'Sheventy-foif step,’ he beamed.
'Very fine,' I agreed, nodding.
'We go count um,' said the Fon, delighted at the idea. 'Sheventy-foif, we go count um.'
He draped a long arm around my shoulders, leant heavily upon me, and we descended to the road below, counting loudly. As he could not remember the English for any number higher than six we got somewhat confused half-way down, and on reaching the bottom we found that according to the Fon's reckoning there were three steps missing.
'Sheventy-two?' he asked himself; 'no, na, sheventy-foif. Which side dey done go?'
He glared fiercely at his cringing retinue, who were waiting in the road, as though he suspected them of having secreted the missing steps under their robes. Hastily I suggested that we should count them again. We climbed up to the veranda once more, counting wildly, and then, to-make quite sure, we counted them all the way down again. The Fon kept counting up to six and then starting again, and I could see that unless something was done we should spend all night searching for the missing steps; so, when we reached the top, and again when we got to the bottom, I said 'Seventy-five!' in loud, triumphant tones, and beamed at my companion. He was a bit reluctant to accept my reckoning at first, for he had only got up to five, and he felt that the missing seventy needed some explaining. However, I assured him that I had won innumerable prizes for mental arithmetic in my youth, and that my total was the correct one. He clasped me to his chest, clutched my hand and wrung it, muttering 'Foine, foine, my friend,' and then wended his way across the great courtyard to his own residence, leaving me to crawl up the seventy-five steps to bed.
The next day, in between coping with a headache brought on by my session with the Fon, I was kept busy building cages for the flood of specimens that I hoped would soon be rolling in. At noon four tall and impressive-looking young men turned up, clad in their best and brightest sarongs, and carrying flintlocks. These fearsome weapons were incredibly ancient, and their barrels were pitted and eroded with rust holes, as though each gun had suffered an acute attack of smallpox. I got them to stack these dangerous-looking weapons outside the gate before they came in and talked to me. They were the hunters the Fon had sent, and for half an hour I sat and showed them pictures of animals and explained how much I would pay for the various creatures. Then I told them to go away and spend the afternoon hunting, and to return in the evening with anything they caught. If they caught nothing they were to come again early the following morning. Then I distributed cigarettes, and they wandered off down the road, talking earnestly to each other, and pointing their guns in all directions with great abandon.
That evening one of the four young men turned up again carrying a small basket. He squatted down and gazed at me
sorrowfully while he explained that he and his companions had not had very good luck with their hunting. They had been a considerable distance, he said, but had found none of the animals I had shown them. However, they had got something.
Here he leant forward and put the basket at my feet.
'I no savvay if Masa want dis kind of beef,' he said.
I removed the lid of the basket and peered inside. I thought that it might contain a squirrel, or possibly a rat, but there sat a pair of large and beautiful toads.
'Masa like dis kind of beef?" asked the hunter, watching my face anxiously.
'Yes I like um too much,' I said, and he grinned.
I paid him the required sum of money, 'dashed' him some cigarettes, and he went off, promising to return the following morning with his companions. When he had gone I could turn my attention back to the toads. They were each about the circumference of a saucer, with enormous liquid eyes and short, fat legs that seemed to have some difficulty in supporting their heavy bodies. Their coloration was amazing: their backs were a rich cream, sprinkled with minute black vermiculations; the sides of the heads and bodies were a deep red, a colour that was a cross between mahogany and wine. On their bellies this was replaced by a vivid buttercup yellow.
Now I have always liked toads, for I have found them to be quiet, well-behaved creatures with a charm of their own; they have not the wildly excitable and rather oafish character of the frog, nor his gulping and moist appearance. But, until I met these two, I had always imagined that all toads were pretty much the same, and that having met one you had met them all as far as personality was concerned, though they might differ much in colour and appearance. But I very soon found out that these two amphibians had personalities so striking that they might almost have been mammals.
These creatures are called Brow-leaf Toads, because the curious cream-coloured marking on the back is, in shape and colour, exactly like a dead and withered leaf. If the toad crouches down on the floor of the forest it merges into its background perfectly. Hence its English title; its scientific title is 'Eyebrow Toad', which in Latin sounds even more apt: Bufo superciliarus, for the Brow-leaf, on first acquaintance, gives the impression of being overwhelmingly supercilious. Above its large eyes the skin is hitched up into two little points, so that the creature has its eyebrows raised at the world in a markedly sardonic manner. The immensely wide mouth adds to this impression of aristocratic conceit by drooping gently at the corners, thus giving the toad a faintly sneering expression that can only be achieved by one other animal that I know of, the camel. Add to this the slow, swaggering walk, and the fact that the creature squats down every two or three steps and gazes at-you with a sort of pitying disdain, and you begin to feel that superciliousness could not go much farther.
My two Brow-leafs squatted side by side on a bed of fresh grass in the bottom of the basket and gazed up at me with expressions of withering scorn. I tipped the basket on its side, and they waddled out on to the floor with all the indignation and dignity of a couple of Lord Mayors who had been accidentally locked in a public lavatory. They walked about three feet across the floor and then, apparently exhausted by this effort, squatted down, gulping gently. They surveyed me very fixedly for some ten minutes with what appeared to be ever-increasing disgust. Then one of them wandered away and eventually crouched down by the leg of the table, evidently under the mistaken impression that it was the trunk of a tree. The other continued to stare at me, and after mature reflection he summed up his opinion of my worth by being sick, bringing up the semi-digested corpses of a grasshopper and two moths. Then he gave me a pained and reproachful look and joined his friend under the table.
As I had no suitable cage ready for them, the Brow-leafs spent the first few days locked in my bedroom, wandering slowly and meditatively about the floor, or squatting in a trance-like state under my bed, and affording me untold amusement by their actions. I discovered, after a few hours' acquaintance with my plump room-mates, that I had sadly misjudged them, for they were not the arrogant, conceited creatures they pretended to be. They were actually shy and easily embarrassed beasts, completely lacking in self-confidence; I suspect that they suffered from deep and ineradicable inferiority complexes and that their insufferable air of superiority was merely a pose to hide from the world the hideous truth, that they had no faith in their fat selves. I discovered this quite by accident the night of their arrival. I was making notes on their coloration, while the toads squatted on the floor at my feet, looking as though they were composing their own entries for Burke's Peerage. Wanting to examine their hindquarters more closely, I bent down and picked up one of them between finger and thumb, holding him under the arm-pits, so that he dangled in the air in a most undignified manner. He uttered a loud indignant belch at this treatment and kicked out with his fat hind legs, but my grip was too strong for him and he just had to dangle there until I had finished my examination of his lower regions. Eventually, when I replaced him on the ground next to his companion, he was a different toad altogether. Gone was his aristocratic expression: he was a deflated and humble amphibian. He crouched down, blinking his great eyes nervously, while a sad and timid expression spread over his face. He looked almost as if he was going to cry. This transformation was so sudden and complete that it was astonishing, and I felt absurdly guilty at having been the cause of his ignominy. In order to even things up a bit, I picked up the other one and let him dangle for a while, and he, too, lost his self-confidence and became timid and embarrassed when I replaced him on the floor. They sat there looking so dejected and miserable that it was ludicrous, and my unmannerly laughter proved too much for their sensitive natures, for they waddled rapidly away and hid under the table for the next half-hour. But now that I had learnt their secret I could deflate them at will when they became too haughty: all I had to do was to rap them gently on the nose with my ringer, and they would crouch down guiltily, looking as though they were about to blush, and gaze at me with pleading eyes.