north of Accra.] peeped up over the port-bow at dawn of the 25th of
January.

The first aspect of Axim is charming; there is nothing more picturesque
upon this coast.

After the gape of the Ancobra River the foreshore gradually bends for a
few miles from a west-east to a north-south rhumb, and forms a bay within
a bay. The larger is bounded north by Akromasi Point, the southern wall of
the great stream; the bold foreland outlain with reefs and a rock like a
headless sphinx, is known from afar, east and west, by its 'one tree,' a
palm apparently double, the leader of a straggling row. On the south of
the greater bay is Point Pépré, by the natives called Inkubun, or
Cocoanut-Tree, from a neighbouring village; like the Akromasi foreland, it
is black and menacing with its long projection of greenstone reefs, whose
heads are hardly to be distinguished from the flotilla of fishing canoes.
The lesser bay, that of Axim proper, has for limits Pépré and the Bosomato
promontory, a bulky tongue on whose summit is a thatched cottage.

The background of either bay is a noble forest, a wall of green, the items
being often 150 feet high, with branchless white boles of eighty,
perpendicularly striping the verdure. The regular sky-line--broken by tall
knolls and clumps, whose limits are rivulet-courses and bosky dells;
thrown up by refraction; flecked with shreds of heavy mist

That like a broken purpose waste in air;

and dappled with hanging mists, white as snow, and 'sun-clouds,' as the
natives term the cottony nimbus--is easily mistaken, in the dim light of
dawn, for a line of towering cliffs.