Journey Without Maps

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

The Horrible Village

I WASN’T surprised when the carriers struck work next morning and demanded a day’s rest. I sent for the chief and Mark interpreted. The chief said Nicoboozu was seven hours off; he was lying or Mark was lying. But I had stood out against the carriers once before and had been proved wrong. Now they didn’t believe me: they believed I was driving them hard on purpose, and so I granted their demand promptly to try to win their confidence again. But it took me more than one day to do that. They were like children who have caught a grown-up lying to them. It wasn’t a place I would have chosen to rest in. It was a really horrible village. The only thing to do in it was to get drunk. I noted in my diary, “A woman goes round scraping up the cow and goat dung with her hands, children with skin disease, whelping bitches and little puppies with curly tails and bat ears nosing among the food Souri is cooking for us in the dust outside a hut, skinny chickens everywhere, dust getting into the throat. Roofs touching. Indelible pencil all over the hands. Damp pages. Lot of trouble with the carriers. A long walk to get away from the village to relieve oneself.”

It would have been stuffy anyway in the narrow space between the huts, but all day a crowd of villagers crushed out what little air there was. They had never before had a chance of examining white people closely. I couldn’t take out a handkerchief without a craning of heads, nor raise a pencil without a pressing forward of watchers who didn’t want to miss a thing. This intent unamused stare got on the nerves. And they were so ugly, so diseased. The thought of disease began to weigh on my mind; I seemed to swallow it in the dust which soon inflamed my throat; I couldn’t forget where the dust had come from, from the dung and the bitches and the sores on the feet.

Only a few of the women broke the monotonous ugliness of the place. The adults had been beautifully and elaborately cut in bush school; the patterns were like metal plaques spread from the breasts to the navel; and there was one small girl in a turban with slanting Oriental eyes and small neat breasts who did appeal to a European sexual taste even in her dirt. To their eyes she was probably less attractive than the village beauty who gazed at herself all day in a little scrap of cracked mirror, a girl with swelling buttocks and smeared and whitened breasts which hung in flat pouches to her waist. It was curious how seldom they did appeal : perhaps sexual vitality was lowered by the heat and the marches, but it was partly, I think, their lack of sexual selfconsciousness They weren’t, until we came near to the Coast and ‘civilisation’, interested in the sex of their visitors, but only in their colour or their clothes. The nakedness, too, was monotonous; it brought home how few people, and for how short a period of their lives, one can see naked with any pleasure.

There was something shifty and mean about Duogobmai, even apart from its dirt. It was the only place, until I got into Bassa country where the coastal civilisation had corrupted the natives, in which I found nothing to admire. The chief was a Mohammedan, but no sooner had I produced a bottle of my whisky than he arrived with a present of palm wine and some eggs, all of which were bad. I gave him half a tumblerful of neat whisky and he tossed it down as if it were lemonade, then rolled away towards his hut. An agreeable and depraved old man with thin white hair twisted into tiny pigtails brought two eggs; he was the oldest man in Duogobmai, the owner of the hut; and he explained through Mark that he didn’t want a dash. He sat down close by, his reward was a ringside seat, and watched the show : the white man writing, drinking, coughing, wiping the sweat from his face. Presently I gave him a swig of whisky; it went immediately to his head. One moment his lip was on the glass, the next he was swaying and giggling in senile tipsiness. He tried to smoke a cigarette, but the smoke got in his eyes. He was like a withered plant one has tried to revive with spirit; it begins immediately to open and flutter its petals, but a moment later the spirit has run its course and it is more dead than ever. In littlehe middle of lunch the chief arrived again to introduce his brother, a fourth lieutenant in the Liberian Frontier Force, through whose village we would pass next day. He was a young simple brutal man in a fur cap with a small metal Liberian flag on it. They had obviously come for whisky and I gave it them; it sent the chief back to his hut for the rest of the day.

He was quite right; there was nothing else to do but drink. The difficulty was to get drunk; the spirit ran out in sweat almost as quickly as one drank it. The race between the night and drunkenness became furious as darkness fell. For I still feared the rats: I wanted something to make me sleep; but drink was quite useless for that purpose and most of the night I lay awake listening to the vermin cascading down the walls, racing over the boxes. I had already learnt that one could not touch the earthen floor with naked feet without catching jiggers under the nails; now I learned that at night anything left outside a case would be eaten-by cockroaches or rats. They would eat anything : shirts, stockings, hair-brushes, the laces in one’s shoes.

Rats

Rats indeed take some getting used to. There are said to be as many rats as human beings even in England in the large towns, but the life they lead is subterranean. Unless you go down into the sewers or haunt the huge rubbish dumps which lie beyond the waste building lots under a thin fume of smoke, you are unlikely to meet a rat. It needs an effort of imagination in Piccadilly Circus to realise that for every passing person, there is a rat in the tunnels underneath.

They are shy creatures; even while I slept among them, and heard them round me all night, I never saw one until I arrived in Ganta, where they were bolder and didn’t wait till dark. Flash a torch : they always avoided its beam; leave a lamp burning : and they played just as furiously in the shadow outside the range of light.little

I remembered the first live rat I ever saw. I had returned with my brother from a revue in Paris to a famous hotel on the left bank near the Luxembourg. It was about one o’clock in the morning; my brother went upstairs first; and lolloping behind him, like a small rabbit, went a rat. I could hardly believe my eyes as I followed them; it didn’t go with the dapper lounge, the wealthy international guests. But I wasn’t drunk; I could see quite distinctly the rough brown fur at its neck. I suppose one of the million or two rats in Paris was reconnoitring. Its appearance had a premeditated sinister air. I thought of the first Uhlans appearing at the end of a Belgian country road.

Perhaps town rats are bolder. In Freetown in 1942 I would lie awake under my mosquito-net and watch them scamper across my dressing table and swing upon my black-out curtains.

The next rat I saw was dead. I had taken a cottage in Gloucestershire and the country scared me. Something used to make a noise in the thatch every night, and I thought of rats: I knew the villagers went ratting along the hedge at the bottom of my garden. The rat-catcher, a rat-like man himself in old army breeches who was said by cruel village rumour to have allowed his first wife to starve, came with his ferrets; they scrambled along the thatch, rearing at the chimney stack like tiny polar bears; one of them couldn’t keep his footing and continually fell off until he had to be put back in the bag. There weren’t any rats, the catcher said, and refused payment. He had a pride in his profession and would only be paid by results, at the rate of a shilling a rat. But that night there was a knock on the door. A village woman stood in the door and held out a dead rat, jumping with fleas. She said, “I thought maybe you might like to see a rat. We’ve caught twenty down the hedge,” dangling the body under my lamp.

It is not, after all, unreasonable to fear a rat. The fear of moths, of birds and bats-this may be nerves; but the fear of the rat is rational. To quote Mr. Hans Zinsser, “It carries diseases of man and animals-plague, typhus, trichinella spiralis, rat-bite fever, infectious jaundice, possibly trench fever, probably foot-and-mouth disease and a form of equine ‘influenza’… . They have nibbled at the ears and noses of infants in their cribs; starving rats once devoured a man who entered a disused coal-mine.” It wasn’t in the least comforting to remember that there are forty million rats in England; the thought of the one rat which the sister at Bolahun had found sniffing at her hair was enough to hinder sleep.

And lying awake and hearing the rats play among our boxes, I couldn’t help remembering, too, the list of diseases I had read in England: leprosy, yaws, smallpox… . They were all, I felt certain, to be found in Duogobmai, and it was no comfort to know that leprosy was hardly at all contagious and that none of these diseases could be transmitted by fleas in a rat’s fur. One felt that even the dust in the cramped dirty town was poisonous, no less than fleas. And yet all the time, below the fear and the irritation, one was aware of a curious lightness and freedom; one might drink, that was a temporary weakening; but one was happy all the same; one had crossed the boundary into country really strange; surely one had gone deep this time.

Buzie Country

If we seldom sank as low as Duogobmai we seldom rose as high as Nicoboozu, which we reached next day after an easy cheerful trek of only three hours. Alfred had gone home; he had decided that the journey was not going to be a holiday; and in his place Vande had taken a friend of Babu’s, a Buzie man called Guawa. Guawa was an asset; he had the carriers singing before Duogobmai had slipped behind the trees. He sang and he danced, danced even when he carried a hammock or a load; I could hear his voice down the trail, proposing the line of an impromptu song which the carriers took up, repeated, carried on. These songs referred to their employers; their moods and their manners were held up to ridicule; a village when the carriers pressed through in full song would learn the: whole story of their journey. Sometimes a villager would join in the chant, asking a question, and I could hear the question tossed along the line until it became part of the unending song and was answered. ^ At the village before Nicoboozu the fourth lieutenant waited to greet us; he led us to his hut, and his brother brought a present of a large cockerel and a dozen eggs. The fourth lieutenant brought out his weapons, a long spear with a leather grip softened by fur and with a leather sheath, and a sword with goatskin at the hilt. He showed me his warrant as a fourth lieutenant dated 1918, and a letter from his commander recommending him for personal bravery and stating that, though he was completely illiterate and unable to learn the new drills, he was a good officer in peace and war. He said he had fought the Grebos and the Krus, and there was a young naοve brutality in his manner of touching his sword, a pride in killing and death.

Nicoboozu was a clean little town, the huts wide apart, and the chief was old, hospitable and incurious. He dashed us a chicken and a hamper of rice, saw that the hut we were to sleep in was swept, and then retired to his hammock and shade from the midday sun while we had a bath in a tin basin and the jiggers were cut out of our toes.

Nicoboozu was as favourable an example as we could find of a village touched by the Buzie culture” Here the women wore little silver arrows in their hair and twisted silver bracelets, beaten by the blacksmith out of old Napoleon coins brought from French Guinea, and heavy silver anklets; the men wore rings, primitive signet rings with a flattened side, and decorative beaded rings and rings twisted to match the bracelets. The weavers were busy, and every piece of craftsmanship we saw was light and unselfconscious. There was an air of happiness about the place which next day we did not find in Zigita.

Zigita is the principal town of the Buzie tribe, it is a town where even the commonest bush cutlass is beautiful, but it isn’t happy. It is Buzie in another fashion, the fashion of witchcraft and fear.

The village women danced to us that evening in starlight to the music of rattles. It was not a lovely dance; they were not lovely dancers but emaciated old women slapping their pitted buttocks in a kind of Charleston; but they were cheerful and happy, and we were happy, too, as they slapped and rattled and laughed and pranced, and we drank warm boiled water with whisky and the juice of limes, and the timelessness, the irresponsibility, the freedom of Africa began to touch us at last.

It wasn’t easy to analyse the fascination behind the dirt and disease, but it was more than a personal fantasy, satisfied more than a personal need. Different continents have made their call to different ages, and people at every period have tried to rationalise in terms of imperialism, gold or conquest their feeling for an untouched land, for a country “that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance; the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their images pulled down out of their temples.”

The old women danced and were cheerful, with the sores on their breasts and the silver arrows in their hair. There were mines in Nigeria broken by sledges: over the border in Sierra Leone were other mines, Justice ruled on the north, the east and the west: —here there was injustice, massacres, exaction, but the forest stayed forest, it was hardly pitted at all by the little holes the white prospectors had dug, the steep paths to Zigita sparkled with mica, but die minerals remained where they were in the soil of the country, and the images had certainly not been pulled down out of the temples.

That Zigita proved, the Buzie town reached by forest paths so steep that I hardly had to bend to use my hands in climbing. The President might speak of building motor roads through the Republic : these paths proved what difficulties lay before him. He had forgotten or never trodden this way, as hard and rough, according to Sir Alfred Sharpe, as any in Africa, which leads to Zigita sprawling across a high plateau, surrounded by forests and higher hills, five and a half hours’ trek from Nicoboozu. Zigita itself is nearly two thousand feet up, and to the northwest, Onagizi, a thimble of almost perpendicular rock, rises another thousand feet, the home of evil spirits. But all round Zigita are hills and forest; it is overlooked from every side but one, and on nights of storm the lightning runs along the top of the hills, circling it with green flame.

The Big Bush Devil

In Zigita it is quite easy to believe that there are men in Buzie country who can make lightning. The use of lightning is little more than a post-graduate course to be taken when the ordinary initiations of the bush school are over, just as the women may take poisoning as their post-graduate course. About six years ago the old blind chief of Zigita lost his wife.

She ran away to the hut of a younger man, and when the chief sent to him to claim the proper fine, they had gone. This flight, this failure to pay the customary fine, made the couple guilty, not their adultery. A year later the chief travelled down to Monrovia to a conference with President Kong. He heard that the young people were living in the town with their baby. He was a forbearing man and again he sent to them to demand that the fine be paid. When the young man refused, the chief, who was a member of the Lightning Society, made artificial lightning which struck the hut, killed the man and the woman, but left the baby, who lay in the bed between them, unharmed. This story is believed by everyone in Liberia, white and black. I heard it from several sources, and it never varied. The old chief I did not see, because he was away at Voinjema meeting the President.

A Liberian District Commissioner is stationed at Zigita: the compound lies up the slope of a hill above the town, above the long field of thatched and pointed huts like stooks of bound bean-stalks. The town chief, who brought to my hut in the compound a crowd of men with swords and daggers and jewellery for sale, seemed young and downtrodden. He was ordered about by the D.Cs clerk (the D,C. was away at Voinjema), but if the D.C. had the chief well under this thumb, there was a higher, though more secret, authority than the Commissioner’s : the Big Bush Devil, in Dr. Westermann’s phrase the Grand Master of a Bush Society, whom it is death or blindness for an uninitiated native so much as to see ^and who must be distinguished from the devils we had watched dancing in grotesque masks, the mere heads of the local bush schools. A new hut was being fenced in for him by the townsfolk as my carriers climbed the slope to the compound : this was a force ruling by terror and poison, which had already driven away one District Commissioner, the other side of the Buzie medal to that which now, as we sat in the verandah with the town chief and the clerk, so richly displayed itself.

The servants did the bargaining. Bracelets and daggers were sold for a few shillings apiece; a sword with a carved ivory hilt was bought from a fat man with the authoritative air of an Eastern eunuch for eight shillings. He lost his temper with Laminah, who, he said, was spoiling the market. He had a few words of English; he said ‘yes’m’ and ‘no’m’; there was something servile and baleful in his manner. He was one of the richest men in the town. I met him in my stroll that evening and he asked to have a picture taken of him. “Which is your hut?” I said. ‘TU take you in front of it.”

‘That my hut,” the fat man said, pointing past a black bull. “Yes’m. And that. And that. And that. Yes’m. And that,” marking out half the town with his plump finger. Next day, the terrified Laminah, who remembered how his bargaining had angered the stranger, learnt that he was the headman of the devil.

The sales continued until late: all the finest swords and spears were brought last by men who slipped quietly in behind the lowered reed screens which at mosquito-time made the verandah into a little private room. One owner, at the chief’s command, unwillingly brought a lovely sword in a worked leather sheath, with a hilt of ivory and brass. He didn’t want to sell; he loved the sword; it had been his father’s. It was pathetic to watch the struggle in his mind between his love for it and the wealth he was offered. I raised my bid to twenty-two shillings and the man nearly gave way. That sum of money would have fed him, and fed him well, for more than three months. He lifted up the screen and ran from temptation, back down the hill into the village, carrying the sword. The carriers laughed at him as they lay sprawling in the verandah.

For we led a patriarchal life on trek. Only the places in which we slept were free from intrusion. If the hut had a verandah or a room to eat in, it belonged to the carriers too. They sat around, on the floor, in the hammocks; they slept in corners. It was assumed that I would always be glad to see them there, to attend to their wants even in the middle of a meal, giving them iodine or Epsom salts. At Zigita a leprous man from the town came, with the sellers, to be healed, standing dumbly, holding out his rotting hands. Passive misery had been stamped on his face for a long while, but he had seen the carriers take medicine from me and one could tell that behind the misery a spark of belief had been struck in miracles. It was no good destroying hope and admitting there was nothing I could do. I gave him a few tablets of boric acid to dissolve and bathe his hands with.

At half-past six when the leper and the men with swords to sell had all gone home, the mosquito-screen was lifted and a stranger slipped in. We were drinking whisky and lime; the hurricane lamp was turned down to save oil; we couldn’t understand what the man wanted when he spoke urgently to us from the shadows. We called Mark to translate. It was a command from the devil in the town that no one should go outside; no one must even look through a window, for the devil proposed to leave his hut. The servants came in from the cookhouse and listened; the man slipped away again into the dark and left them scared. I tried to sound the servants; it was disquieting to see how grave and frightened Laminah had become, although the longest march never stilled his tongue for long. He stood there silent and gloomy in his shorts, his little white waiter’s jacket which the forest had torn, his woollen cap with the red bobble. He believed, one could not doubt it, that if we so much as saw the devil through a window we would go blind. The warning reached the carriers who were gathered in the cookhouse, and suddenly all the voices were turned low like lamp flames. One could hear the silence welling up the hill from Zigita into the compound. I looked from under the mosquito-screen; the compound was quite empty; the sentry who usually guarded the gateway had disappeared; the screens were down in the clerk’s house and the windows shuttered.

I said : “But if we go outside, do you really think that anything … ?”

They watched me carefully, trying to make out if I were serious. Mark was a Christian boy, he wouldn’t answer directly, he was ashamed of his fear, but he said he thought we oughtn’t to go. Amedoo broke in excitedly with a story it was difficult to follow about what had happened in 1923 at dinner one night at a District Commissioner’s in Sierra Leone : “The D.C. he sit here, his wife she sat there, Mr. Trout he sat here, Mrs. Trout she sat there and the devil passed through.” He said that if we went and saw the devil, the devil would put a medicine on the town and there would be no white man after we had gone with better medicine. The boys went into the two rooms and drew the mosquito-screens over the windows; after they had cleared dinner they sat with the carriers in the cookhouse with the blinds pulled down; we could see the lamp shining on the floor through the slats and the shadows of the silent figures.

But the needs of the body had to be satisfied, and taking our electric torches we went out through the compound to the edge of the forest. The town of over two thousand inhabitants might have been deserted; the pale sickle of a new moon, a sky luminous with stars, circle after circle of shuttered huts. The place had an eerie air after Nicoboozu and Duogobmai, where music and dancing, laughter and cries went on till midnight, for it was not yet nine. But as we returned up the path out o^ the forest and flashed our torches on the town, we lit up two human figures who were standing silently outside the devil’s hut. Perhaps the devil had set a watch on Zigita to see who moved or peeped, because for some time after we returned to the rest-house we could hear feet moving in the compound, lightly stirring in the dust outside. As we undressed the devil’s music began in Zigita, the pulse of a drum. We turned out the lamps and lifted the screen from the window which faced the town, but there was nothing to be seen from the direction of the devil’s hut; no lights moved. “When once,” Saki wrote, “you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.” We had the creeps that night; there were no doors and anyone could slip into the house under the mosquito-screens. I very nearly took the automatic out of the moneybox to load it; only selfconsciousness prevented me.

I had expected the atmosphere in the morning to clear. This was the day of rest which the carriers had looked forward to, but they showed no sign of enjoying it. They lingered in the rest-house, avoided the town. Mark said it was a bad place where they fought with poison and not swords, and I remembered uneasily how simple it would be for the devil to poison the carriers’ food and teach the sceptical whites a lesson. Thunder kept wandering along the hills; two carriers complained of their heads and one of his belly, and I sent off a messenger to the Lutheran mission at Zorzor warning them of our coming next day, although I had meant to stay another day at Zigita, All the morning the building of the fence round the new hut went on, a line of women carrying pails of water up and down the hill from the river to loosen the soil. The noise was like that of a distant football match; every now and then there were screams of delight as if a try had been scored. Once the headman arrived on the verandah and asked for some oil, and if I had not stopped him, Laminah would have given him the greater part of our supply.

Again a warning was brought to the compound that the devil was leaving his hut. After the drums had sounded, no one was to go outside. The fat baleful man appeared with a lot of trash to sell, and I, not knowing then who he was, chaffed him at the gateway of the compound. He had with him a little old man with a white goatee beard who wanted us to buy some crude leather pouch. Yes’m and ‘No’m the fat man said at intervals. “And this devil,” I said, “why can’t I see him?” He laughed evasively and Laminah plucked at my sleeve. He knew who the fat man was and he was scared. The fat man turned and saw him. He became boisterously funny, but without any humour showing in his little sunk eyes. He said, “You want to see devil, eh?” gripping Laminah’s arm, and he began to talk to him in his own tongue.

When Laminah got away he was stammering with his fear. The fat man, he said, was the devil’s headman and the old man with the goatee beard his medicine man. The headman had frightened him badly in revenge for his bargaining over the sword; he had told him that he would be carried away into the bush for seven years and forcibly initiated into the Bush Society. The thunder rumbled round the hills and the clouds broke up. Amedoo joined us. He said, “England good place. You have one God and no devils. I have one God too but plenty devils.” He was a Mohammedan. He began all over again the story about the English D.C. He wanted to prove that it wasn’t safe to laugh in private at a Big Bush Devil. They could make themselves invisible; they could hear everything.

Then the rain came washing down, a vertical wall of water, while the thunder rumbled. We ran for shelter. Mark met us on the verandah, anxious to impress us, too, with how bad a place it was. The D.C., Amedoo began to tell us all over again, had been having dinner. “Mrs. D.C. sat here, Mr. Trout there.” The D.C. had laughed and said that he would like to see the devil, and immediately the devil had passed invisibly through the dinner-table splitting it in half. Through a window we could see a man standing outside the devil’s hut in the pouring rain fanning the thunderstorm away with a switch of elephant hair, fanning it away from the devil’s hut towards the compound and the hills. He stood there for more than two hours in the rain, fanning.

The storm continued all the evening and well into the night. It certainly kept away from Zigita; the hills and the huts leapt up in green light; the thunder travelled all the way along the rim, the lightning screwing down into the forest. There was no sound from the devil’s hut. The stage was magnificently set for a supernatural act. I had promised the boys we would not look outside, but we kept watch on the hut through a crack in the shutter. It leapt and receded before the green flames; something should have happened to crown the wild night, but nothing did. The devil never stirred and the great natural preparation went on too long without a climax; the storm became a bore.

That night the rats came leaping into my room like large cats; they knocked things over; they made too much noise for me to sleep, though they always evaded the eye of the torch. A tin went crashing over; once I could have sworn that the lamp itself had gone. But curiously, when daylight came, nothing was out of order; even the biscuit-tin I had heard fall was in its usual place.

There was certainly something bad about Zigita. I never felt quite well again until I reached the Coast

It was not that I believed in the devil’s power so much as in the power of my own mind. The suggestion of malice and evil here was so great that I could imagine it influencing my mind until I half believed, and a half-belief can be strong enough to affect the health.

So in a way I was just as glad to leave Zigita as the carriers were. They broke into song as soon as they got beyond its boundaries, and made fast time on the wide treeless track south to Zorzor. We couldn’t see twenty yards ahead at first because of the deep wet fog which dropped softly round us, but when the sun had sucked it up, we experienced the real ferocity of Africa on the shadeless road. It staggered and sickened me even through a sun-helmet. Once a beautiful little green snake moved across the path, upright,, without hurry, bearing her bust proudly forward into the grasses like a hostess painted by Sargent, poisonous with gentility, a Fabergι jewel.

At lunch in the only shade the wide gorge provided the messenger arrived from Zorzor with a note to tell me that I could have a house in the compound of the Lutheran mission.

Kindness in a Corner

I had expected something better of a mission than this parched playground on a hilltop opposite Zorzor: the deserted houses, nobody about, the dusty plants, and at last the fat American woman trailing forward through the afternoon heat in a green-flowered dress, the pattern tightly expanded across the hips, a white topee. She whined at us dismally that this was the house: the dusty rambling shuttered house stuffy with the smell of vermin, torn mosquito-wire across the windows. She couldn’t find the keys and gazing through the windows I could see stacks of missionary literature on wobbly tables and files of broken filters against the peeling walls. “You see, I’m all alone here,” the American woman wailed, trailing round the building looking for the keys, but she checked herself, when she had taken another look at my dirty shorts, my dirty face and unshaven skin, and when a little later I insisted, “Are you really quite alone?” she wouldn’t answer the question, scared, I suppose, for her goods and her honour.

If Duogobmai was the dirtiest place in the Republic, Zorzor was the most desolate. It hadn’t been left to itself; the whites had intruded, had not advanced, had simply stuck and withered there, leaving their pile of papers, relics of a religious impulse, sentimental, naοve, destined to failure. Mrs. Croup’s husband had been drowned at Monrovia: the other man in the mission had gone off his head, Mrs. Croup had been alone now for six months. I heard her voice whining away across the compound, as I hypocritically called after her some expression of my pleasure at sleeping in a house after the native huts, “Well, I guess we try to keep it free of bugs.”

But she was a kind woman, and her whine had its excuse. I found next day that I was whining too. It was the heat. One hadn’t the energy to finish forming words; the voice trailed out, like bad handwriting, after the first syllable. She was kind, courageous, practical and a little bizarre. She sold me a cracked lamp from the mission stores at a great deal more than its value, and she kept a black baby in her house and a cobra in her garden. The cobra she fed with a live chicken every day; she had always meant to watch it as it swallowed the chicken, but somehow, though she guessed it would be interesting, she had never thought to watch through the lid of the hutch at the right time. She said enigmatically, “I’d have sent you an invite to dinner, but I’m going home in six months,” an excuse which became even more difficult to understand when later in the evening, learning that we were leaving next day, she said : “Oh, if I’d known you were going that soon, I’d have sent you an invite’

That evening I had a conference at her house. She had advised me to cut across the corner of French Guinea to Ganta, making my first stay at Bamakama. As usual the carriers said it was too far. So I took Amah down to her, as the spokesmen of the men, and Vande slid in at the door with a dour silent carrier who always trailed at his heels. They sat on stools and the baby crawled about their feet and Mrs. Croup stoked up a roaring fire in the tiny stuffy tropic room lined with photographs in Oxford frames.

But as Mrs. Croup talked, I became more and more doubtful whether she really knew anything about the route. She always travelled in a hammock specially made to carry her weight, with eighteen hammock-carriers. She drove them hard : a ten-hour trek was nothing to her. She sent out for a man who knew the route, but he had never been farther than Bamakama and then he had taken two days over the journey; he believed there was a short way by Jbaiay, but he wasn’t sure whether it was passable, whether £he chiefs had mended the bridges since the last rains.

I could see the carriers’ doubts growing; they were thinking that again I was going to force them into too long a trek. So I told them that we would go next day to Jbaiay and there discover the road to Bamakama; if it was too far we would spend the night at Jbaiay. They assented to the plan with suspicious alacrity… .

There were no rats that night: only cockroaches, ready to eat anything available. They lay there, while the light was on, flattened like large blood blisters against the wall, but when it was extinguished they flashed faster than lizards on the hunt. Sir Harry Johnston, who knew only the coast districts of Liberia, never penetrating, I believe, much farther inland than his rubber plantation at Mount Barclay outside Monrovia, speaks of these cockroaches as “obviously harboured and bred in the heaps of refuse which accumulate” in the Americo-Liberian settlements. But really they can be found everywhere in the Republic. “These insects,” he wrote, “do not hesitate at night to attack human beings who are asleep. They creep to the corners of the mouth of the sleeping person to suck the saliva. They eat the toe-nails down to the quick, and above all, they gnaw at any sore place or ulcer on the skin… . Dr. Buttikofer relates that he only saved his body from attack at one time by placing bowls of rice and sugar in his bedroom as a counter-attraction… . The present writer has been attacked in a somewhat similar way, but on board dirty and uncomfortable steamers on the West Coast a good many years ago. [n the bunks of these steamers cockroaches swarmed, and there were of course no mosquito curtains to shield the unfortunate passenger, who would wake in the dead of night, in black darkness, to find two or three large cockroaches clinging to his lips.”

This, as I grew more tired and my health a little failed, seemed to be what I would chiefly remember as Africa : cockroaches eating our clothes, rats on the floor, dust in the throat, jiggers under the nails, ants fastening on the flesh. But in retrospect even the cockroaches seem only the badge of an unconquered virginity, “never sacked, turned, nor wrought.” In Sierra Leone, in the bright electric Hill Station, one was conscious under the fans beside the iced drinks of how the land had been subdued; but even in the capital town of Liberia one was aware only of a settlement, a very chancy settlement that might be wiped out at any time by yellow fever. White and black, they were living here for a short while on the surface of the land, but Africa had the last say, and it said it in the form of rats and ants, of the forest swallowing up the little pits the Dutch prospectors had made and abandoned. There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when one finds it.