Journey Without Maps

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

The Carriers’ Strike

NEXT morning we entered France : so the colony was known among the natives of the Republic. One of the men reported sick before we started, was paid off and left behind. The number of carriers had now almost reached a minimum. My cousin used a hammock and needed four carriers, but I reduced my hammock-men to three : I hadn’t used the hammock yet and unless I went sick I saw no reason why I should ever need to use it.

The country was stamped as French from the first village we stayed in, which was neither Bamakama nor Jbaiay as I had intended: French in its commercial sense, in its baits which I should have believed to be intended for tourists, if there had been any hope of tourists. It was astonishing what a difference the invisible boundary made. You could not have mistaken this land for Liberia. Tourists would have been quite at home here among the round huts and the scarlet fezzes of the Mandingo traders. For these traders were indistinguishable, except that their dignity was less tarnished, from the men who sell carpets in the Dτme and the Rotonde. The only difference was we had followed them home. It was as if we had shadowed them all the way from the Boule Miche, sitting in third-class carriages, travelling steerage, riding up the long way from Konakry on horse-back.

In ‘France’ the trouble with the carriers came to a head. Their complaints, the phrase ‘too far’, ‘too far’, had got on my nerves. To be deserted altogether, I began to think, might be preferable to this recurrent bickering, this pressure to go more slowly than I could afford. The trouble was I did not know the extent of my authority and I did not know which of them I could trust. Vande I suspected; the headman was a cheerful rogue with his pipe and his cloth cap and his rattle; but it sometimes seemed to me that he let the carriers have their own way too often. I trusted Amah, because Amah was unpopular with the other men; I trusted Babu, the Buzie, and his friend Guawa; I thought I could trust my hammock-man, Kolieva, who went ahead with me on each day’s march.

But it was Kolieva who led me effectually astray the first day in France. We took the wrong path from the first : the carriers had evidently talked in Zorzor with the inhabitants and decided that the way to Bamakama by Jbaiay was too long and rough. No one ever knew the name of the town we reached about two hours later, across the upper reach of the St. Paul. It sounded like Koinya. It was distinguished from the Liberian villages by a kind of town-planning. The huts of the chief and his wives were enclosed by a high wall in the centre, round which the town circled. The whole place was rather like an encampment of traders on the road.

When Amah arrived he interpreted what the chief had to say: that Bamakama was a full day’s trek away and that he was uncertain whether the paths between had been cleared or the bridges opened after the last rains. He was a man of great dignity, a little below the average Mandingo height with a black beard and a scarlet fez and a country robe and that Semitic expression in the dark eyes above the hooked nose of being open to the commercial chance. The men in the village had their hair curiously cut into patterns and tufts : I had seen nothing of the kind in Tiberia. Their heads were often completely shaved except for two tufts, at the crown and the nape; they looked like poodles, and a poodle of course is a French dog. The women in French Guinea, too, lived up to the standard of a country which provides the handsomest whores and the most elegant brothels; their hair was gummed into complicated ringlets like watch-springs round the ears, they were sometimes painted on the face with blue and ochre, as well as the usual white stripes, and this gave them the thick rather unfinished look of a modern portrait.

It was no good going on after what the chief had said. He promised a guide for the next day and had the only square hut in the village swept out. This was another peculiarity of the French colony, that every town had to supply a rest-house for travellers. The idea would have been a better one if travellers had been more frequent, but these rest-houses (usually, though not in Koinya, a little outside the towns in a compound of their own) had almost always fallen to decay with spiders building across the doors, the thatch dropped in and the cookhouse a ruin over the ashes of old fires. In Koinya, perhaps, the inhabitants were far enough from the route of any French Commissioner to use the rest-house themselves, with the result that it was clean and well-cared for.

No sooner were we settled in the hut than trade began. Everything was for sale. There was no such thing as dashing here. The dash, though it has become a convenient method of extorting money, must have originated in a gesture of courtesy and hospitality, in a generosity rather alien to the modern Mandingo mind. All the junk of civilisation had been washed up in the village like the last line of seaweed on a beach. One could get porcelain pans and pails, knives crudely decorated with silver alloy and brass to catch a stranger’s jackdaw eye; even the common curved cutlass for hacking a path through the bush was offered gaudily got up, its handle covered with the alloy from Napoleonic coins, the blade as blunt as wood. It must have been the pure spirit of commerce which led them to manufacture these objects (they could not have encountered white tourists here twice in ten years), or perhaps this was the obscure factory from which the gimcrackery on sale in Konakry and Dakar, in Paris itself, came; we had stumbled on an industrial centre in the furthest corner of one of the least known of the French colonies. Perhaps even the cannibals on the Ivory Coast were now chiefly occupied in manufacturing baits for tourists.

The carriers had only marched for half a day, but they had eaten before they left Zorzor and there was trouble in the air. They kept sulkily apart from my hut, all except Babu and Amah, talking in high angry voices. I was no longer a patriarch among my retainers; I was the unjust employer; there was bad blood somewhere which had to be let out. It worked a little on the nerves not knowing what complaint they would make or when they would bring it me; and the worst of it was that I could not lose my temper, I must remain cheerful and good-humoured, I had to laugh at them however much I wanted to curse them.

In the afternoon I lay down but I couldn’t sleep. A little while before sundown, when I was sponging myself in my tin bath, Amedoo came into the hut. He said, “The labourers say they want more money. Massa say no.” He was the perfect manservant; he advised me how to meet a mutiny with the calmness and firmness of Jeeves advising Bertie Wooster on the choice of a tie. But it was sometimes a strain to live up to him : his loyalty, his honesty and his complete reliability demanded so much in return: a master, too, who was reliable as he understood reliability, in the imperial manner. He had lived with District Commissioners; he completely failed to understand any other than the official attitude of a man to his carriers. It was a relief to me when in the last week of the trek even Amedoo’s morale began to weaken.

I lingered as long as I could in my bath; it was embarrassing to know that Amedoo would judge me by my conduct now; it would have been so disgracefully easy to have given way. For, after all, the carriers were disgracefully underpaid. At last I had to go outside, sit down, pretend to write my diary. I was aware of them watching me, judging the moment to strike, I felt like a fly on a wall and they held the whisk. Then Kolieva came forward, and about fifteen carriers drifted up in a close group behind him. I hadn’t expected Kolieva to be one of them. He was embarrassed and that helped me; he was exaggeratedly sullen and falsely dignified, his heavy lip drooped, he beat at his toes with a stick and spoke thickly. He was the only one of the mutineers who knew a few words of English. It occurred to me as I counted the number of die strikers that I could never reach my objective without them, paying at every town for new carriers at the Government rate. If they remained firm and took their pay and left us, we should have to cut straight through the forest towards Monrovia. I wasn’t sure that my money would last even then. If they had only known it, they had all the aces in their hand.

Kolieva said they wanted to talk to me. They wanted more money. I pretended not to understand him. I said I was willing to lend anyone a little money on his wages. Vande had already borrowed sixpence at Zigita. How much would they like? Kolieva grew more embarrassed; he said the Government wage for a carrier was a shilling a day. He was quite right of course; the proper wage was a shilling, though I believe it was legal to contract over a period at a smaller rate, and actually no one in Liberia, except a few unfortunate travellers taking carriers from town to town, ever pays the proper wage. Certainly not Government officials, who can generally get carriers for no payment at all.

I said that the Government wage didn’t include food, and I was paying for their food. They could not tell that their food only came to about twopence a head; but they stood in a surly circle, not really listening to anything. It was no good arguing the merits of the case. Besides, the merits were all on their side. I was exploiting them like all their other masters, and it would have been no comfort to them to know that I could not afford not to exploit them and that I was a little ashamed of it. I pretended to be puzzled, to understand nothing of what they meant; they had contracted … I told somebody to fetch Vande and when he came I asked him what it was they were arguing about; I had understood from him that they had agreed to work for three shillings a week.

Then I bluffed. There was nothing else to do. They had me on the spot. Babu and Amah were on my side and of course my servants; Vande, too, I thought, from the way he spoke to them, though I couldn’t understand a word of Bande. I said, “Tell them they can go home. I’ll give them their pay, but they won’t get any dash, I’ll take new carriers here.” He talked to them, they shouted things at him, after what seemed a long while he smiled. He said, “They no want to go.” It was the moment to strike harder. Kolieva seemed to be the ringleader; I told him to go. I’d pay him off. I thought to myself all the while : if I can keep them together for a fortnight more they will be in a country as strange to them as to me; they won’t want to leave. There was a tribe, about a week ahead, which was still supposed to practise cannibalism on strangers; they wouldn’t want to be paid off there. But I had won: Kolieva explained it was all a mistake, grinning with shame; and a moment later they were laughing and joking as if there had been no disagreement; they were like children who have tried to get an extra holiday but bear no grudge because they have never really believed they would succeed. But the dispute had let out most of the bad blood; for two more days there were to be continual arguments, which wore my temper to threads, and then quite suddenly they began to work together happily and smoothly.

Vande asked whether they could kill the kid I had been given in Kpangblamai, and it seemed the right moment for conciliation. I said ‘yes,’ not expecting the immediate slaughter there in front of the hut: the little kid held down on the ground by its legs like a crucified child, the knife across the throat and the screams through the flow of blood. The kid took a long time dying, the blood welling out across the earth, gathering in pools on the baked unporous ground, as the light went and someone in the chiefs enclosure began to shake a rattle. And it was good to know that one had not been deserted.

Bamakama

The next day wasn’t so good. We were out on the trail with a guide from Koinya by seven, but the paths were very rough for the carriers, and they and my cousin fell a long way behind. There was a multiplicity of little paths and the country was slowly changing from the Liberian hills and forest to a plateau covered with tall elephant grass twice the height of a man, a plateau which I suppose stretches northward to what Mungo Park called the Mountains of Kong, and then on again to the Niger. On one of these tiny paths I saw the only horse, with the exception of the bony mare in Freetown, I saw in West Africa; an old Mandingo with a white beard and a turban sat it and watched us go by through the grass. A boy carried all their gear upon his head. He may have come from very far away, perhaps from the Sahara After three and a half hours’ march we reached the St. Paul River again, or the Diani as this upper reach is called. On either side the forest followed it, ‘H slow shadowed river, seventy yards across, under the huge trees. It was only at the watersides that nature was ever beautiful: away from the rivers it was too dry and shrivelled and lifeless for beauty. But here there was faint movement, depth and gleam: refreshment, too, in the thought that the great slow stream was moving down to our destination, though by a quicker route, and would come out two hundred miles or so farther, past the great central forest, into the flats and mangrove swamps of Monrovia.

A ferry took us to the other side, a raft built of the trunks of trees lashed together and pulled across on a creeper rope. Amedoo was with me and Amah and about ten of the carriers; the others were somewhere behind with my cousin. After half an hour I was anxious, but my anxiety was small compared with Amedoo’s. He had been ordered in Sierra Leone by Daddy to take care of us and never to show his face again in Freetown without us, and the responsibility weighed on him. He walked restlessly up and down the high bank above the river, shouting, but the sound died out a few yards away among the trees. There was nothing we could do if they had lost their way, and my cousin’s lot really would have been happier than mine. My cousin had Laminah and the cook and Vande, the beds and mosquito-nets, and most of the food and more than half the carriers. I tried to make up my mind what I should do; it would be no use chasing each other all over French Guinea. I decided to go on, just as my cousin, I learnt later, had decided to go back.

But at last when I was on the point of giving the order to march, for fear we should be caught by darkness in the bush, an answer did come, from between the big trees, from across the water, and presently a tired angry band rejoined us. Among the many paths which had to be closed with sprays, one had been left open and they had taken it. The path had narrowed into nearly nothing at all, but they went on, Laminah cutting a way for them with the sword he wore, until they reached a closed wall of greenery and knew they were lost. In such densely overgrown country it was easy enough to be lost completely within a mile of a village and for all they knew they might be ten miles from any other human beings. If it had not been for the fiver I should have gone straight on to Bamakama without knowing that they were lost, and if Laminah had not found a man who guided them to the St. Paul, a piece of luck they couldn’t have expected when once they had strayed off the main path, we should have been permanently separated, for my cousin had no idea of the route I intended to follow the other side of the St. Paul.

Another four hours’ marching along narrow winding trails through thick elephant grass brought us to Bamakama. Here there was a rest-house for travellers outside the village in a small rotting compound, but it was so long since any white man had used it that it was in a horrible state of decay, the hut was full of bugs and suddenly as we drank our tea an army of flies descended on the compound, settling all over our faces and the food. The monkey sat in a corner moaning like a child, and as the sun declined and the flies left us, the cockchafers came, detonating against the wall. A rat had died under the floor, and “the smell of decay settled over the compound. Tim was the second place where there was nothing to do but get drunk. We looked across the wall with envy towards the airy village. We were enclosed like lepers with the dead rat and the cockchafers.

And again there was the inevitable palaver. That night it was the water-carriers who caused the bother. The water for our washing and for the filter had to be carried up every day from the nearest stream in basins. Kolleva headed a deputation. I couldn’t make out clearly what it was about; a tribal dispute seemed to have split the carriers into hostile groups. They complained, I think, that Amah, the second headman, favoured the Bande carriers; they didn’t do their share of the water-carrying. They asked that Amah should cease to be second headman. The fight went on a long while and I was glad to be a little drunk. But I slept badly; what Daddy had told me in Sierra Leone came back now when my nerves were tired with the marches and the squabble. I imagined all night that leeches were falling on my face. It was really the plaster ceiling of the pretentious rest-house which the rats were demolishing. I was too drunk to remember that the mosquito-net protected me.

Galaye

The smell of the dead rat, the cockroaches which had got at our clothes and eaten them into holes, drove us away early. I was anxious above everything to get to Ganta. Mrs, Croup had spoken of it as three days away, but the chief at Bamakama seemed to think it was at least another three days off. It seemed to recede rather than approach; nobody at Bamakamft really knew the way, because Ganta was in Liberia, another country, and though the Mandingo traders recognise no boundaries, their country stretching from Timbuctoo to the Coast and Paris, across desert and forest, the ordinary tribesman has seldom moved more than a day’s march from his town. The boundaries between country and country, as between tribe and tribe, might be no more than a tiny stream the carriers waded through beneath a shower of butterflies, but they could not have been more definite if all the European display of barbed wire and Customs sheds had been visible on either bank.

The chief strapped on a sword and acted as guide. I was glad that he set so smart a pace: if we were ever to reach Ganta, I thought, the men had got to be raced through the villages between. I had promised them a short march of three hours; but I was afraid my temper would give way altogether if I had to argue them on at every village. So we raced ahead, the chief and I and Kolieva, and left my cousin and the men to follow; I knew the carriers hadn’t the resolution to stop behind without me.

It took exactly three hours to get to Galaye, a populous little town with the remains of old mud walls at the back like pieces of abandoned scenery. The rest-house here was in such a state of decay that I wouldn’t use it and chose a hut in the village instead. It was a hospitable place; few of the younger people had seen a white face before and they stood all day in the doorway. There was nothing you could do without their noticing it; to draw a handkerchief 4rom the pocket caused a craning of necks. It worked a little on the nerves, this constant stare; but you had to recognise the superiority of their attitude over the white man’s to something strange. We were as good as a circus; they had no wish to stuff us or skin us or put us in cages. The carriers, after one more dispute over the water-carrying, were very cheerful, but I knew better by now than to expect their happiness to last. Their mood changed more rapidly than April weather. They, too, were appreciating something genuinely Gallic, for the girls of Galaye had an air of greater freedom towards strangers than I saw in any other tribe : one girl in particular who, when dark fell and the drums and harps were taken out, joined in the carriers’ dances, a stamping and thrusting out of the elbows and buttocks, a caricature of sexuality. When they approved of a dancer, the others crowded round and stroked his arms and forehead, a curious intimate tactile applause.

The dancing went on for hours in a close hot circle before our hut. The moon was half full, and the increasing light worked on their spirits. This was one of the revelations of Africa, the deadness of what we think of as alive, the deadness of nature, the trees and shrubs and flowers, the vitality of what we think of as dead, the cold lunar craters. The carriers were aware of the moon with an intimacy from which we were excluded. At Galaye it was already moving in their blood, so that even Amedoo burst into the circle and danced with a sudden wild lapse from dignity. But the most grotesque of the dancers was a moron dwarf They dropped him into the ring with a couple of piccaninnies of three years old who were as tall as he, and he swayed a great inflated head, blister a pin would burst, to the beat of the rattle and then howled and wept to be released.

I lay in bed while the music went on and held Burton against the mosquito-net to let the lamplight shine feebly through on the page of cheap print. The cover was already going damp, as if the book had been left out in the dew, The word nigra caught my eye, as I listened to the feet stamping and the calls I couldn’t understand. I suddenly felt, reading the lines of Calpurnius Graecus, the irresistible tug of the familiar, a longing for flowers and dew and scent It was hard to believe they existed in the same world and that there were emotions of tenderness and regret that couldn’t be expressed with a harp, a drum and a rattle, buttocks and black teats.

Te sine, vae misere mihi Mia nigra viento, Pallentesque rosae, nee dulce rubens hyacinthus, Nullos nee myrtus nee laurus spiral odores.

I put the light out and listened to the moonlit tumult, but when it ceased and the villagers crept into their huts and put up the doors, there was such a rush of rats down the walls that I switched on my torch and saw the shadows racing down. But I had left my door open and they didn’t stay. I had the night to myself.

The Dead Forest

The next day was the eleventh of the trek, and we turned back into the great forest with very little idea of where we should spend the next night, except that I was determined it should be at least fifteen miles towards the vanishing Ganta. Examining my diary I find the first expression of a weariness which was more mental than physical Ganta, which I had thought was two days away from Zorzor, seemed to be receding. I had long given up thinking in terms of hours, but I still clung to time in the sense of darkness and daylight, not admitting yet that to be happy in Africa one must cease to count even the days and weeks and months.

The chief at Galaye told me that Ganta was still three days away, and only after Ganta would we begin to head south. Every march took us farther from the coast.

It was not that the villages were ever dull to me, and only here in French Guinea were their simplicity and hospitality a little tarnished by the touch of white rule, but the rising in the dark, the hurried breakfast, the seven hours of tramping along narrow paths through the hot-house forest with no view to either side and only occasional glimpses of sky above, this routine became almost unbearable. I was usually alone with a carrier or a guide who couldn’t speak English, for Mark and Amedoo could not keep my pace, and I had to try in vain to occupy the mind, to think of things to think about. I would calculate: I can think of this place or that person for so many hundred steps, and I would have a sense of triumph when the thought lasted me for a few dozen steps further than I had hoped. But usually it was the other way; the image or the idea lost interest a long while before I had taken the hundred paces. And this succession of thoughts had to be kept up for six or seven hours on end. I remember for what a long time I was able to think of fruit salts, for far longer and with more longing than I thought of beer or iced drinks. I suppose my digestion was suffering from the tinned foods, rough rice, the dry tough African chickens, and about five eggs a day. For the only way to economise our tinned supplies, which threatened to run short, was to eat off the country, rice, eggs and chicken, for meal after meal.

If the forest had been full of dangerous life, the day’s marches would have been more supportable. A few monkeys, a snake or two, the sound of heavy birds creaking invisibly overhead, and ants, ants everywhere, this was au the life in the dead forest The word ‘forest’ to me had always conveyed a sense of wildness and beauty, of an active natural force, but this forest was simply a green wilderness, and not even so very green. We passed on twelve-inch paths through an endless back garden of tangled weeds; they didn’t seem to be growing round us so much as dying; there was no view, no change of scene, nothing to distract the eyes, and even if there had been, we couldn’t have enjoyed the sight, for the eyes had to be kept on the ground all the way, to avoid the roots and boulders. It was a relief, a distraction, when a stream broke the path. A carrier would horse one across, for it was dangerous to wet the feet in the tiniest shallow stream because of guinea-worm which the Mandingo traders had brought down from the Sahara. The smell of the carriers had long ceased to be noticeable: I suppose our own smell by that time was bad enough, for fear of the same worm prevented JH5 bathing as the carriers did in the rivers. The guinea-worm makes its way through any sore in the foot, going up as far as the knee. When the foot is afterwards put in water the worm spews its eggs into the water through the sore. The only way to deal with it in the absence of a doctor is to find its end like a thread of cotton and wind it out in a long unbroken length round a match-stick. If the worm breaks, the leg may fester.

It was little wonder, then, that the senses were dulled and registered only acute boredom. I suppose there was some beauty in the forest, but the eye had long ceased to be aesthetic The great swallow-tailed butterflies which rose in clouds round our waists at the stream sides seemed no more worth watching than the black ants which fastened on the flesh.

Perhaps the Liberian forest is peculiar in Africa for the quality of deadness, for other writers more often complain in their parts of Africa of the noise and savagery of the jungle. M. Celine is an example. “The forest is only waiting for this signal [the sunset] to start to shake, whistle and moan in all its depths, like some huge, barbarous, unlighted railway station… .” How we would have welcomed the moans and whistles of that station. You can grow intimate with almost any living thing, transfer to it your own emotion of tenderness, nostalgia, regret, so that often of a relationship one remembers the scene with the most affection. A particular line of hedge in a Midland county, a drift of leaves in a particular wood : it is only human to imagine that we receive back from these the feeling someone left with them. But no one had ever transferred to this forest any human emotion at all. Like the shell of a house on a bankrupt housing estate it had never been lived in.

That poem of A. E. Housman’s which begins Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays.

For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways had a curious fascination for me during those weeks; it was like a succession of pleasant. sounds in a foreign language; it represented the huge difference between this Nature and what I had previously know. I used to reserve it as a last resort for when I could think of nothing else to think about and recite it very slowly to myself, wondering whether I had covered a hundred yards between the first and the last verse.

The poem had ceased to mean anything; it was impossible here to think of Nature in such terms of enchantment and nostalgia; it would have been like cherishing a dead weed in a pot, a sign of mental derangement.

And full of shade the pillared forest Would murmur and be mine… .

So Housman wrote, sharing the feeling of Wordsworth and many English Nature poets, that Nature is something alive which could be possessed as one possesses a friend or a lover, but this forest had never belonged in that way to anyone. Perhaps it was even wrong to think of it as dead, for it had never been alive.

But it was only fair, I suppose, that the moments of extraordinary happiness, the sense that one was nearer than one had ever been to the racial source, to satisfying the desire for an instinctive way of life, the sense of release, as when in the course of psychoanalysis one uncovers by one’s own effort a root, a primal memory, should have been counterbalanced by the boredom of childhood too, that agonising boredom of ‘apartness’ which came before one had learnt the fatal trick of transferring emotion, of flashing back enchantingly all day long one’s own image, a period when other people were as distinct from oneself as this Liberian forest. I sometimes wonder whether, if one had stayed longer, if one had not been driven out again by tiredness and fear, one might have relearned the way to live without transference, with a lost objectivity.

Rain in the Air

The chief from Galaye acted as our guide back from the plateau into the forest, wearing for the occasion a black tail coat and a green beret, with one of his men to follow him and carry his sword. At a large village, Pala, they told us that the next town was Bamou, a long way off; we should certainly not reach it until six, and we had started the mardi at seven. There was nowhere in between where we could sleep. The men were grumbling already as they arrived, and I could foresee a long series of angry complaints. But I wouldn’t consent to stay at Pala, (that would be to delay our arrival at Ganta too long), so I didn’t wait for all the carriers to arrive, to get together and rebel, but walked off with a guide, the hammock-men and Amedoo.

We went for more than three hours without passing a village, and the path was wide enough for the sun to scorch us incessantly; for lunch we had to make a clearing with swords in the bush itself to gain enough shade. But in the small village we reached at last I learnt to my relief of a town not more than an hour and a half away. The village chief was hospitable, bringing out gourds of palm wine for my carriers to drink, and I did not notice in time his unwillingness to offer his hand. Only after I had put out my own and he had reluctantly taken it did I see that it was covered with white sores. It may not have been leprosy, and in any case leprosy is only very slightly contagious, but it spoilt my food for me all that day.

I never knew the name of the place we reached. It cannot have been Bamou, for we must have left that path. It had a guest-house in a little enclosure just outside the town. The chief was sullen and inhospitable, he wouldn’t provide a cooked meal for the carriers, nor would he allow them to sleep in the town. He said they would cause trouble there. I bought rice from him at the highest rate I had yet paid and he left again with his headman and a little train of disapproving ancients.

The air was heavy with thunder. The carriers felt ill-as they lay about in the verandah. I sat listening to snatches of argument, until just before sunset, as the storm gathered and bore down out of the northwest, shouts and bugle-calls brought everyone to the fence. A procession was approaching the compound from the village. A man with an old sporting gun over his shoulder led the way, then a covered hammock borne by four men, attendants running on either side and one of them blowing blasts on a bugle. I thought it must be at least a French Commissioner and hoped that he would not ask to see my papers, for I had no visa which would allow us to pass through a French colony. But it wasn’t a French Commissioner who stepped out of his hammock and strutted to the gate with a dog at his heels and a riding whip hung at his wrist. He was a black with tight curled ringlets and black side-whiskers. He wore an old white topee, a Fair Isle jumper, breeches and braces and a belt, gaiters and little white kid boots. He stood swinging his whip, watching us as if we were curious caged animals, with superb arrogance. Somebody said he was the chief from Djiecke, the next town on the track to Ganta. He spoke neither English nor French, but when I asked him through Mandingo Amah how far it was to Djiecke, and told him that I intended to reach the town next day, the answer came, of course, ‘too farlittle It seemed unlikely, for it was nearly sunset and he would hardly have planned to spend the night in the bush. When he had stared at us for long enough he swaggered back to his hammock and to the sound of one more heraldic blast was borne away swaying into the forest. A heavy storm broke soon after dark: lightning like one prolonged flickering illumination. The carriers slept on the floor of the verandah. The sound of their breathing and snores was very companionable in the pounding electric night, and they kept away the rats. But die storm worried me. The dry season was supposed to last another month, but sometimes the rains came early. It would never do to be caught in the interior, for on the lower level below Ganta the ways in the wet season were impassable; Central Liberia between the villages became a swamp, and we had not yet even turned towards the south.

Cafι Bar

Suddenly in the inconsequent manner of Africa Ganta came close and we left French Guinea behind us. On the last day the colony proved more than ever French. Djiecke took us by surprise after only two hours’ march, a neat native school behind a gateway, Ecole de Djiecke, in a tidied park-like plain.

A small fussy black in a topee and European clothes and pince-nez came to meet our train from the school compound. He was very conceited, very inquisitive and we couldn’t understand each other’s French, When he learned that we were English he became deeply suspicious. He wanted to know where we had come from and when I said Sierra Leone he was convinced that I was lying. I think his geography was vague, for he couldn’t understand that we could have come from Sierra Leone by land. He wanted to know what canton we had just left, but I didn’t even know what a canton was. I thought it had something to do with Switzerland.

With every question he became more official, excited and conceited. I don’t know what impression of a foreign spy he gained from my vague manner. He said we must see the French District Commissioner, a day’s march away. He seemed to me dangerous; if he had authority in the town he might hold us up indefinitely. So I was polite, probably too polite, telling him that it was impossible, I must go straight on; for if this was Djiecke, Ganta was at last very close. I could see his little thin black body swelling under the drill, for he personified the power of France. He asked to see my passports and after a search in the baggage I found them and showed him the word ‘France’ in the list of countries for which the passport was available. I don’t think it quite satisfied him, he had more brains than I bargained for, but at that moment there was an interruption. We were standing close to the chiefs compound and a message came from him that we were to enter and rest, while chop was prepared for our men. If we had had a taste of French officialdom, now we were to taste French hospitality.

The chief had shed his oddly-assorted European clothes. He was dour and handsome in his native robe and his side-burns, squatting on the floor of his hut with his daughters and wives around him. The daughters were the prettiest women I had seen in Africa. They lay round and over him like kittens. The schoolmaster left us disapprovingly; there was a distinct atmosphere of sex and relaxation about the scene and it didn’t suit his pedagogic mind; but soon after a boy brought in a letter from him in French which one of the girls translated to her father.

I think he may have asked the chief to detain us, for it became more and more difficult to get away. Not that I really in my heart wanted to go from the moment that the chief produced a bottle of French white wine, an enamel cup, and a tin of French cigarettes. It was like a dream: ever since we had entered French Guinea our minds had continually reverted to Dakar, to the cafιs and the flowers and what seemed to us now the delicious freshness of the place where plague is endemic and the natives die of the want of will to live. I had sometimes tormented myself, washing out my mouth on the march with the warm filtered water-fruit had long since given out, without the thought of a bottle of wine.

And here it was. The chief sat grimly on the floor among his girls, with only the faintest suspicion of enjoyment about his mouth, and poured the warm sweet delicious wine into the enamel cup. He drank and passed it to me; I drank and passed it to my cousin. Back it went to the chief and was refilled. It didn’t take long for the three of us to empty the bottle. We were all a little drunk in no time; die heat of the hut, the confused tumble of half-clothed girls helped. As there was no sign of the promised chop for my men, I sent a boy out to fetch a bottle of whisky from my case. The chief had never tasted whisky before, but he had innate taste; he didn’t gulp down the neat spirit like the chief in Duogobmai. He sent a daughter for a pail of water and when the water was brought, he smelt it. It didn’t pass his inspection, he emptied it on the ground and sent her for more. Then he settled down to drink, became grimly merry without moving from the floor and forced the whisky on his favourite daughter, until she was drunk too. We grinned at each other and made friendly gestures.

The favourite daughter could speak a few words of English; her thigh under the tight cloth about her waist was like the soft furry rump of a kitten; she had lovely breasts: she was quite clean, much cleaner than we were. The chief wanted us to stay the night, and I began to wonder how far his hospitality might go. The girl was feeling a little sick with the whisky, but she never stopped smiling. I felt that she would be as unobtrusively and neatly sick as a cat and would afterwards be quite ready for more fun. A boy of about sixteen came in and knelt in front of his father. He pushed the whisky away; he wouldn’t drink it; and now he tried to stop his father drinking. He fetched a bottle and persuaded his father to put away every other drink for future use.

It became more and more like a blind in Paris; the wine, the bitter Gallic smoke, the increasing friendliness with someone you can’t speak to because you don’t know the language well enough. You’ve run across him in the Montparnasse bar and gone on exchanging drinks ever since: you speak English and he speaks French, and you don’t understand each other. There are a lot of girls about whom he seems to know and you’d vaguely like to sleep with, but you can’t be bothered because the wine’s good and you are beginning to feel a deep emotional friendship for the man on the other stool. He seems to know everyone: you don’t understand a thing, but you are happy.

We were there two hours, right into the full heat of the day; the men had their chop in the end, and the chief began to get sleepy and forgot that he was supposed to detain us. I don’t really know why we ever went; the schoolmaster was the only blot on the place; I think we might have been very happy there all night. Perhaps if I hadn’t been a bit drunk I’d have stayed, but the idea I thought I had lost, that one ought to stick to time-tables, came up again in the Parisian air, and I was a little uneasy, too, lest the schoolmaster should have sent a quick messenger to the French Commissioner and that we might find ourselves under arrest-the French colonies are very carefully preserved. So I refused to stay. Before we went I photographed the girl, but she wouldn’t be taken as she was, insisted on putting on her best dress for the picture : the chief would not be photographed. By that time two men had to support him. He followed us a little way out of the village, sleepily imploring us to stay, until we were out of ear-shot.

It was another four hours’ march to Ganta. Soon after Djiecke we left the forest behind and took a path through elephant grass towards the River Mani or St. John, which forms the boundary line between French Guinea and Liberia and rims south-west into the sea at Grand Bassa, a hundred and sixty miles away. That was where we were to end our march, though I didn’t know it then. We were now at last off the route followed by other English travellers, for Sir Alfred Sharpe in 1919 went up northwards into French Guinea, another ninety miles or so, and then retraced his steps and went down to Monrovia between the Loffa River and the St. Paul.

The Mani here was about forty yards wide with steep banks. We crossed by dug-out canoe, and the spirit of all the carriers lifted on the other side. They hadn’t really liked France, and Mark’s enthusiasm as he stepped on shore, the monkey clinging to his skull, infected them. “Now we are in our own land again.” It was an unexpected example of national feeling, for they were certainly not among their own tribe; they were in the land of the Manos, where ritual cannibalism practised on strangers has never been entirely stamped out. Amah ran up and down the line of carriers with a load on his head encouraging them to a longer stride because this was Liberia.

One came to Ganta through a series of leopard traps, winding maze-like paths between walls of plaited reed, and then out on to a beaten road, beside a straggling line of huts across a wide treeless plain, up the side of a hill and down again, with the Liberian flag flying above a whitewashed compound and more people than we had seen for weeks, Mandingos and soldiers among them. There were stores here, the first we had seen in Liberia, with the goods laid out on the ground, but the whole appearance of the place was as nomadic as a forest market. It looked as if it had been built up overnight and might be shifted next morning. It was the plain, I think, which gave it that air. One was used to villages circumscribed by a hilltop, with the burial stones and the palaver-house in the centre, looking as old as the rock itself and the cracked soil. This ribbon development along a highway which was being driven north and south had a raw look. Only the District Commissioner’s compound at one end and the little group of mission buildings a mile down the road at the other had a stable air, as if the next rains wouldn’t wash them away.

As our caravan came out on to the road from the river path and the leopard traps, a group of yellow-faced Liberians in European clothes, more like Italians than Africans, turned to watch us. One of them, the only dark-skinned one, took off his topee. Later in Tapee-Ta I was to get to know him better, and those soft sad lustrous seeking-a-friend eyes of his. He was called Wordsworth. He watched us yearningly as we toiled up the bare scorched road towards the Methodist mission. Already he was intent on joining that odd assortment of ‘characters’ (the Grants and the Kilvanes) one collects through life, vivid grotesques, people so simple that they always have the same side turned to one, damned by their unselfconsciousness to be material for the novelist, to supply the minor characters, to be endlessly caricatured, to make in their multiplicity one’s world.