WHERE IT IS HOT!

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19346, 27 June 1925, Page 14

WHERE IT IS HOT!

THE PRINCE’S ORDEAL. (By G. Ward Price). (Daily Mail special correspondent who is touring with the Prince of Wales) LAGOS, April 22. This is our Hast night on the West Coast of Africa, and the Prince looks back on a fortnight’s visit to the four British Colonies there, more intensive and far-reaching than that of any traveller in so short a time before. His little tour began with a call on that quaint, pocket-size colony of Gambia. Then came a slightly longer stay at the capital of Sierra Leone, in the most picturesque setting we have yet seen. The Gold Coast, still small but wclalthy for its size, gave us a first glimpse of tropical Africa, and struck a new note with the rich pageantry of its chiefs. Last and longest has been the visit to Nigeria. The gigantic, spectacle of mediaeval splendour at Kano, together with the enthusiasm of the people of Lagos, has made Nigeria the crown and «limax of his West African tour. HEAT! But. despite the orgies of colour land quaintness that we have seen, I know ■what will bo the most lasting memory that the Prince of Wales carries away from tho West Colast. It is just— 7 heat. Heat that takes you to its fiery bosom; heat that wraps you the long day through in invisible, scalding towels such ns barbers use upon the face, heat thht saps and sucks and drains you at every pore till there is surprise in the discovery that your frame still keeps its usual outline instead of wilting like a wax doll left near the I fire. i The day starts with treacherous delusion. One wakes to a cool temperature of about SOdcg. Cool, light breezes play upon your face. How overrated, you reflect, are the rigours of tho Tropics? Towards nine o’clock the atmosphere begins to feel loss like sparkling wino. But Iho energy of the early hours is still upon you, and after breakfast you walk—-it need be no more than fifty yards—in the sun. That infinitesimal exertion is enough. The very backs of your hands glisten with a silver gauntlet of moisture. Ami now you are well started for the day. Useless to shed the clammy clasp of your dank shirt for a new one, the very exertion of putting it on dissolves you afresh. To drink pro--1 vokes a perfect spate of deliquescence. There is no remedy; you must stew literally in your own juice till the sun goes down. DREADFUL NIGHT It is the last hours before tho longed-for disappearance of your fomentor that are the worst of all. The air- is not a life-giving gas, but watervapour. One’s fibres feel as soggy, and yet as tough as brackish, as a bunch of high-tide seaweed. A little later conics the evening bath. For a delicious moment the parboiled body knows the ease of normal temperature again. But the exertion of towelling plunges one again into solution, and the resistance of a stiff dross-collar is instantly overcome by the by-products of the.effort to subdue it. Such was yesterday; rather worse was tho day before; the day before that, in the train from Kano, was of a kind that even royalty cannot call hot without using an emphatic epithet. And now it is tho depth of night. But it is a mistake, I find, to imagine that one’s labours can be more easily accomplished in the cool small hour?. For vzork needs night, and light is attracting, as I write these words, i collection of fearsome things that .craw) and buzz a id whirr and zoom and bne and sting, that might be a lost contingent of Pharaoh’s plague of flies. CENTIPEDES AND MOSQUITOES. A centipede six inches long is on the wall; a tarantulesque spider in a dim corner of the floor; the approach of either will drive me from my table. And though I wear mosquito boots that relach to the knee, and though my face and hands are smeared with pungentsmelling oil guaranteed by London chemists to hold the most aggressive of insects in respect I nm being pricked and stabbed and tickled in a manner almost intolerable. I have just taken a large and slug.gish beetle from the nape of my neck; constant jerks of the head to dashes of large, terrifying, winged and many-legged leviathans keep me hot and flustered. It is still two hours to thft precious T>reath of air at dawn. I, t'J«, shall irever forget tho seariug teeth, of thia Bight of-Bemn-