I. THE BREATH OF THE TROPICS

There is a glamour like the glamour of the dawn about one's first
voyage to the tropics; and as the _Ethiopia_ passed out of the grey
atmosphere of England into the spring belt of the world, and then into
a region where the days were a glory of sunshine and colour and the
nights balmy and serene, Miss Slessor, so long confined within the bare
walls of a factory, found the experience a pure delight in spite of a
sense of loneliness that sometimes stole over her. Her chief grievance
was that Sunday was kept like other days. Trained in the habits of a
religious Scottish home it seemed to her extraordinary that no service
should be held. "My very heart and flesh cried out for the courts of
God's house," she wrote. Some of the crew comforted her by saying that
there was always a Sabbath in Calabar.

It was not until the headland of Cape Verde was sighted and passed, and
she saw in succession stretches of green banks, white sands upon which
the surf beat, and long grey levels of mangrove, that she began to
realise the presence of Africa. From the shore came hot whiffs of that
indescribable smell so subtly suggestive of a tropical land; while the
names of the districts--the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave
Coast--conjured up the old days of adventure, blood-red with deeds of
cruelty and shame. This Gulf of Guinea was the heart of the slave
trade: more vessels loaded up here with their black cargo than at any
other port of the continent, and the Bight of Biafra, on which Calabar
is situated, was ever the busiest spot. Mangrove forests, unequalled
anywhere for immensity and gloom, fringe the entire sweep of the Gulf.
Rooted in slime, malodorous and malarious, they form a putrescent
paradise for all manner of loathly creatures.