August radiating stored-up heat from iron-framed
buildings, with the foul, dead air shut in by the skyscrapers, with
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
Jamaica, each balancing on her head her tightly rolled umbrella, and
in the gardens slim young girls, with only a strip of blue and white
linen from the waist to the knees, lithe, erect, with glistening
teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission
schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms.
Sierra Leone has all the hall marks of the crown colony of the
tropics; good wharfs, clean streets, innumerable churches, public
schools operated by the government as well as many others run by
American and English missions, a club where the white "mammies," as
all women are called, and the white officers--for Sierra Leone is a
coaling station on the Cape route to India, and is garri