My canoe was one of the most ordinary structures, with a shelter in the middle under which I had my chair put up. My gear was stowed fore and aft, and six canoe-men took charge.
Starting always seems to be a difficulty in Africa, and when I was weary of the hot sun and the glare from the water, and was wondering why we did not start, the canoe-men, true to their kind, found they had no chop, and they had to wait till one of their number went back and got it. But it was got at last and I was fairly afloat on the Volta.
To be paddled up a river is perhaps a very slow mode of progression, but in no other way could I have seen the country so well; in no other way could I have grasped its vast wealth, its wonderful resources. It is something of an adventure to go up the Volta too, for as soon as we started its smooth, wide reaches were broken by belts of rock that made it seem well-nigh impassable. Again and again from the low seat in the canoe it looked as if a rocky barrier barred all further progress, but here and there the water rushed down the narrow chasm as in a mill-race. Wonderful it was to find that a canoe could be poled up those rocky stairways against the rushing water. The rapids before you reach Kpong are innumerable; it seems as if the going were one long struggle. But the river is wonderfully beautiful; it twists and turns, and first on the right hand and then on the left I could see a tall peak, verdure-clad to its very summit, Yogaga, the Long Woman. First the sun shone on it brilliantly, as if it would emphasise its great beauty, and then a tornado swept down, and the mist seemed to rise up and swallow it. The Senchi Rapids raise the river thirty-four feet in a furlong or two, and the water, white and foaming, boils over the brown rocks like the water churned up in the wake of a great ocean steamer. I could not believe we were going up there when we faced them, but the expert canoe-men, stripped to a loin cloth, with shout and song defying the river, poled and pulled and pushed the canoe up to another quiet reach, and when they had reached calm water flung themselves down and smoked and chattered and looked back over the way we had come. We seemed to go up in a series of spasms; either the men were working for dear life or they were idling so as to bring down upon them the wrath of Grant who, after that trip along the Coast, felt himself qualified to speak, and again and again I had to interfere and explain that if anybody was going to scold the men it must be me. But indeed they worked so hard they needed a spell.