable spot.
We made a queer little party of three in that old-world Castle, in the old Dutch rooms that are haunted by the ghosts of the dead-and-gone men and women of a past generation. At least, I said they were haunted, the school-inspector was neutral, and the medical officer declared no ghosts had ever troubled him. I don't know whether it was ghosts that troubled me, but the fact remains that I, who could sleep calmly by myself in the bush with all my carriers drunk, could not sleep easily now that my troubles were over, and I set it down to the haunting unhappy thoughts of the people who had gone before me, who were dead, but who had lived and suffered in those rooms; and yet in the day-time we were happy enough, and the two men instructed me as one who had a right to know in things African. The school-inspector was very funny on the education of the native. His great difficulty apparently was to make the rising generation grasp the fact that grandiloquent words of which they did not understand the meaning were not proofs of deep knowledge. The negro is like the Hindoo Baboo dear to the heart of Mr Punch. He dearly loves a long word. Hygiene is a subject the Government insist upon being taught, only it seems to me they would do more wisely to teach it in the vernacular so that it might be understood by the common people. As it is, said my school-inspector, the pupils are very pat; and when solemnly asked by the teacher what are the constituents of drinking water, rap out a list of Latin adjectives the only one of which he can understand is “potable.”