Journey Without Maps

MISSION STATION

Mythology

I dreamed that I was two thousand miles away from the mud hut and someone was outside the door waiting to come in. Perhaps a goat stumbling across the threshold and the dead fire caused the dream, or maybe a memory of the masks on Harley’s table, bobbing up one after another into the sleeping mind, like grotesque balloons at a carnival released towards the ceiling, each with its individual expression of terror and power.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

Later the presence took many odd forms : a troop of black-skinned girls who carried poison flowers which it was death to touch; an old Arab; a half-caste; armed men with shaven heads and narrow eyes and the appearance of Tibetans out of a travel book; a Chinese detective.

You couldn’t call these things evil, as Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw was evil, with his carroty hair and his white face of damnation. That story of James’s belongs to the Christian, the orthodox imagination. Mine were devils only in the African sense of beings who controlled power. They were not even always terrifying. I remember that at the age of sixteen it was a being with the absurdly symbolic title of the Princess of Time who haunted my sleep. The poisoned flowers, the Tibetan guards, the old Arab whom I think of now as someone like the Mandingo chief at Koinya, were all in her service. I can still recall the dull pain in my palms and my insteps when I deliberately touched the flowers, for I was always trying to escape her, her kindliness as well as her destructiveness. Once I was incited to kill her: I was given a book of ritual, bound in limp leather like an Omar Khayyam at Christmas-time, and a dagger. But she survived into many later dreams. Any dream which opened with terror, with flight, with falling, with unseen presences and opening doors, might end with her cruel and reassuring presence.

It was only many years later that Evil came into my dreams: the man with gold teeth and rubber surgical gloves; the old woman with ringworm; the man with his throat cut dragging himself across the carpet to the bed.

Full Moon

ALONG the northern border we had been walking through the edge of the enormous bush; now we moved steadily lower and deeper into its heart. The deadness was sometimes broken by the squabble of monkeys; a baboon once crossed the path, running like an old man with the tips of its fingers just touching the ground; a leopard’s pads marked the sand by a stream, where a snake had come to drink And outside the first village, Yeibo, there was a round shallow pond under thorn trees with great carp-like fish lounging lazily in the shadows. It was still early morning, I was happy with the sense that every step was towards home, there was something peculiarly English about the fish, the pond, the quite small trees. It was a foolish mind that had come all this way to find pleasure in a sight so vaguely, so remotely English, a pleasure I felt again when we came out of the forest into a stretch of land like a Midland park; a small stream, a long undulating pasture, a few cows, and groups of trees, like elms, in the long grass. A quarter of a mile away the forest wall set a limit to England, and across the stream in single file came a few men, naked except for their loin-cloths, carrying bows and steel-tipped arrows. It was like the world of Miss Nesbit, where odd savage people appear in country lanes; they might have been coming through the Amulet out of the African forest into an English park. We passed them, going ourselves into Africa, while they with their bows and arrows, their naked cicatrised bodies, went on into the park, towards the great house and the butler’s pantry.

Six hours brought us to Peyi, where the chief was friendly and the hut clean and the village very poor. Nearly everyone was old and diseased, withered, goitered, with venereal sores. The chief had no authority; he was making a mat when we arrived, and when he had finished the villagers crowded on to it, pushing the chief off. There they lounged outside our hut until the full heat of the afternoon dispersed them, watching everything we did, and a girl had her hair deloused by an old woman with sores over her hands.

Eighteen of the carriers approached the hut; I no longer feared a strike or desertion : they were too far away from their own homes for that. And they had developed a kind of pride in the journey. It was a rare adventure in a country where carriers were usually employed from village to village by the day. I heard them sometimes on the march answering proudly “Bolahun” to questioners. It didn’t matter that these strangers had no idea where Bolahun lay. They knew what miles of forest and river they had come, how they had even passed through France, and presently were going to reach the sea.

Now they wanted to borrow threepence each out of their wages. At Ganta they had borrowed two shillings from the cook to buy a goat with, and he demanded sixpence interest, a rate of about fifty per cent a week. The rest of the money they were going to spend on palm wine and extra soup (the name they had for the horrible anonymous wedges of meat or fish with which they cooked their rice). The chief took their money, but he gave them nothing in return, and in this poor village he could find them only one pail of rice for their chop.

But, curiously enough, this didn’t matter. They bore no malice. It was the night of full moon. They had very little to eat, they had nothing to drink, the moon and its deep green light made them happy. They even shared their small meal with the chief and until very late the village was full of song and laughter and running feet They were crazy with pleasure in the small moon-filled clearing. One could only envy them: we, the civilised, had lost touch with the real lunar influence. It meant to us selfconscious emotion, crooners and little sentimental songs of lust and separation; at best a cerebral worked-up excitement. It couldn’t mean this physical outburst, this unthinking tidal urge to joy. Mark said to me on the next day’s march, “Last night we were so happylittle’ Next night to our eyes the moon would be just as full, they had no calendars to tell them that the moon was on the wane, they didn’t need calendars. Night after night they had felt the tightening of the influence that binds us to the cold empty craters; now they felt it loosen. Every month the world turned back into its empty sky.

Steve Dunbar

A young man in a Boy Scout’s hat and native robe came to meet us next day in the wide clean streets f Sakripie, where there were stores and Mandingo traders in turbans and soldiers of the Frontier Force : Paramount Chiefs town.

The Paramount Chief was away, but this was his n who came and led us to a guest-house in the chiefs compound, a huge square with a flag-pole surrounded by whitewashed huts belonging to his ves. He had the ingratiating air of a motor sales-in, but he was harassed all the time because he had authority; he was a joke, no one troubled to obey n. He had a faint hope, I think, as he sat with me the verandah of the guest-house that our coming would give him prestige. He sent for a chicken and some eggs but nobody brought them. He swore at everyone he could see; he was almost in tears with vexation.

“My name,” a voice said softly behind me, “is Steve Dunbar. I am very pleased to meet you. These chairs are yours? They are very nice. I have been looking at your beds.” I looked round. A middle-aged Mandingo in a scarlet fez and a native robe nodded and smiled. He spoke excellent English. He said, “You are travelling through our country. I hope you have met hospitality everywhere. Your chairs are very interesting. I have not seen anything lite them.”

“They fold up,” I said.

“That is very interesting. I will buy one of them.”

He told me again, “My name is Steve Dunbar. I am interested also in your bed. And this table” fit I was a card-table bought for three and elevenpence), I “That too folds up? I will buy that.”

I said, “I’m sorry. You see, we’ve got to get to Monrovia. I can’t possibly sell them before that”

He changed the subject quite suddenly. ‘This chief,” he said “is a good young man. If you warn anything done tell me.” I said I wanted chop for the men; I would pay a good dash for it in the morning. He told the chief.” The chief,” he said, “agrees.”

“I want the chop quite early,” I said. “They didn’t have much food last night.”

The chief fanned himself with the Boy Scout cap He was hot and excited. He sent several men off is different directions. “You are going to Ganta?” Steve Dunbar said.

“No, no,” I said. “To Monrovia. But first to Grand Bassa. And Tapee-Ta. How do we get to Tapee-Ta?”

“You want to see elephants?” Steve Dunbar said. “You will see plenty. Hundreds. You go to Baplai. There is a civilised man at Baplai. He is a friend of mine. Mr. Nelson. You will find him very agreeable. You may say you are my friend. From Baplai you will go to Toweh-Ta. You will see lots of elephants. They will run backwards and forwards all the time over the path.” Across Steve Dunbar’s shoulder I caught sight of Laminah’s startled face. Steve Dunbar said, “I will leave you now, but I will see you again in Monrovia and we will talk about the bed and the chair.” He stepped inside and looked at the bed again and then made off across the compound followed by his boy; he had the air of a well-established firm. The chief and I sat in silence. He had his eye on the bottle which Amedoo had put out on the card-table. Presently I could stand his sad covetousness no longer; I gave him a few fingers of neat whisky and he went away.

Almost immediately Laminah was at my side. He was excited (his woollen cap and bobble were all askew), and when he was excited it was almost impossible to understand him. I gathered he wanted a goat. ‘Tor chop?” No, it wasn’t for chop. He said something about elephants. Amedoo came forward and explained that our path from now on would be through the biggest bush, that there were lots of elephants, and the labourers wanted a goat. I still didn’t understand. He explained that elephants were frightened by the noise a goat made; it need only be a very, very small goat. It seemed a tall story, but if it made them feel safer to have a goat, I didn’t mind paying for one. Goats had only cost two shillings at Ganta. I told the Paramount Chief’s messenger, who still hung about the verandah, that we wanted to buy a goat. About an hour later a piccaninny, not more than three and a half feet high, arrived with a tiny kid slung across his shoulders. The owner wanted six shillings for it; goats were, apparently, at a premium on the edge of elephant country. The carriers were indignant; they wanted a goat, but they would lose face if their employer paid too much; they would rather dare the elephants without protection. So I refused it, even when the price went down to four shillings. The carriers had never been outside the borders of their northern tribes before; they could never understand that prices varied according to supply and demand. When the price of rice, from Sakripie onwards, began to advance, they were shocked and indignant; they felt we were being humbugged.

I learned the origin of the goat idea later at Tapee from Colonel Davis, the Kru coast warrior. Apparently a goat once made a bet with an elephant that he could eat more at a meal. The elephant ate and ate and fell asleep. When he woke the goat was standing on the top of a high rock. He said he had eaten everything around and was now going to start on the elephant. From that day all elephants have feared the voice of a goat. I’m not sure whether Colonel Davis believed the story or not.

When the sun was low a clamour of voices brought me from bed. The population of Sakripie was pouring into the compound behind two huge stilted and masked devils. They must have stood more than eighteen feet high. They wore tall witches’ hats rimmed with little shells; their faces were black, the masks looked as if they had been made out of old cotton stockings, they wore striped pyjama jackets, with the sleeves sewn up to hide the hands, and pyjama shorts, while the stilts were wound with a thinner striped material. Their performance was humorous and sophisticated. They sat down on the roof-tops and idly fanned themselves with their legs crossed, then stretched a leg right across the thatch and pretended to fall asleep. They had a sense of climax which would have earned the applause of the most sophisticated music-hall audience as they leaned back their whole stiff inarticulated length at an angle of about twenty degrees and just recovered as they began to fall. They had the usual interpreter with them. He lay on the ground while they hopped on one stilt towards him, so that it seemed almost inevitable that the wooden hoof would be planted on his face; but always at the last moment they cleared him. When the entertainment was over, they left the compound by the wall; the gateway was too low for them. They sat on the ten-foot wall and lifted over each stiff leg in turn like old men crossing a stile, and for a long while after their witch hats were visible bobbing away above the huts towards their own compound.

It was dusk when they had gone, and I began to be impatient for the carriers’ chop. It was nearly forty-eight hours since they had eaten a really good meal. I sent a messenger for the chief, who said that the chop was at that moment being cooked. I made the mistake of giving him whisky, thinking it would make him more ready to do what I wanted, but it only made him sleepy and confused and less able than ever to deal with his disobedient townspeople. When it was quite dark and we were sitting in the compound squeezing limes into our whisky, he returned with a pretty nubile girl who was one of his two wives. His father the Paramount Chief, he said, had fifty-five. He drank more whisky and became rather fuddled. I was aware of the carriers hovering miserably out of range of my hurricane lamp; I wanted to impress them that I was doing something about their food, I was feeling guilty sitting there drinking whisky, waiting for my own chop to be served. I told the chief he was lying, that he had done nothing about the men’s chop, and he leapt up, dignified and drunk and a little too plausible like the motor salesman he should have been. He said he would show me that he was not a liar; the chop was cooking now-I had only to follow him, and he set off with long strides towards the town. I called out into the shadows for Vande and pursued him at the run. It was a very lovely night; I had never seen so many stars; the whisky made me want to be at peace with all the world; I was quite ready to take the chief’s word when he halted outside one of the furthest huts and pointed to a circle of women, their faces lit by the slow low flames of the wood fire on which they were boiling a great cauldron of rice. “Is it enough?” I asked Vande, and Vande said, Yes, it was enough. Neither of us could speak the language and ask the women whether the food was really intended for the carriers. A few. sullen notabilities of the place loitered at the edge of the dark, hating us, hating the young drunk chief. We returned and presently I went to bed. After an hour or two someone moved in my hut. It was Amedoo come to tell me that the carriers had received no chop at all and had gone hungry to their beds.

The Tax-gatherer

The dry weather was breaking: in a few weeks the way to Grand Bassa would be impossible. When I woke at half-past five the rain was pouring down, the empty compound was lit by green lightning. The chief’s cows, great cream-coloured beasts with curled horns and velvet eyes, were standing close against the women’s huts for shelter. It looked as if we shouldn’t get away till late. There was no sign of the carriers : it was not until half-past six when the rain had stopped, though the lightning flickered on, that they drifted into the compound, wet and hungry and miserable.

I called Vande, gave him half a crown to buy a goat with whenever he chose, and told them to cook the little rice we had with us and eat it before starting. Then the young chief appeared in the compound; he had an aching head and a dry mouth, and he was embarrassed and ashamed. I pretended not to notice him until he climbed on to my verandah, and then I didn’t offer him a chair. I waited until my carriers were close and then I cursed him. I was very Imperialist, very prefectorial as I told him that a chief must be judged by his discipline, that he ought not to allow his headman to disobey him. He couldn’t tell my satiric self-criticism as the ghost of Arnold of Rugby addressed his head prefect through my lips.

We did not get away from Sakripie till nine-thirty; we had never before been so late in starting, for by ten the heat was always intense. The paths were rougher than any we had encountered since Zigita, and the storm gave us an indication of how impossible the route would be when the rains set in. Already the paths were turning into swamps and the men had sometimes to wade waist-deep in water. We were not taking the quickest route to Tapee, which would have involved two long and scorching days on a path cleared of shade, and the villagers we now passed saw white faces for the first time. They ran screaming beside us, waving sprays of leaves, until we reached the boundary of the village land; there they always stopped at some invisible line across the forest path. Once they tried to seize my cousin’s hammock and rush it triumphantly through a village, but Amedoo drew his sword and held them off.

After five hours we reached Baplai. We were by this time among the Gio tribe, who live on the extreme edge of subsistence in the great bush. The steep pointed roofs were falling in, and the inhabitants were quite naked except for loin-cloths. They were so thin one expected to see the bones through the veneral sores. The presence of a ‘civilised man’, however, ensured their keeping a rest-house, one musty little hut with two rooms the size of large dog kennel, where, I suppose, Liberian Government agents slept if ever they came up into the Gio tribe.

Mr. Nelson appeared from his own hut next door. He wore a pair of torn white trousers, backless slippers on his grey naked feet and a torn pyjama jacket which had lost most of its buttons. On his head was a kind of rough-rider’s hat, and his eyeballs were yellow and malarious. All vitality, except a little malice and covetousness, had been drained out of the half-cast, who lived here, year in, year out, squeezing taxes out of the bare village, with no pay but the percentage he chose to steal. He was officially reckoned civilised because he could speak English and write his name.

When I came in with my carriers he thought I was a Government agent and asked me what my ‘privileges’ were: how many free labourers I was allowed, how many hampers of rice unpaid for from this starved village. I said I had no privileges but wished to buy food for my men.

“Buy?” Mr. Nelson said, “Buy? That’s not so easy.” He said with a faint flicker of hatred, “These people would rather be forced to give than sell.” Later I photographed him with his wife, an old Gio woman naked to the waist, and he came and sat beside me and talked languidly of politics. I spoke of the coming election. He said that Mr. King had no chance of re-election, but all his opinion meant was that he owed his position, if you could call his dreary exile by that name, to Mr. Barclay’s party. If King succeeded Barclay, even the Nelsons would be ruined. I asked him about Mr. Faulkner, who contested the election in 1928 against King and who had started the League of Nations inquiry into slavery. Mr. Faulkner had won the uneasy respect of everyone in Liberia; he had refused minor offices in every Government; he had spent all his own money, earned as an electrical engineer and the owner of Monrovia’s only refrigerating plant, in fighting president after president in the cause of reform. “But no,” Mr. Nelson said, turning his yellow malicious eyes over the pointed leaking huts, “we don’t like Faulkner.” After a while he found enough vitality to explain, “You see, he has an idea.”

“What idea?” I said.

“Nobody knows,” Mr. Nelson said, “but we don’t like it.”

A young man came out of the forest in the evening light followed by a boy with a gun. He was a native, with a round sad gentle face, dressed in plus-fours with bright little tassels below the knee and the same rough-rider hat as Mr. Nelson wore. He introduced himself: he was Victor Prosser, a Bassa man, schoolmaster of Toweh-Ta. He had been on a visit to the Catholic priest at Sanoquelleh, two days’ march away, to make his confession and fetch back to school his youngest pupil. He was a devout young man who had been educated by the Catholic fathers on the Coast, and was now established as the head of a little mission school. When he heard that I was a Catholic too, he was overjoyed. He sat there beside Mr. Nelson, repeating over and over again in a soft hesitating English I had to bend my head to catch, “That’s very good. That’s good. Very good. That is good.” Mr. Nelson eyed him sourly and cynically and left us.

Victor Prosser said that he would call his youngest pupil to read me the Catechism, and gave an order to the boy with the gun. He didn’t ask whether I would like, to hear the child; he assumed that any Catholic would be pleased to hear the Catechism recited at any time. The piccaninny appeared : a tiny creature of about three years old, dressed in nothing but a transparent shirt. The dark settled over Baplai as he began rapidly to read, his pronunciation so odd that I could only recognise occasional words-venial : purgatory: Communion of Saints. Victor Prosser interrupted him, “What is purgatory?” and the small Gio repeated rapidly the definition established by I know not what council of the medieval church, “Purgatory is that state …” He wasn’t really reading, I could tell that : he had learnt the whole thing off by heart, but if I were inclined to criticise the value of that, there before me was Victor Prosser who had in his time too been a piccaninny with nothing but a retentive memory for words which meant nothing to him at all, and now sat there visibly entranced over ‘purgatory’ and ‘the communion of saints’. The child, too, had an ancient English reader with little steel engravings of ladies in bustles and gentlemen with trousers buckled below their boots. Victor Prosser refused the drink I offered him and, rising to go, said that he would lead us himself next morning on our road as far as Toweh-Ta.

So this bare grimy pool in the deep forest had more goodness in it than we had expected : even the fat chief in his dirty robe and battered bowler, who had greeted us so surlily when we entered, mistaking us, as Mr. Nelson had done, for Government agents, proved himself to possess a kindly heart. Amah and Vande were quite drunk with palm wine long before dark, and when we ourselves were sitting at dinner the waving of half a dozen torches announced the chief’s approach with the carriers’ chop. He stood there swaying in front of us between two tipsy torch-bearers, while Vande whispered in my ear, “Chief good man. Chief very good man,” and his men brought up between the pointed huts, under the light of the flaming splinters, bowl after bowl of food. The carriers had never seen such a feast. Its stink reeked in the hot flyey night, the stink of fourteen bowls of chop and three bowls of meat scraps.

Later I was a little drunk myself, not this time for fear of rats but from mere good fellowship. I remember wandering round the village listening to the laughter and the music among the little glowing fires and thinking that, after all, the whole journey was’ worth while : it did reawaken a kind of hope in human nature. If one could get back to this bareness, simplicity, instinctive friendliness, feeling rather than thought, and start again …

I was more spellbound, I suppose, than Vande, who clutched my sleeve in the shadow of a hut and begged me to take the half-crown I had given him that morning into safe keeping: he was afraid to carry such wealth about him among this low bush tribe. He took a green leaf out of his pocket and unwrapped it : inside the leaf was a matchbox : inside the matchbox another leaf, and inside that the silver coin. Then he went back to his palm wine and later I encountered him again wandering in blissful drunkenness, hand in hand with the headman of the village, who had reserved for him a special bowl.

“All Hail, Liberia, Hail!”

I woke at five. In my dream someone had been reciting Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christs Nativity. The version belonged entirely to sleep, but it seemed to me more moving than any poetry I had ever heard before. Two lines, “Angels bright Bathed in white light”, brought tears to my eyes, and for a long while after I woke I believed them to be beautiful and even to have been written by Milton. The darkness was thinning behind the pointed huts. The smell of goats blew in on the damp misty wind. It was Victor Prosser, I suppose, who was responsible, who had brought the idea of God and heavenly hierarchies, of crystal spheres and light insufferable, into the empty pagan land.

I said goodbye to the chief and Mr. Nelson. When I gave the chief a present of money he was taken aback, he wasn’t used to payment and automatically held it out to the tax-gatherer, and automatically Mr. Nelson’s hand moved towards it. Then he remembered he was observed and turned the movement into a jest, a hollow jest unshared by “the drained malarious eyes.

Victor Prosser had gone ahead with my cousin. There were a lot of things he wanted to learn before he reached Toweh-Ta. Was it true that Queen Elizabeth was a Protestant, and Mary Queen of Scots a Catholic like himself? Where did the Thames rise? Was London on the Tiber as well as the Thames? Were Sweden and Switzerland the same country? He asked what London was like, and my cousin chose to tell him of the underground trains, but it wasn’t an easy idea to convey to someone who had never seen an ordinary train. “Very remarkable,” he said coldly and disbelievingly at the end of it and changed the subject by humming God Save the King. The boy with the gun walked behind and last followed the tiny piccaninny in the transparent vest. Victor Prosser walked very slowly, and with some pain, because he wore backless slippers for the sake of his prestige as head teacher of Toweh-Ta.

He asked my cousin to join him in singing God Save the King, which the Catholic missionaries on the Coast had taught him; I can’t imagine why, for they were all of them Irish. He said he knew some Protestant hymns and insisted they should sing Onward, Christian Soldiers together as they picked their way through the Liberian jungle. When I joined them he and his two schoolboys were singing the Liberian national anthem :

All hail, Liberia, hail I

All hail, Liberia, hail!

This glorious land of liberty shall long be ours,

Tho’ new her name, green be her fame,

And mighty be her powers.

In joy and gladness with our hearts united,

We’ll shout the freedom of a land benighted.

Long live Liberia, happy land,

A home of glorious liberty by God’s command,

All hail, Liberia, hail!

All hail, Liberia, hail!

In union strong success is sure, we cannot fail

With God above our rights to prove.

We will o’er all prevail.

With heart and hand our country’s cause

defending, We’ll meet the foe with valour unpretending. Long live Liberia, happy land, A home of glorious liberty by God’s command.

The patriotic sentiments sounded better as I heard them later bawled by a school of two hundred children in Monrovia; here it was “the land benighted”, the tall trees standing like cliffs of dull green stone on either side, which really prevailed. After a while Victor Prosser ceased to sing and dropped farther and farther behind in his flopping slippers. I could hear him humming Venite, Adoremus, as we passed the coffin-shaped holes dug by some Dutch prospector, who had been that way alone a year before.

Toweh-Ta was quite a large town; a Paramount Chief had his compound there, and the forest was cleared away from its outskirts. A broad bare road sloped up to it and a big square hut behind a fence at the beginning of the road was Victor Prosser’s school. His manner had altered; here he was someone of importance. It was about half-past nine by our time, which agreed roughly with the handsome silver watch Victor Prosser had won on the Coast. School, he said, would have started; his assistant would be controlling the boys till his coming, and he asked us in to see the class at work. But when he opened the door there was no class : only a little room of empty benches, a cane balanced on two nails, a desk which just succeeded in standing on four loose crooked legs.

And when Victor Prosser angrily demanded why the school bell had not been rung, the young assistant pointed to a rusty kitchen alarm clock on the desk By his time it was only eight-forty-five. Victor Prosser was embarrassed : we all compared watches : then he rang the bell, put the clock to nine and led us up the hill to the Paramount Chiefs cookhouse.

This impressive building was too large for me to photograph: I couldn’t get far enough from it. A circular building with open sides, it had a huge cone chimney of smoothly plaited reeds. Where it fitted down over us like a fool’s cap it must have been about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and it narrowed very gradually until through the top, more than the height of Salisbury Cathedral nave, a handkerchief of sky was visible. Here the town chief came and dashed me a chicken and a hamper of rice-embarrassingly, for the hamper was a man’s load and my cousin’s hammock-men had had to be reduced to three.

It was another five hours’ march to Greh, by a track of appalling monotony. I tried to think of my next novel, but I was afraid to think of it for long, for then there might be nothing to think about next day. Greh, at the end of it all, proved an even more primitive village than Baplai. It was impossible for us to sleep in the huts, for their roofs were built so low that we could not stand upright, and there was no room for the poles of the mosquito-nets. So I ordered our beds to be put up in the cookhouse in the centre of the village, to Amedoo’s distress; he had never travelled before with white people outside Sierra Leone, and we lost caste by exposing ourselves to the stares of the villagers in the wall-less cookhouse.

There was one boy, the chiefs son, who could speak English, for he had been educated on the Coast and called himself Samuel Johnson, and there were strange bits and pieces of ‘civilisation’ scattered about the primitive place, which seemed to indicate that at last one was going south. In the cookhouse someone had painted little bright childlike pictures of steamships; a boy carrying an umbrella was naked except for a piece of blue cloth strung on beads over the genitals and a European schoolboy’s belt with a snake clasp which he wore halfway up his torso, between his breasts and navel; and what seemed another scrap of ‘civilisation’, for sexual inversion is rare among the blacks, a pair of naked ‘pansies’ stood side by side all day with their arms locked and their hair plaited in ringlets staring at me. Vande got drunk again with palm wine and Amah cut off the top of his finger with one of my swords chopping meat for the carriers’ meal. I felt irritated with everyone and everything; I could no longer afford to drink much whisky, for my case was nearly exhausted; I went to bed and lay awake all night because the goats came blundering in, tripping up over our boxes. I was vexed with them in a personal way, as if they could help their stupidity, their clumsiness. I would have exchanged them happily for rats; rats were almost as noisy, but I told myself that there was something purposeful in their noise; they knew what they were doing, but these goats were stupid. … I could have cried with exhaustion and anger and want of sleep.

And then, when he came in the morning to wake me, Amedoo said that Laminah was too sick to walk. He had lain awake all night in pain from his gum where the tooth had been drawn. The aspirin I had given him was useless. Now he was getting a little sleep for the first time. This was far more serious than the sickness of a carrier; I had less responsibility for a carrier; he was in his own country if not in his own tribe; but Laminah I had brought from another country, he couldn’t be simply jettisoned. But neither could I bear the thought of another day in Greh. I had promised the carriers a rest in Tapee-Ta because that was a large place with a District Commissioner where I could hope to buy fresh fruit, which we were beginning to need badly. Even limes had given out at Sakripie and we had seen no oranges for two weeks, but in that respect Tapee was to disappoint us.

I suggested to Amedoo that Laminah should stay behind for a day and we would wait for him at Tapee-Ta. But Amedoo said that he was afraid of being left. “This is Gio country,” Amedoo explained, “they chop people here.” So my cousin gave up the hammock to Laminah, who looked half dead when he was laid in it; and I wondered what my conscience would say to me if he died, if my curiosity for new experiences led to the death of someone so charming, so simple, capable of such enjoyment. I was afraid of blood poisoning, but I need not have been frightened.. I think it was cowardice Laminah was suffering from, for he recovered very quickly at Tapee.

Three hours through the forest brought us out into a rough road as wide as Oxford Street. Here was an example of what the President had told me of the road-building in the interior. Although the road was too rough for any kind of mechanical transport, it was impressive to see the enormous rampart of trees on either side from which it had been cut.

We were coming in range again of Liberian authority. I had already heard tales of the half-caste Commissioner at Tapee-Ta, and I was anxious to meet him. But I had not foreseen the extent of my good fortune. Colonel Elwood Davis, the leader of the campaign on the Kru Coast, the man responsible for the atrocities described in the British Blue Book, was at Tapee-Ta; I heard his name repeated by passing natives all along the great four-mile stretch of road. His name carried weight; his friends in admiration and his enemies in derision, I discovered later, called him “The Dictator of Grand Bassa”.

The road did not stretch as far as Tapee-Ta. After an hour we reached the end, where a gang of naked men was at work felling an enormous silvery cotton tree in the centre of the road. They had dug a trench about three feet deep and squatted in it singing and hacking at the trunk with ordinary bush cutlasses, the rhythm given them by two men with drums. Then there were several more hours of forest path before, in the hottest part of the day, when the sun was directly overhead, we came out of the forest on to a wide exposed road again. The powdered soil was quite white under the sun: it blinded the eyes, even behind smoked glasses.

Amedoo joined me: he had been talking to Majk and the other carriers, and he was uneasy about the great man at Tapee. He was a wicked man, he said, “Will he make trouble for massa?” I wasn’t at all sure that he mightn’t. The Liberians were under the impression that I was travelling only in the Western Province, and here I was, a long way to the east, in the Central Province. I had no proper papers: my Liberian visa only gave me permission to land at accredited ports.

I was a little uneasy. I hadn’t met Colonel Davis then and I think I pictured him as something rather ferocious in the manner of Emperor Christophe. I couldn’t help remembering the Blue Book phrases; the murdered children, the women in the burning huts, Nimley’s pathetic dignity, “And when I learnt that Colonel Davis had fought with Tiempoh, who are my children …” It certainly did seem to me that there might be trouble.

I was more uneasy still when we came in sight of the District Commissioner’s compound (the town of Tapee lay beyond). It was an impressive group of verandahed bungalows behind a stockade with an armed sentry at every gate, and the Liberian flag flying from a staff in the middle. Although it was time for siesta, there seemed to be a lot of movement; many things were going on. From the journalist’s point of view, I seemed to have come at a favourable moment, but from the Liberian point of view I couldn’t help feeling that I must look very like a spy (the moment was too opportune to be accidental) as I led my odd caravan round the stockade to the main gate.