Journey Without Maps

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT

“Boss of the Whole Show”

MARK called me at five in the morning, scrabbling against the mosquito-wire. I was sending him ahead with the Mandingo Amah to warn the chief at Kpangblamai of our arrival, of my need of a hut and food for about thirty men, and to ask him to send a messenger to the chief at Pandemai to warn him that I should not be coming after all. I packed my Revelation suitcase and Amah took it, striding off down the path into the village. He wouldn’t be home for weeks, but all his belongings were tied up in a rag the size of a workman’s handkerchief.

It was seven-thirty before I followed. The long column of carriers slipped down from the mission hill into the mist. Vande, the headman, left the column for a few minutes and disappeared between the huts to say goodbye to his wife. He had a cloth cap, a loose shirt and shorts; he carried no load, taking with him for a few days his young brother to carry his bundle; he was very like an English foreman, cheerful, unexacting, a pipe-smoker. When he wasn’t smoking he was shaking a rattle made of two tiny gourds filled with seeds. He kept to the tail of the column staying behind with any man who needed a rest.

For the first mile along the wide beaten way towards Kolahun a piccaninny followed at a jog-trot. He was about two feet high; he carried an empty sausage tin and an empty Ideal milk tin, one in each hand. Men turned and told him to go back, but he wouldn’t obey; he had to run to keep up, but he kept up. He wanted to go with his father. The men laughed and shouted up the line and presently his father turned back and ordered him home. The line passed them and went on : they stood there, the tiny child sullen and unhappy and obstinate, the father telling him to go back as one says “Home” to a dog. At last he left him there, stubbornly planted.

The broad red clay road had been improved for the President’s coming, the trees had been cut down on either side and the trunks tipped into the great palmy ravines. The heavy mist lay low between the hills; one couldn’t see how close one was to the great forest. A deer sprang across the road, a little brown deer which might have belonged to an English park, not the royal antelope which lucky travellers may still see in the Republic, no larger than a rabbit, except for its slim legs, ten inches high with horns of less than an inch. The road was all right so long as the mist held, but all the shade had been cut away, and I hurried to leave it behind before the sun had reached the middle sky. It was half-past nine when the road came to an end in Kolahun, the headquarters of Mr. Reeves.

It occurred to me that though I had been told that the President had gone, and Mr. Reeves presumably with him, it would be wise at least to inquire for the Commissioner. The town seemed empty, the green triumphal arches for the President were dusty and wrinkled with heat; one two-storied concrete house stood apart from the huts in a compound where the star and stripes dangled from a post. This was the house built, according to the natives of Bolahun, with forced labour. That extra storey gave it a formidable air; it stood there above the town as if it watched and knew all that happened; it would be unwise to pass it by with such a long caravan of men; it couldn’t help noticing.

Everything was very still, very Sabbath; nobody left the huts to see us come in, which was odd (the town might have been sacked) but I noticed when we were nearer that there were about a dozen soldiers, in the scarlet caps with the gold star, marching up and down in the compound. At the other end of the town on a hill was a kind of garden shelter and I could see the scarlet cap there too. A small yellow-faced half-caste in a black fez came down from the compound and waited for me. Yes, he said, the Commissioner was there, and immediately led the way back into the compound between the sentries, leaving the carriers and the servants outsidelittle I had the impression that we had been expected; and how could we not have been if it were anyone’s duty to watch the road from the first storey?

A gramophone was playing, and Miss Josephine Baker’s voice drifted across the compound with an amusing and sophisticated melancholy. It made everything for the moment rather unreal: the carriers sitting in the dust, the quiet drift of huts, the forest edging up over the horizon became no more than a backcloth for a lovely unclothed cabaret figure. One couldn’t really believe in Mr. Reeves, who appeared in a sinister melodramatic way from behind some curtains dressed in a scarlet fez and a long native robe; his heavy black Victorian side-whiskers, his thick grey skin, his voluptuous mouth were just part of the Paris revue. But somebody turned the gramophone off upstairs, and we were removed at once from the dour company of Mr. Reeves by a smart miniature black officer with glittering gaiters. He said, “Won’t you come upstairs? The President will see you in a moment.”

It was quite unexpected. I hadn’t asked to see the President, I had believed that the President was in another part of the country, and I was a little taken aback. I was in a shirt and shorts with a water-bottle at my side; I was very conscious of the dust I had collected on the way, and I remembered all the stories I had heard of the Liberian rulers, how they liked to keep a white man waiting and demanded that he should always be suitably clothed for an interview.

We sat down in a tiny upper room and a soldier with a revolver holster changed the record. Miss Edith Olivier’s Dwarfs Blood lay on the table. The black officer was very neat, very gende, very attentive; he was like a china figure which has been kept carefully dusted. Presently a young woman came in; she wore European dress : she looked more Chinese than African. She had slanting eyes and a quality of deep repose. She didn’t speak a word, though the officer presented her as “one of the President’s entourage”, but sitting down beside the gramophone she took up a pack of cards and began to shuffle them. Her father, I learnt later, had been made a justice of the supreme court: there is a distinctly Stuart air about the civilisation of the Liberian Coast.

She was the loveliest thing I saw in Liberia; I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I wanted to talk to her, somehow to express the pleasure the sight of her gave in the empty sun-cracked place. Josephine Baker’s voice couldn’t compete with her, whining out at the end of the record before the soldier could change it. It was as if suddenly one saw what Africa might be if she were left to herself to choose from Europe only what would beautify her; she promised more than the frozen rhetoric in the declaration of independence. I never said a word to her (“Very hot marching in this weather,” the little shining officer said politely, making small talk), I only saw her once again from a distance when she stood on the President’s balcony in Monrovia watching the Krus demonstrate their loyalty below, but she remains the kind of vivid memory which draws one back to a place, even after many years.

Then the President came in: a middle-aged man called Barclay with curly greying hair in a thick dark suit, a pinned and pinched old school tie and a cheap striped shirt. Africa, lovely, vivid and composed, slipped away, and one was left with the West Indies, an affable manner, and rhetoric, lots of rhetoric. But there was a lot of energy, too: he was a politician in the Tammany Hall manner, but I never saw any reason to change my opinion that he was something new on the Coast. He might be out to play his own game, but he was going to play it with unexampled vigour and the Republic would at least pick up some chips from his table. I asked him whether his authority was much the same as the American President’s. He said it was more complete. “Once electedlittle’ he said, “and in charge of the machine”- words ran away with him; something candid and childlike and excited continually peeped through the politician’s dignified phrases-“why then, I’m boss of the whole show.”

Liberian politics were like a crap game played with loaded dice. But in the past it had been the custom to give the other fellow a chance with the dice. There was a kind of unwritten law that the President could take two terms of office and then he had to let another man in to pick the spoils. It was a question of letting, for, as Mr. Barclay said, the President was boss of the whole show; the newspapers were his; most important of all, he printed and distributed the ballot papers. When Mr. King was returned in 1928 he had a majority over his opponent, Mr. Faulkner, of 600,000, although the whole electoral roll amounted to less than 15,000. But Barclay was altering that; he wasn’t playing fair in his opponent’s eyes; he was treating politics seriously and he has some claim to be known as the Republic’s first dictator. The term of office had hitherto been four years, but Mr. Barclay was to hold a plebiscite at the same time as the presidential election and increase the term to eight years. He could use the same means to put that through as he could put through a fabulous majority: he had the printing press. He had, too, the Civil Service, He explained to me, beaming with gold-rimmed benevolence, how he had cleaned it up and removed it from political influence, had instituted examinations in place of nominations.

What he failed to mention was the small string he kept in his fingers. When candidates of equal merit were presented-and that was very easy to arrange-the President himself had the right of choice.

But one had to admit that this man had energy and courage; he was worth a dozen Kings, and his hands were comparatively clean. He had been Mr. King’s secretary of state, but the League of Nations commission, which had found the President personally responsible for shipping forced labour to the little dreadful Spanish island, Fernando Po, and for countenancing the mild form of slavery that enabled a man to pawn his children, had exonerated Barclay. The only real blot in the eyes of the outside world on his administration was the Kru campaign described in the Blue Book from which I have quoted, and for that the man on the spot was chiefly responsible, Colonel Elwood Davis, the black mercenary from North America. No President before Barclay had dared to tour the interior. Mr. King had travelled rapidly down from the Sierra Leone border with two hundred soldiers, but the President now had with him only thirty men. I could see almost the whole lot of them marching up and down the compound. The tribes, of course, since Mr. King’s day, had been disarmed by Colonel Davis, they had no more than a few guns in every town, but they had swords and spears and cutlasses.

The President, it is true, didn’t linger. He travelled very rapidly, forcing the pace, up paths he was not expected to use, and his inquiries were very brief. I have said that the natives in Bolahun had no hopes that Mr. Reeves would be ever brought to book.

Their doubts were justified, for I heard later that when the President arrived, the chiefs, who had been bribed or intimidated, had no complaints to make. He was able to return as rapidly to Monrovia as he had come. He said that everywhere the population had been enthusiastic, but dances are easily arranged and it is not much trouble to build triumphal arches of greenery and sprinkle white powder. I never came across a single native in the interior who had a good word for the politicians in Monrovia. If they preferred one ruler to another it was simply because they were happier under one Commissioner than another. Everywhere in the north I found myself welcomed because I was a white, because they hoped all the time that a white nation would take the country over.

This attitude is unreasonable, but their minds do not move on the level of reason. To accept a black overlord offended some deep communal instinct which was unaffected by the fact that under the worst black Commissioner they had not suffered what the natives in French West Africa had suffered under white Commissioners. They did not take into account at all from what they were saved by the nominal nature of black rule. In that rough, unmapped country, if they were twenty miles from a Commissioner’s headquarters, they were fifty years away. They were left alone to their devils and secret societies and private terrors, to the paternal oppression of their chiefs. They weren’t interfered with as they would certainly have been interfered with in a white colony, and one was thankful for their lack of education, when one compared them as they were in Buzie country, striding along the narrow forest paths, the straight back, the sword with an ivory handle swinging against the long native robe, with the anglicised ‘educated’ blacks of Sierra Leone, the drill suits and the striped shirts and the dirty sun-helmets. Every head of a family in this tribe had his sword and wore it when he left his village, every young man had his dagger, and even the tool of the men working on the farms, the broad-bladed cutlass in its beautifully-worked leather sheath, had an air of chivalry, of an older civilisation than the tin shacks on the Coast. Even the poorer tribes beyond the Buzie country, the Gios and the Manos, with their loin-cloths and sores, were not more neglected than were the natives of a Protectorate under the care of a single sanitary inspector.

Hospitality in Kpangblamai

His Excellence the President talked for more than an hour in the little room above the Sunday-stricken town. He was very courteous, and it went against the grain to deceive him and give the impression that Zigita was the farthest extent of the journey I intended to take. The Commissioners in the Western Province had been warned of my coming, and I wanted as quickly as possible to slip over into a province where I was not expected. As quickly as possible … but it was not easy to stem the rolling tide of the President’s hopes, the roads, the aeroplanes, the motor-cars. It was a paradoxical situation; a black preaching progress to a sceptical white, but the white had come out of the busy bustling progressive scene and he had noticed there nothing more lovely than the Buzie cloths the President spread for his inspection. There was nothing crudely peasant, nothing art and crafty, nothing to remind one of stalls at bazaars and dear ladies with pale-blue bulbous eyes, about these cloths : they were sophisticated in their design, but the sophistication had a different source from ours. It sprang directly from a deeper level; it wasn’t tinged by the artistic selfconsciousness of centuries.

There was a world of difference between these cloths and the Mandingo cloths from French Guinea, one of which I had bought in the market at Bolahun and which can be bought, too, at double the price, on the Coast, at Freetown and Monrovia. The Mandingo is a trader, his line of country is immense when it is computed less in mileage than in difficulty: in forest, swamp, river and flood. One finds him in the ports, one finds him five hundred miles in the interior in places where no white man has been seen in living memory. He is unmistakable : his height and shaven head, his Semitic features^ his air in his scarlet fez and his long robe, a verse of the Koran hung round the neck, of a long trading lineage. He rides the only horses to be seen in the interior, but more often he does the journey on foot. In French Guinea I met a Mandingo who could tell me the whole route to the Coast at Cape Palmas or Grand Bassa. He made the wild four weeks’ journey as regularly as a traveller in silk stockings who catches the Brighton Belle once a week. But the cloths, the swords and knives they carry with them .are not superior to the peasant lands of Central Europe; they have the same crude tourist stamp; lozenges of bright crude colours on the heavy cloth. And this is interesting when one considers that there are no tourists in French Guinea, and few white men at all in the far corner of the colony which touches Liberia. The trade goods have to be carried through hundreds of miles of forest to reach the kind of public which enjoys the bogus gaudy article.

It was all against the proper White House etiquette, I felt, but it was I who had to make the move to end the interview, for I began to fear that it would be dark before I reached Kpangblamai. I was still following roughly the route which Sir Alfred Sharpe took in his journey through Liberia in 1919. All the way along this northern border the ground is high, generally about sixteen hundred feet, and the ground broken. Sir Alfred Sharpe wrote after his journey that he had never been in any part of Africa where the going was so bad, but at least it isn’t monotonous like the way through the central forest, where there is no variation in the narrow paths, the dull tangled greenery, where there is nothing to see for hours on end but the carrier’s feet and the tree-roots. Here, between Kolahun and Kpangblamai, there were hills to scramble over, the Mano River to cross on a wide bridge of twisted creeper, the great swallow-tailed butterflies swarming at the watercourses, tiny winged primroses resting on the damp sand and rising in clouds round our waists, and once a little ferny, brackeny glade, warm and sweet like an English summer.

These first few days of trekking had a beauty that later one completely missed: everything was new the villages with the women pounding rice, the cluster of stones where the chiefs were buried, the cows rubbing their horns along the huts; the taste of warm, boiled and filtered water in the dried mouth; the sense, above all, that one was getting somewhere, that one was going deeper. It made me walk fast, faster than my carriers and my companion. A march, this first week, was a dash; my hammock-men, as I didn’t use my hammock, kept my pace, and an evasive half-relationship developed from shared oranges, the rests at the watercourses, where they drank out of the empty meat tins they carefully preserved and I from my bottle.

Babu was one of these men, the Buzie : he played the harp tentatively when we rested; he couldn’t speak a word of English, but he had amused friendly reliable ways of showing that he was on your side in the arguments which soon came thick and fast. He was one of the few carriers who smoked a pipe, a small clay pipe, and one could imagine him a season-ticket-holder, the reliable support of his mother and sisters in a remote sad suburb. For there was an undertone of sadness which grew as the trek went on; he wasn’t strong enough for the work; he didn’t complain, he was completely reliable until he was simply too sick to go farther. He was at first the only Buzie man with us; he didn’t mix easily but sat apart with his pipe, sometimes coming up to the door of my hut to smile his good wishes and go away again.

The other man on the first day who went ahead with me was Alfred. Alfred was another type altogether, in his cloth cap and shorts. He had learnt to read and write, he knew English; he thought he was out for a jaunt. Plump and sweaty and horribly ingratiating, he managed to be the one who carried the harp and not the empty hammock. He pointed out everything which he considered of interest, he hung around; but among the men he was the focus of discontent; he always knew that a town was “too far”, I could hear his fat grumble doing its work whenever a group gathered together to voice their complaints, and a moment later there he would be, back at my side, doing me a little service, oily and friendly and proud of his English.

Kpangblamai was about four and a half hours’ march from Kolahun. It appeared quite unexpectedly towards the end of the worst heat on the usual hilltop, and there was Mark running dramatically down to meet us at the stream. He had a school friend with him, Peter, the chief’s son, and he said he had “plenty plenty fine house” covered with pictures. So it was : rectangular, like a small stable with two stalls and a verandah. The stalls were bedrooms, containing native beds, platforms of beaten earth spread with matting. The walls were papered thickly with old advertisements and photographs out of illustrated papers, most of them German or American. Over a chair made out of an old packing-case was an article by General Pershing on Youth; beautiful women showed their teeth brushed with Chlorodone, handsome men displayed their ready-made suitings, somebody wondered why she wasn’t a social success, and a man in uniform denounced a clause of the Treaty of Versailles. It was a really fine house, the only one like it in the town; we didn’t have another lodging in a native town so good before Monrovia.

The chief at Kpangblamai was overpoweringly hospitable. I hadn’t time to sit down and rest and take a drink before the old man arrived, wizened and reserved, in a turban and a kind of liberty robe which was like the tea-gowns worn at Edwardian literary teas. He brought with him his headman, who wore a robe of the ordinary blue and white striped native cloth and a battered bowler hat. He was even older than the chief, they neither could speak a word of English, but while from the chiefs manner I gathered an impression of a rather sad tired benevolence, the headman was full of shrewdness, satire, salacious humour. He giggled in a sly way; he had, I felt sure, the low-down on the whole town; he wasn’t, like the chief, an idealist; if he had belonged to another race, he would have been one of those elderly men who pinch girls’ bottoms on buses in a friendly, harmless way. Chief and headman were inseparable; they went everywhere together like the higher and the lower nature.

Now they had brought with them a basin full of eggs (every one of which proved to be bad), a huge basket of oranges, and three gourds of palm wine. For the first time I was thirsty enough to enjoy palm wine; I drank one gourdful not realising the danger of dysentery if it wasn’t fresh or the gourd was dirty; it was the colour of stone ginger beer and had a soft flat taste like barley water. The chief and the headman sat down on the native bed and I gave them cigarettes. Nobody spoke. Presently they got up and went away, but a minute later the chief returned with a chicken. That first day I didn’t know the right etiquette; I dashed back for each present when it arrived; and the presents multiplied rapidly-Later I learnt from Amedoo that I should dash once only at the end of my stay.

I was longing for a wash and I hadn’t had time to shave before I left Bolahun, but the hospitable chief kept me on the run. No sooner had he gone after presenting the chicken than his son came in to say that the devil would dance for the visitors : so with the chief and the headman we sat out in the blazing sun and waited for the devil to appear. This time it was a devil belonging to a woman’s society, a devil from Pandemai in Buzie country, who was travelling to Kolahun to dance before the President.

It came out between the last huts at the end of the wide little whitewashed town, then swayed and simpered forward in a country robe, swinging a great raffia bustle, nodding its black mask. The bustle swung up and showed huge pantaloons of fibre, like a caricature of a Victorian dress. One remembered Miss Tilly Losch in a Cochran revue hesitating before a pillar-box with just this air of coyness, the sophisticated copy of something young and artless. This devil seemed to a European to have a mock female, mock modest manner, which was curiously and interestingly gross when combined with the long cruel mask, the slanting eyes, the heavy mouth. It turned and turned, swinging the bustle above the pantaloons, and the interpreter ran round and round carrying a small whip. There was something about it of the witch of one’s childhood; perhaps because it remained so feminine even while it was unrecognisable as a woman; perhaps because of its curious headgear; the tall tufted pole taking the place of the sugar-loaf hat. It sank on to the ground and recited its greetings on a low gushing note. It was a far more accomplished dancer than Landow. To compare Landow’s wild rushes, matching the great crude muzzle, with the simpering silly sinister gait of this woman’s devil was like comparing brutality with cruelty. It may have been a tribal difference: no Bande craftsman could have made this mask. Landow’s was a mask of childish fancy running in the vein of nightmare : this was a work of conscious art in the service of a belief.

After the dance the chiefs son, Peter Bonoh, said that his father wished to show the visitors his town. The whole length of Kpangblamai cannot have exceeded a hundred and fifty yards, but before we had seen all the activities of that small settlement, I felt much as a member of the royal family must feel after a tour of an industrial fair. I had been allowed no rest after the march, the palm wine was lying heavy in my stomach, there was no air on the baked plateau, and I thought that I was going to faint before I reached the end. Five weavers were at work, each under his own little shelter of palm branches; a man was cutting leather sheaths for daggers; and in the smithy they were making blades, one man working a great leather bellows, another beating out the white-hot blade (I would have paid them more attention if I had known then the importance of the smith, how frequently he is the local devil and his word more powerful than the chiefs). In front of another hut two women were spinning a kind of top upon a plate, working the thread out of a mass of cotton. In a little wooden enclosure a woman was boiling the leaves of a forest plant in a great cauldron to make a dark-blue dye. The smell of the cauldron, the pressure of the crowd fingering my sleeves and the cloth of my trousers, the necessity of keeping my face fixed in a bright cheerful interested mask made me feel weak and ill. There seemed no end to the parade of industry. It was a tiny plateau, not much larger than the Round Pond; wherever I looked, between the shoulders of the crowd, I saw the huts give way to trees, and above the trees the high forested ridge of the Pandemai hills; but in the hot stuffy evening it seemed as endless as a maze of which one doesn’t know the clue.

Two women sat on the ground smoothing out cotton as it came from the pods; a group of women were extracting the thick yellow oil out of the palm nuts; another weaver. …. At last we were back at our hut; the chairs and tables were out; and another present arrived from the chief-a kid; it escaped and led a howling chase between the huts before it was brought back and tethered. My cousin went to bed, couldn’t stand the thought of food, and I had my very English meal alone, sardines on toast, a steam-ing hot steak and kidney pudding, a sweet omelette washed down with whisky and orange. I was only halfway through the second course when Peter Bonoh put his head through the screen to say his father was outside, and there the old chief was, sitting in his chair at the entrance in his tea-gown and turban. He had brought an orchestra with him and all through dinner they played their monotonous tinkling tones. The chief hadn’t anything to say; he $at there quite proud and happy and ignored, while the headman giggled salaciously somewhere in the dark nearby, until at last he slipped away into the moonless night carrying his chair.

But there was one thing I had to know before I went to bed-where to go next. The doctor at the mission had spoken of an easy day’s march to a place he called Dagomai, a long march the day after to Nicoboozu, and then Zigita. That was as far as he had been on the way to Ganta, but south of Zigita, at Zorzor, there was a Lutheran mission where someone might know something of the way beyond. The maps of the Dutch prospectors didn’t cover the ground so far east.

The trouble was, no one had heard of Dagomai. Peter Bonoh hadn’t heard of it, nor had his father or the old headman. The only town they could suggest between Kpangblamai and Zigita was Pandemai. But that wasn’t far enough for a day’s march, and besides I didn’t expect too friendly a reception from the chief there, who had been expecting me that night. Dagomai, Dagomai, I kept on repeating in the hope that somebody would have heard of the place. Presently “Duogobmai,” the chief said doubtfully. It sounded very nearly right, it was on the way to Nicoboozu, and I decided that it must be the place the doctor had meant. ‘Too far,” Alfred said, joining in, “too far”; the carriers clustered round and he whispered to them how far it was; they hadn’t begun to work together yet, they were full of jealousy and suspicion:, he had the right material to his hand. But I didn’t believe him; even the doctor’s wife had done the march to Dagomai, and now I quite firmly .believed that Duogobmai and Dagomai were the same place. It wouldn’t pay me not to believe it; time was money, and it wouldn’t do to lose myself my first day loose in the Liberian interior.

For hours as I lay in bed I heard the faint music of the harps, the low sound of Alfred talking to the carriers; I wondered what I’d do if they refused to obey me. I suppose it is the thought which strikes every new prefect at school, but I had never been a prefect; I had never before so abjectly depended on other people’s obedience. I was glad afterwards that I hadn’t for a moment imagined that Alfred, oily, smart, ingratiating, mutinous Alfred, might be right.

It was die first time I had slept in a native hut, and foolishly, for the sake of privacy, I kept the door closed, as the natives do themselves for fear of wild animals from the forest. I had never experienced such heat; it was like a blanket over the face, even the thin muslin mosquito-net took the breath. But at any rate there were not yet rats; only a few rustles in the roof, and in the end I fell asleep in spite of Alfred’s whisper, the music and the heat and the strangeness.

The Primitive

I was called at five by Mark and Amah, whom I again sent on ahead to warn the chief at Duogobmai. It was just as well to get Amah out of the way; Vande had chosen him as second headman, but already I could tell how unpopular he was. He was the only Mandingo among the carriers, and for the first week of the march tribal differences caused almost continuous trouble. He was strong, reliable, the best-looking man of a rather weedy set, but he had no sense of humour and they teased him mercilessly until he got into a sullen rage.

Mark and Amah had nearly three hours’ start, for the chiefs hospitality was by no means over. He gave my cousin a hideous leather satchel made in the village in the bright crude colours of Italian leather work, and his son gave me a bundle of knives from the smithy. Unfortunately his hospitality included the carriers, and he provided them with a large meal before they started.

The character of a carrier is childlike. He enjoys the moment. He cannot connect cause and effect He is used to one meal in the day at evening, he lives on the edge of subsistence, and it would be a hard master who grudged him the unexpected pleasure of an extra meal. The chief’s kindness made them for a few minutes gloriously happy; and when almost immediately they suffered from walking with heavy loads on a full stomach, they didn’t connect their suffering with their pleasure. They simply felt with minds clouded by indigestion that somebody was treating them badly. It was always the same throughout the four weeks of marching; whenever they had a breakfast they worked badly, grumbled and made palavers; when food became scarce they worked well and were happy. On one occasion they spent nearly forty-eight hours without food and at the end of that time they were fresher than they had ever been.

I had been warned of this; I knew what to expect; the food hadn’t been in their bellies five minutes before rebellion stirred. But they could be distracted, too, as easily as children, and when a man presented me with a small grey monkey on a string they were temporarily happy again. They liked something to torment. They poked it with sticks. They turned it upside down. They dragged it head first in the dust. They tickled its private parts, and the little brute screamed at them and tried to bite and turned its bloodshot eyes this way and that for an escape. When they left it in peace for a moment it sat with its head in its wrinkled hands as if it were weeping. Laminah and Alfred were its chief tormentors, they were like bullies at school with a new boy who couldn’t hit back; the other men were amused and tormented it occasionally when they were bored, but sometimes they were kind to it, offering it pieces of banana or kola nuts, and after a while they forgot it. Even Laminah gave up teasing it in the end, and Mark became its companion. After the first four days it went everywhere with him; it sat on his shoulder all the way through the forest until at Ganta it escaped; it rested its hands on his head and searched his hair for insects. It never tried to bite him; he never talked to it; they accepted each other in silence.

It was eight o’clock before the men had finished eating and were ready to start. They were very slow and quarrelsome, and I went on ahead with my two spare hammock-men. Alfred walked in front dangling the monkey, and Babu walked behind carrying two harps. Almost immediately we were in the forest, but it was only the edge of the great waste of bush which covers the Republic to within sight of the sea. I felt rather absurd with my two companions climbing up out of the forest, over the crest of a small cracked hill covered with round huts while the natives came to the door and stared at the sight of the first white man they’d seen for months. One really needed to be a minor prophet to emerge suddenly like this, almost unaccompanied, with two harps and a monkey… .

On a narrow path we met three men with long curved cutlasses cutting away the bush; Alfred spoke to them; they came from Pandemai. They said the chief had expected the white man the night before; he had swept a hut and cooked food for thirty men. Alfred suggested it would be a good thing to spend the night with the chief. He would be offended otherwise. Duogobmai was too far, too far… . He asked the men about it. They shook their heads. He said that it was more than a day’s march from Pandemai. But I couldn’t speak the language, and Babu, whom I trusted, couldn’t speak any English, and Alfred I believed to be a Har. But liars sometimes speak the truth.

A little later a tiny stream, a patch of sand, a cloud of butterflies, marked the boundary between Bande country and Buzie country, and soon after we came out into a broad sun-drenched clearing below Pandemai. A concrete house was being built beside the path with a fence and a garden gate, and a black man in a European suit with an old white topee came out to meet me and laughed and lifted his hat and laughed again. He was a middle-aged man with a hard mean face which he had covered defensively for the occasion with an expression of silliness and subservience. He said, “Mr. Greene, we were expecting you last night.” He had the name pat, he laughed in a nervous servile way after every sentence, and there was something unmistakably clerical about his manner. One felt the Sermon on the Mount was somewhere about, though it had gone sour. He was a missionary from Monrovia, and now he was engaged in building his new mission. Like Mr. Reeves he believed in concrete and like Mr. Reeves he kept his brother blacks well in hand.

He said, “The chief had everything prepared for you last nightlittle and again he laughed as much as to say, 1 know I’m laughable, I’m only a black and you are a white, you are laughing at me, but you needn’t think I don’t laugh toolittle He led the way up to Pandemai, laughing and complaining all the way, not taking himself seriously, with a bitter humility which didn’t really disguise the hardness and meanness below it. I wanted to go straight through; I was afraid of trouble with the carriers if they once put down their loads, but the missionary was too ready to accept my refusal as one more sign that he was despised. I couldn’t give him that excuse, and now that my cousin had joined us, I let the missionary lead the way to his two-roomed hut in the town. The place was bug-ridden; we had only sat on the porch for a minute, while we ate the bananas he brought in a wooden bowl, before we realised that.

Sir Alfred Sharpe passed through Pandemai, “an old war town”, in 1919, and was received with great hospitality by the local chief. Perhaps the black missionary had not then arrived: now the town seemed dead : the chief when he came, a sullen suppressed man who presented his dash of a chicken and a pail of rice as if they had been exacted from him by force. The missionary ruled him. When, thinking of the wasted chop and the trouble he had taken the night before, I prepared to dash him five shillings in return, the missionary caught my hand. He said he couldn’t allow it; there was no need to give the chief anything; I was the guest of .the country. At last he allowed two shillings to pass to the chief, who stood by with a beaten smouldering air like an honest man who watches, without the power to intervene, two racketeers squabbling over his property.

The missionary calculated that Duogobmai was still six hours away. That was disquieting, for we had already marched for more than two hours, but nothing would induce me to stay. It wasn’t only the unfriendly chief and the bugs in the hut; I was still planning my journey by European time : the listless-ness, the laissez-faire of Africa hadn’t caught me. I had planned to reach Duogobmai that night and to fail to reach it seemed to put back everything. I wasn’t confident enough to see the journey as more than a smash-and-grab raid into the primitive…. There was a dream of a witch I used to have almost every night when I was small. I would be walking along a dark passage to the nursery door. Just before the door there was a linen-cupboard and there “die witch waited, like the devil in Kpangblamai, feminine, inhuman. In the nursery was safety, but I couldn’t pass. I would fling myself face downwards on the ground and the witch would jump. At last, after many years, I evaded her, running blindly by into sanctuary, and I never had the dream again. Now I seemed to be back in the dark passage : I had to see

the witch, but I wasn’t prepared for a long or careful examination.

So I wouldn’t be delayed, and though the carriers grumbled and Alfred whispered again into my ear, “Too far. Better stay here. Too far,” I insisted on going on. Rather recklessly I pledged myself that it wasn’t far to Duogobmai. I nursed the idea that a black always exaggerated, when the fact was they had so hazy an idea of time that they were just as likely to minimise. I said, “It’s only about five hours from here. I know. The white doctor at the Holy Cross told me.”

Only five hours, I thought, as the midday heat came nearer, striking up from the dry ground, catching the feet as much as did the roots of trees, beating down on one’s helmet so that for moments at a time it was cooler to raise it and take the full sun on the skull. We were in the forest now, but it was still the edge where it flattened out towards the Mandingo plateau to the north : the dead dull edge of it which didn’t shelter sufficiently. A few birds moved overhead, out of sight, their wings creaking like unoiled doors. A monkey ran along a branch of a great grey cotton tree, which was buttressed on the ground like a tower. It flung itself into the air at the height of a cathedral spire, dropped fifty feet and out of sight behind the palms and ivy, the tangle of greenery. The boy with the harps leapt aside at a slither in the grass. That was all the life there was, except for the long sullen chain of carriers, dropping farther and farther behind. I wondered whether they would stay the journey; if they left us I hadn’t the money to reach the Coast. Would I have the nerve, I wondered, if it came to a show-down, to refuse to pay them or would we go tamely back with them to Bolahun?

The bush got thicker; the paths narrower. It was difficult to keep one’s feet among the roots. My cousin and the carriers were out of sight and hearing. Nothing seemed to live but the snakes and birds, and they were invisible, and the ants. It was a country made for ants. Their great yellow tenements, twelve feet high, broke through the bush, enchained the villages. Their swarms drove across the paths, like Carthaginian armies; the route on either side was lined with sentries; one could imagine the heaving at tiny ropes, the cracking of infinitesimal whips. Sometimes near water there were other ants, guerilla ants this time who whipped at one singly through the air and fastened their pincers in the skin: stockings couldn’t keep them out: their nip was like the cut of a knife. These, one sometimes felt, were the real owners and rulers of the bush, not the men in the villages one passed every two or three hours above their scanty streams, ringed with a little plantation of kola trees, the leaves turned upwards in great ugly yellow bowls like brass epergnes; not certainly die few white men who had passed this way and left in a little cleared space beside the path an abandoned gold-working: a deep hole the size of a coffin, a few decaying wooden struts above a well of stagnant water, die ivy already creeping up. This was the ruling passion of most white men in this dead bush, a passion just as secret, needing as much evasion, kept perhaps with as much fear, as the secrets of the bush e houses which stood away from the path behind a row of stunted charred trees like funeral cypresses or a fence of woven palm leaves. A few banana trees at the edge of one village were fenced in : “the devil’s bananas”.

It was odd in this shabby lost bush to be told by one’s guide, pointing to a tiny path, that that was the ‘road’ to Voinjema. The carriers were still near their own country, and though the paths were sometimes as numerous and apparently as random as a child’s criss-cross scrawlings on a sheet of paper, Babu knew his way. He didn’t have to hesitate; to show the route to those who came behind he would close the wrong paths with sprays of leaves. These were the only road signs in the bush.

Under the vertical sun we reached another village, I and my two spare hammock-men and Amedoo. They led me to the palaver-house, the low thatched barn in the middle of the village where the old men were drowsing out their siesta. I sat down in a hammock which was slung on one side, and the old men ranged themselves opposite and blinked and scratched. It was too hot to talk. A woman lay in a patch of shade, on her face in the dust, and slept. The chickens scratched on the floor for the grains of rice which sometimes fell between the slats of the roof. A long time passed; I wanted to scratch too. I wasn’t bitten; it was a nervous reaction. The old men blinked and scratched their armpits and heads and thighs; they burrowed inside their loose robes to find a new spot to scratch. It was too hot to be really curious about anyone, though a few of the younger men of the village stooped under the thatch and sat down and stared and began to scratch. The delay irritated me. I wanted to eat my lunch and get away, but it was nearly an hour before the carriers began to stumble in, tired and stubborn, suspicious and complaining. Alfred went round among them, urging them to rebel, gathering evidence from the villagers as to how far Duogobmai was.

But I still persisted in believing that they were wrong. I was without experience. All the white men I had met in Sierra Leone had told me how blacks must be driven, how they lied and humbugged, and it was not unnatural that I should believe they were lying now, ‘trying it on’, like schoolboys who are testing a new master’s discipline. And as a weak master who knows his own weakness bluffs it out with a new form, unable to recognise who is truthful and who is not, alienating the honest by classing them with the dishonest, I became all the more stubborn. I ate my food very fast, so that the men might have only a short rest, I told Vande to make Alfred one of my cousin’s hammock-carriers so that he might be forced to work, I wouldn’t listen to their arguments.

Laminah said softly behind my chair, “Amedoo’s feet very bad’

At least I had the good sense not to alienate my servants. I depended on them for any comfort that could be wrung out of the country; it was they who, however tired they were, saw first to putting up our beds and chairs, to preparing our food, to boiling water for the filter. I said, “If his foot’s really bad, we’ll stay’

Laminah said, “Amedoo go on. He say he no hum-bug.”

“It’ll be only three hours from here,” I said. “Only three hours, the doctor said so.” They didn’t believe me, but they went about among the carriers repeating what I had said; they put up a good pretence of believing. It is one of the curious things about a black servant, the way in which he includes loyalty in his service.

I am not praising him for that. One ought not to be able to buy loyalty. It enabled me to victimise my carriers. I walked straight off out of the village with my two spare men and left the carriers behind. I was paying them three shillings a week and that sum paid, not only for an eight-hour day or more of heavy carrying, but for their loyalty. The poor fools when I left them had the moneybox, I was a foreigner, my servants were foreigners, they could have shared the money out and gone home. But I was almost certain, though I had known them only two days, that they would follow. I ought to have despised them, as I would have despised the little tame employee at home who puts his office first. But after a while I began to love them for it. Perhaps there is a difference. There was no trait of cowardice in their loyalty, no admission that the richer is the better man. They did sell their loyalty, but it was a frank sale : loyalty was worth so many bags of rice, so much palm oil. They didn’t pretend an affection they didn’t feel. Love was quite one-sided as it ought to be.

So they followed after me, though a long way behind. Three hours went by and there was no sign of Duogobmai. The worst midday heat wore off soon after four. Another village offered hospitality I wouldn’t take. Babu and Kolieva stayed and drank water outside one of the ragged huts, but I went stubbornly on to where the forest began again. A man followed me. He had a few words of English : he said we would never reach Duogobmai before dark. There was still another village between. But I went on : I couldn’t bear the thought of waiting; I had been walking now for more than eight hours, but I had gained my second wind. One of the two men dropped behind; I was alone with Babu and the harps; it was not only the heat that was fading out of the air, the ferocity of the light between the branches was tamed.

Suddenly Babu sat down by the side of the path and changed his vest. He smiled shyly, winningly; we were coming to a town; he had to clean himself, just as much as any season-ticket-holder who straightens his tie before he gets to the City. As the light went out the forest began to rouse and one wondered whether after all it was so dead as it had seemed. I couldn’t help remembering that the man in front was in the greater danger from a snake, but the man behind from a leopard, for leopards, one is told, always jump at the back. Another village lifted itself on the skyline at the green tunnel’s end : the sky was grey, the huts so black that quite suddenly one realised how close night was. It would have been wise to stay, but it was a tiny village, not more than thirty huts on a little cracked hilltop. The thatch was falling in, a few horrible tiny dogs with bat ears came barking out and three old women sat on the very edge of the hill, sorting out cotton seeds, dirty and scarred and naked, like disreputable Fates. The hill dropped straight below them. They were just on the margin of life.

I didn’t believe there was rice enough in the place to feed my men.

Below the hill a wide river lay flat and heavy in the evening light. It was the Loffa, which flows down into the sea about thirty miles above Monrovia. None of these Liberian rivers have been traced from their source in the French Guinea hills to the sea; their upper course is represented in the British War Office map with dotted and inaccurate lines. They usually fall in rapids about fifty miles from the coast and so commercially are of little value, but even in these calm upper reaches they are not used at all by the natives of the Republic : the only canoes one sees are ferries, and these almost all on the French border. One would expect villages to cluster round these rivers, but actually they flow through the wildest and least inhabited part of the bush until within a few days’ trek of the coast. The way over the Loffa that evening was by a great hammock bridge. It was a really lovely architectural sight, seventy yards of knotted creeper swinging down from an’ arboreal platform fifteen feet in the air and out and up ten yards above the Loffa to another tree on the opposite bank. The foothold was about a foot wide, but it was railed on either side with creepers to the height of a man’s shoulders. Sometimes die creepers had given way, and one had to stretch across the gaps while the whole bridge swung like a rope ladder.

Halfway across Mark was standing with a chicken in his hand. He was sick and tired and hungry. He could hardly stir another yard. But Amah, who had been carrying a load all day since they left more than twelve hours before, was quite fresh. He was waiting for Mark on the other side. He had taken off his robe and was naked except for his loin-cloth. He picked up the Revelation suitcase and swung it up to his head as if he were only beginning the day’s march. He was admirable when things went wrong; he sulked and grumbled only on a day of rest or after a short march. It amused him that I should have overtaken them, and he strode up the path from the Loffa laughing and chattering in Bande.

Duogobmai came in sight, a line of blackened huts at the top of a long red-clay slope. A strange pink light welled out of the air, touching the tall termite mounds which stood along the path. It seemed to have no source in the darkening sky, it gave the whole landscape, the ant-heaps and the red clay and the black huts of Duogobmai on the hilltop camp, a curious Martian air. Men ran out of the huts and looked down at us, climbing up out of the dusk and the forest.

It was quite dark when we came into the town and felt our Vay between the huts to find the chiefs. Duogobmai looked very old andlittle very dirty. It was like a Tudor town in its cramped crowded way; the thatch of the huts touched, one had to stoop between them, and the narrow paths were blocked with creamy moonstruck cows like Jerseys with twisted horns standing in their turd among the hens and dogs and small fierce cats and goats.

The chief was a middle-aged man with thick lips and little cunning eyes who looked more Oriental than West African in his red fez. He sat in a hammock before his hut. I couldn’t tell whether he was friendly or not. He just sat there and listened to Amah speaking, to Amah asking for huts and food for thirty men. He was a slow thinker and he was startled by our sudden appearance. He hadn’t seen a white face for years. I still believed that this must be the Dagomai the doctor had directed me to, but no, the chief said, no white people had stayed here since they had begun to pay hut tax, and that was as far back as memory took him. In his slow way he was immensely tickled; it was as good as a circus. He sent some men to clean a hut.

It was quite dark : there was no moon. The blacks moved between the huts with smouldering torches, but the little cheerful embers lit only wretchedness and dirt. A few carriers tottered in and sank immediately to the ground beside their loads with their heads in their hands. There was no humbugging; they were completely exhausted. Amah led me to the hut which had been chosen for us: a small round hut with a native couch at one side, where there was just room for two beds. The chief’s lamp, the only one in the village, stood on the floor and the sweepers raised clouds of dust which rose and settled again : there was a burnt-out fire in the middle. Somebody put a box on the floor and I sat down to wait. I was anxious: I couldn’t imagine how my cousin and the carriers could get across the long hammock bridge in the dark, avoiding all the gaps where the creepers had given way. I sent Amah with the lamp down the hill to see if he could find them and sat in the dark and heard the first rustle of the rats above. I dropped into a doze, and nearly an hour later voices roused me, a lamp swaying between the huts, a sudden pack of worn-out men. Amedoo rushed like a whirlwind into the hut, lashing with his stick at the legs of the few blacks who sat there with me: he could never remember that he wasn’t any longer in the British Empire. He was worn out and in a despairing rage because half the carriers, he said, had stayed at the village the other side of the Loffa, refusing to cross the bridge in the dark. There were no beds, no mosquito nets, no lamps, no torches, no food, and worst of all in the blasting heat of the hut, no filter.

Old Souri, the cook, appeared in the doorway in his black fez and his white robe which had been torn in the forest. He had a chicken in one hand and a bare knife in the other. He said, “Where de cookhouse? Where de cookhouse?” Nothing, no seedy village, no ten hours’ trek, could quench the old man’s ruling passion.

There was nothing to do but have our hammocks slung and lie all night in them fully dressed and wrapped in blankets to keep away mosquitoes. While Amedoo and Amah prepared the hut we stumbled out of the village to relieve ourselves. We had no light, we lost our way in the coil of little huts, it was a pitch-black night except for the quivering sparks of fireflies. We struck endless matches, making water in the dry pitted ground.

And suddenly I felt curiously happy and careless and relieved. One couldn’t, I was sure, get lower than Duogobmai. I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping pIace among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable. Only one thing worried me a little : it seemed likely after a night without nets we should both go down with fever when we were farthest from both Bolahun and Monrovia, though luckily our quinine was on the right side of the Loffa.

There was no water to drink because there was no filter, and it was appallingly hot, lying covered by blankets over our clothes. My cousin was wise and bore the thirst, but in this village there was so much chance of disease that one wasn’t adding to it much, I thought, by drinking two dirty gourds of palm wine. Then I had to fall back on neat whisky. The hut was too short for the hammocks to be stretched at full length; we had to sit in the dark bolt upright waiting for the rats to come. There was a bat somewhere in the roof, and I had noticed before the lamp went out a few huge cockroaches flattened against the wall.

And then luck changed. It was as if fate had been merely curious to see how the worst would affect us. Suddenly the carriers arrived with Vande grinning and happy and proud in the rear. Somehow he had persuaded them to cross the river in this pitch darkness, and there they were with the beds and nets and food and filter, sinking to the ground by the hut too tired to grumble. So after all one was protected, protected from the flies which stayed awake all night, from the mosquitoes, the cockroaches and the rats, by one’s net But it wasn’t easy to sleep. Outside, the carriers sat round the lamps and had their chop and I heard vitality come slowly back to them and Alfred’s voice sowing dissension. When their lamp went out the rats came. They came all together, falling heavily down the wall like water. All night they gambolled among the boxes, and the cows snuffled round the wall and made water noisily. A jigger burrowing under one of my nails burned like a match flame. By half-past five the village was awake again.