I am told by a good authority that the natives, whose memories
are tenacious on some points, will not show to strangers the ruins which
cost their forefathers so dear.
The last village on the sands is Kukakun, where the wreck of a schooner
saddens the scene. Within a few hundred yards of Akromasi we bent abruptly
eastward and exchanged the sands for the usual stiff soil of red clay. The
gut is formed by the point-bluff and a southern block, and the surface is
covered with dense second-growth--pandanus, the false sugar-cane, ferns
large and small, and the sloth-tree, the Brazilian _uba_ or Preguica, with
tall, thin white trunk and hanging palmated leaves. The African palm-birds
(orioles of the _Merulidae_ family), whose two colours, red (_ntiblii_) and
golden yellow (_enadsi_), apparently divide them into as many fighting
factions, give a touch, a bright colour to the dulness, and chatter over
their pensile homes, which strangers would mistake for cocoa-nuts.
Severely hustled and horribly shaken up, we ran down the little valley of
the Avin streamlet. It comes from afar, heading, they say, in Abasakasu, a
region where gold abounds. In three-quarters of an hour we had cleared the
four short miles which separate Axim from the Ancobra ferry.
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