in Africa. You take them as a matter of course if you are outward bound, but on your call homeward (if you make it) you will look on them as a blessing and a curiosity. For lower down, particularly in "the Rivers," these things are rarely to be had, and never in such perfection as here; and to see again lettuces, yellow oranges, and tomatoes bigger than marbles is a sensation and a joy. Onions also there are, and if you are wise you will buy them when outward bound. If you are speculative in the bargain you will take as many as you can get, for here you may buy them from four to five shillings the box, and you can sell them below for any sum between twelve shillings and a sovereign.
Here, too, are beads, but for the most part of dull colour and cheap quality. Beans, too, are more than well represented. Horse-eye beans, used for playing warry; vast, pantomime-sized beans, the insides of which being removed, and a few shot put in, make a pleasant rattle to hang at the wrist; and evil Calabar beans, which can serve no good end at all here, and which it seems insolent to sell in open market, in a town where poisoning is said to be so prevalent that its own Bishop declares "small social gatherings are almost unknown from the fear of it."[1]
The piles of capsicums and chillies, the little heaps of Reckitt's Blue, vivid-coloured Berlin wools, pumpkins, pineapples, and alligator pears, give rich and brilliant touches of colour, and relieve the more sombre tones of kola nuts, old iron, antelope horns, monkey skins, porcupine quills, and snails. These snails are a prominent feature in the market in a quiet way: they are used beaten up to help to make the sauce for palm oil chop; and they are shot alive on to the floor in heaps, and are active and nomadic: whereby it falls out that people who buy other things such as vegetables, Berlin wool, or meat, are liable to find one of these massive gastropods mixed up in the affair. Treading on one of them is, for a nervous person, as alarming as the catastrophe of treading on one of the native black babies with which the market floor abounds. There are half a hundred other indescribabilia, and above all hovers the peculiar Sierra Leone smell and the peculiar Sierra Leone noise.
- ↑ Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years.
