Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

It is as pleasant to travel afoot in the tropics, so long as you keep intact the curiosity of a newcomer and do not expect life to be buoyant near towns, as it is in Devonshire; though one ought not to stroll off into the deep end of the unhelpful wilderness, like Smith, if the vital organs are lardaceous. To walk is the only way to learn where you are. Yet perhaps it does not get done so easily as this paragraph. Trifles that would be disregarded at home may become perilous where the sun can be an evil-doer. An extra risk should be looked at before it is taken; and fretfulness when all goes awry is as bad as ptomaine poisoning, though its effects are not so quickly obvious. Shelter and food on numerous occasions will be worse than sketchy, yet as to that it should improve the morals of a civilized man to realize how narrow is the division between his precious life and what comes after it. That division between here and hereafter in a tropical wild is so thin that you might see clean through it if what is behind it were not so dark. I set out into the woods without a mosquito curtain, because those who had never been so far advised me that I should not want it. No fever there, naturally. There never is. Yet later I used good measures of quinine and aspirin on natives who looked as sad as malaria usually makes a victim. And one despondent exile to whom I spoke of this replied simply, "I don't know why some of 'em make such a devil of a fuss about West Africa, when there's this place."

The mosquito net should have been an essential part of the kit. We slept in native huts, where any lurking _anopheles_ are almost sure to be infected. Besides the mosquitoes, there are the little extras. A bug of some kind-the jungle bugs are of many kinds-stung me the first night, and left a weal which was not as large as a hot cheese plate, but felt like it. That reminder I retained for about a week. The little things count, most decidedly. We had floundered, one day, through the mud and ordure where a herd of wild elephants had rested during the heat; then we spent some hours in a canoe, and a bare foot, though I did not know it, was exposed to the sun. The consequent blisters, which became confluent, were alarming if I looked at them too long.