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In addition to fresh meat and tinned you are able to get a quantity of good sea fish, for the great West African Bank, which fringes the coast in the Bight of Benin, abounds in fish, although the native cook very rarely knows how to cook them.
After an early breakfast, the long day began again. The question of what to eat came to be a serious one. We experimented with all sorts of tinned foods, and tried to produce some variety from them, but it was all rather tiresome. We almost dreaded the visits of the Paymaster and the Inspector at that season, as we never had anything in the house to give them.
They had just completed, as a relief from the nightly round of lunch rooms, a wood-alcohol meal of canned baked beans, cheese, crackers, and tinned sweet cakes. Even Mrs. Blair, at an age when the years are at the throat of a woman, shriveling it, had opened her blouse at the neck, revealing an unsuspected survival of its whiteness.
I then took opportunities of conveying by night, to a retired situation east of Rotterdam, five iron-bound casks, to contain about fifty gallons each, and one of a larger size; six tinned ware tubes, three inches in diameter, properly shaped, and ten feet in length; a quantity of a particular metallic substance, or semi-metal, which I shall not name, and a dozen demijohns of a very common acid.
For many reasons Scott was obliged to make his own headquarters in London, and the room that had been placed at his disposal in Burlington House soon became a museum of curiosities. Sledges, ski, fur clothing and boots were crowded into every corner, while tables and shelves were littered with correspondence and samples of tinned foods.
"Get your rations and plunder aboard," he ordered, turning suddenly to his party, and, loading up with blankets, overcoats, haversacks, and canteens, the recruits speedily took possession of their new quarters, forced open the jammed windows to let out the imprisoned and overheated air, piled their boxes of hard bread and stacks of tinned meat at the ends and their scant soldier goods and chattels in the rude sections, then tumbled out again upon the platform to enjoy, while yet there was time, the freedom of the outer air, despite the torrid heat of the mid-day sunshine.
In the coffee niche the embers glowed. One or two ragged Arabs sat hunched upon the earthen divans playing a game of cards. At least I should have my coffee after my tinned dinner. I was turning to go back to the Bordj when the extreme desolation of the desert around, now fading in the shadows of a moonless night, stirred me to a desire. Sidi-Massarli was dreary enough.
I had, by a lucky chance, found an alligator upon the beach, and attaching a string to the fellow's neck I had led him to our camp. I had then poisoned the fellow with tinned salmon and removed his hide. Our costume was now brought into harmony with our surroundings.
We hardly heard Sister Gabrielle when she came in and put down the steaming soup before us. The delicate perfume of the vegetables made our mouths water. For many days past we had had nothing to eat but our rations of tinned meat, and all that time we had not been able to light a fire to cook anything at all. So we fell to eagerly upon our well-filled plates.
The pot was a percolator, and beside it I placed a frying-pan, and in it sliced bananas and a lump of tinned butter from New Zealand. Leaving these inanimate things to react under the dissolving effect of the blaze, I ran to the beach, where I watched the sunrise.
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