By Graham Greene

Novels

THE MAN WITHIN

it’s a battlefield

ENGLAND MADE -ME
BRIGHTON ROCK
THE POWER AND THE GLORY
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
THE END OF THE AFFAIR

Short Stories

NINETEEN STORIES

Entertainments

STAMBOUL TRAIN

A GUN FOR SALE

THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT

THE MINISTRY OF FEAR

THE THIRD MAN and THE FALLEN IDOL

Travel

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS
THE LAWLESS ROADS’

Essays

THE LOST CHILDHOOD

Plays

THE LIVING ROOM

JOURNEY
WITHOUT MAPS

A Travel Book

GRAHAM GREENE

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD • LONDON

MELBOURNE

TORONTO

FIRST PUBLISHED 193$

uniform edition (reset) 1950, 1953

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE WINDMILL PRESS,
KINGSWOOD, SURREY

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

SIX years after this book was written I found myself
living in Sierra Leone—a writer should be careful
where he goes for pleasure in peacetime, for in war¬
time he is only too likely to return there to work. It
was odd flying up from Lagos, following from the sky
the line of surf along the Liberian coast, seeing the
huddle of tiny shacks which called itself Grand Bassa,
where I had dismissed my carriers, passing over the
small white isolated building which was the British
Consulate at Monrovia. It was odd too retracing my
steps from Freetown to Kailahun, travelling in the
same tiny lamp-lit train, staying in the same rest-
houses.

I can look back now with a certain regret at the
hard words I used about Freetown, for Freetown is
now one of the homes I have lived and worked in
through all the seasons . 1 have been able to recognise
in myself after a year’s sojourn the inertia which as a
tourist I condemned so harshly in other people. But
if there are fallacies into which the passing visitor
falls, there are fallacies too which come from a close
acquaintance. After a little while there is so much
one ceases to notice, and if I were writing of Freetown

Vi PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

now, how unnaturally rosy would my picture he, for
1 begm to remember mainly the sunsets when all the
laterite paths turned suddenly for a few minutes the
colour of a rose, the old slavers* fort with the cannon
lying in the grass, the abandoned railway track with
the chickens pecking in and out of the little empty
rotting station, the taste of the first pink gin at six
o’clock, I have begun to forget what the visitor
noticed so clearly—the squalor and the unhappiness
and the involuntary injustices of tired men, But as
that picture is true too, I let it stand .

London, November 1946

CONTENTS

PART I

Page

Chapter One: The Way to Africa i

Chapter Two: The Cargo Ship 13

Chapter Three: The Home from Home 32

part n

Chapter One: Western Liberia 83

Chapter Two: His Excellency the President 117
Chapter Three: Into Buzie Country 152

Chapter Four: Black Montparnasse 174

part m

Chapter One: Mission Station 203

Chapter Two: “Civilised Man 99 220

Chapter Three: The Dictator of Grand Bassa . 243
Chapter Four: The Last Lap 260

Chapter Five: Postscript in Monrovia 281

Illustrations at pages 1 18-119

‘O do you imagine/ said fearer to farer.

That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?’

— W. H. Auden

The life of an individual is in many respects liVp a
child’s dissected map. If I could live a hundred years,
keeping my intelligence to the last, I feel as if I could
put the pieces together until they made a properly
connected whole. As it is, I, like all others, find a
certain number of connected fragments, and a larger
number of disjointed pieces, which I might in tim<»
place in their natural connection. Many of these
pieces seem fragmentary, but would in time show
themselves as essential parts of the whole. Wha t
strikes me very forcibly is the arbitrary and as it were
accidental way in which the lines of junction appear
to run irregularly among the fragments. With every
decade I find some new pieces coming into place.
Blanks which have been left in former years find their
complement among the undistributed fragments. If
I could look back on the whole, as we look at the
child's map when it is put together, I feel that I
should have my whole life intelligently laid out
before me... .

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

PARTI

CHAPTER ONE >,

THE WAY TO AFRICA

Harvest Festival

The tall black door in the narrow city street remained
closed. I rang and knocked and rang again. I could
not hear the bell ringing; to ring it again and again
was simply an act of faith or despair, and later sitting
before a hut in French Guinea, where I never meant
to find myself, I remembered this first going astray,
the buses passing at the comer and the pale autumn
sun.

An errand boy came to my help, asking me whether
I wanted the Consul, and when I said yes, that was
what I wanted, the boy led me straight to the entrance
of St. Dunstan’s Church and up the steps and into the
vestry. It wasn’t the sort of beginning I’d expected
when I was accumulating the tent I never used, the
hypodermic syringe I left behind, the automatic pistol
which remained hidden underneath boots and shoes
and bags of silver in the money-box. They were pre¬
paring for the harvest festival; the vestry was
crowded with large dressy yellow blooms and litters
of vegetable marrow; I couldn’t see the Consul any¬
where. The errand boy peered among the flowers in
the dim light and at last pointed to a little intent
woman bent above the blooms. “There she is,* he
said, “that’s her. She’ll tell you.”

I felt very self-conscious, nicking* mv way among

*'A *

2

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the vegetables in St. Dunstan’s, asking: “Could you

by any chance tell me? Is the Liberian Consul-?”

But she knew and I left that street for another.

It was three o’clock and lunch at the Consulate was
just over. Three men, I could not distinguish their
nationality, overcrowded the tiny room which was
deeply buried in the huge new glittering office block.
The window-sill was lined with old telephone direc¬
tories, school textbooks of chemistry. One man was
washing up lunch into a basin stuck in the top of a
waste-paper basket. Unidentifiable yellow threads
like bast floated in the greasy water. The
poured a kettle of boiling water from a gas jet over a
plate which he held above the basket; then he wiped
the plate with a cloth. The table was littered with
bursting parcels of what looked like stones, and the
lift porter kept on putting his head in at the door
and flinging down more parcels on the floor. The
room was like a shabby caravan held up for a
moment in a smart bright street. One doubted
whether, returning in a few hours’ time to the gleam¬
ing mechanised block, one would still find it there; it
would almost certainly have moved on.

But everyone was very kind. It all came down to a
question of paying money; no one asked me why I
wanted to go, although I had been told by many
authorities on Africa that the Republic of Liberia
resented intruders. In the Consulate they had little
guttural family jokes among themselves. “Before the
war,” a large man said, “you didn’t need passports.
Such a fuss. Only to the Argentine,” and he looked
across at the man who was making out my papers.
“If you wanted to get to the Argentine you even had

JLJbiiL WAY TO AFRICA

3

to give your finger-prints a month ahead, so that
Scotland Yard and Buenos Aires could get together.
All the scoundrels in the world went to the
Argentine.”

I examined the usual blank map upon the wall, a
few towns along the coast, a few villages along the
border. “Have you been to Liberia?” I asked.

“No, no,” the large man said. “We let them come
to us.”

The other man stuck a round red seal on my pass¬
port; it bore the National Mark, a three-masted ship,
a palm tree, a dove flying overhead, and the legend
“The love of liberty brought us here”. Above the
same redTseal I had to sign the “Declaration of an
Alien about to depart for the Republic of Liberia.”

I have informed myself of the provisions under
the Immigration Law, and am convinced that I
am eligible for admission into the Republic there¬
under.

I realise that if I am one of a class prohibited
by law from admission, I will be deported or de¬
tained in confinement.

I solemnly swear that the above statements are
true to the best of my knowledge and that I fully
intend when in the Republic to obey and support
the laws and constituted authorities thereof.

The only thing which I knew of the law was that it
forbade a white man to enter the country except
through the recognised ports unless he had paid a
large sum for an explorer’s licence. I intended to
enter the country from the British border and make

6 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

his goods, but in this country the buyer enforces
the price to suit his convenience. . . .

The Government can kill all the people of Sass-
town and all the tribes of the Kru Coast before we
surrender to the Government. We will not return
to the coast or surrender until we hear from the
British Consul in Monrovia that there will be no
more war. Then we will return to Old Sass-
town. . . .

There was something satisfyingly complete about
this picture. It really seemed as though you couldn’t
go deeper than that; the agony was piled on in the
British Government Blue Book with a real effect of
grandeur; the little injustices of Kenya became
shoddy and suburban beside it.

And it was saved from melodrama by its irony, by
the fact that the Republic was founded as an example
to all Africa of a Christian and self-governing state.
An American philanthropic society at the beginning
of the nineteenth century (many of its directors,
it is said, were slave-owners who found it con¬
venient thus to get rid of their illegitimate children)
began to ship released slaves to the Grain Coast of
Africa. Land was bought from the native rulers and
a settlement established at Monrovia. “The love of
liberty brought us here,” but one can hardly blame
these first half-caste settlers when they found that
love of their own liberty was not consistent with the
liberty of the native tribes. The history of the
Republic was very litde different from the history of
neighbouring white colonies: it included the same
broken contracts, the same resort to arms, the same

THE WAY TO AFRICA

V

gradual encroachment, even the same heroism among
the early settlers, the peculiarly Protestant character¬
istic of combining martyrdom with absurdity. There
were, for example, the black Quakers from Pennsyl¬
vania, teetotallers and pacifists, who when they were
attacked by Spanish slavers depended on prayer and
were massacred. Only a hundred and twenty escaped
and settled in Grand Bassa.

From the first these American half-caste slaves were
idealists in the American manner. Their Declaration
of Independence, when the Republic was declared,
had the glossy white marble effect of the American.
The-year was 1847, but the phrases were eighteenth
century; they belonged to Washington; they had the
rhetoric of an expensive tomb. The inalienable rights
of life and liberty gravely led off the scroll; but then
one passed to “the right to acquire, possess, enjoy,
and defend property”. To-day the ‘ideals’ are still
American, something a little like the American of
Tammany Hall; the descendants of the slaves have
taken to politics with' the enthusiasm of practised
crap players.

“If you desire the prosperity of your people, the
independence of your Government, a place of honour
for the Lone Star among the flags of all nations, you
will support the re-election of President Barclay in
this campaign. ...”

This too attracted me. There seemed to be a seedi¬
ness about the place you couldn’t get to the same
extent elsewhere, and seediness has a very deep
appeal: even the seediness of civilisation, of the sky-
signs in Leicester Square, the ‘tarts’ in Bond Street,
the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court

a JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Road, the motor salesmen in Great Portland Street. It
seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia
for something lost; it seems to represent a stage
further back.

Streets that follow like a tedious argument of in¬
sidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

But there are times of impatience, when one is less
content to rest at the urban stage, when one is willing
to suffer some discomfort for the chance of finding—
there are a thousand names for it. King Solomon’s
Mines, the “heart of darkness” if one is romantically
inclined, or more simply, as Herr Heuser puts it in
his African novel. The Inner Journey, one’s place in
time, based on a knowledge not only of one’s present
but of the past from which one has emerged. There
are others, of course, who prefer to look a stage ahead,
for whom Intourist provides cheap tickets into a
plausible future, but my journey represented a dis¬
trust of any future based on what we are.

The motive of a journey deserves a little attention.
It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West
Africa in preference to Switzerland. The psycho¬
analyst, who takes the images of a dream one by
one—“You dreamed you were asleep in a forest.
What is your first association to forest?” — finds that
some images have immediate associations; to others
the patient can bring out nothing at all; his brain is
like a cinema in which the warning ‘Tire” has been
cried; the exits are jammed with too many people
trying to escape, and when I say that to me Africa

THE WAY TO AFRICA

9

has always seemed an important image, I suppose
that is what I mean, that it has represented more
than I could say. “You dreamed you were in Africa.
Of what do you think first when I say the word
Africa, Arica?” and a crowd of words and images,
witches and death, unhappiness and the Gare St.
Lazare, the huge smoky viaduct over a Paris slum,
crowd together and block the way to full consciousness.

But to the words 'South Africa’ my reaction, I
find, is immediate: Rhodes and the British Empire
and an ugly building in Oxford and Trafalgar
Square. After ‘Kenya’ there is no hesitation: ‘gentle¬
man farmers, aristocracy in exile and the gossip
columns’. ‘Rhodesia’ produces: ‘failure, Empire
Tobacco’, and ‘failure’ again.

It is not then any part of Africa which acts so
strongly on this unconscious mind; certainly no part
where the white settler has been most successful in
reproducing the conditions of his country, its morals
and its popular art. A quality of darkness is needed,
of the inexplicable. This Africa may take the form
of an unexplained brutality as when Conrad noted in
his Congo diary: “Thursday, 3rd July . . . Met an
off“ of the State inspecting. A few minutes after¬
wards saw at a camp place the dead body of a
Backongo. Shot? Horrid smell”; or a sense of despair
as when M. C&ine writes: “Hidden away in all this
flowering forest of twisted vegetation, a few deci¬
mated tribes of natives squatted among fleas and flies,
crushed by taboos and eating nothing all the time
but rotten tapioca.” The old man whom I saw beatei?
with a club outside the poky little prison at Tapec-Ta,
the naked widows at Tailahun covered with yellow

10

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

clay squatting in a hole, the wooden-toothed devil
swaying his raffia skirts between the huts seem like
the images in a dream to stand for something of
importance to myself.

To-day our world seems peculiarly susceptible to
brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the
pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who
have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they
have begun living again at a level below the cerebral.
We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a
revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs
between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely
than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea.
It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever
at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness,
to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration
have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to
discover if one can from what we have come, to recall
at which point we went astray.

Via Liverpool

But none the less I was a little scared at the prospect
of going back by way of Africa alone; I feel very
grateful to my cousin, who was willing to accompany
me, to share the journey, for which no maps were
to be bought, from its start in the restaurant car of
the 6.5 from Euston, as we sat before the little pieces
of damp white fish. A headline told me that there
was another due in a trunk murder case; a man on
the dole had killed hi ms elf; while along the line the
smaller stations were dashed out like so many torches
plunged in water.

THE WAY TO AFRICA

II

The huge Liverpool hotel had been designed with¬
out aesthetic taste but with the right ideas about com¬
fort and a genuine idea of magnificence. It could
probably house as many passengers as an Atlantic
liner; passengers, because no one goes to Liverpool
for pleasure, to the little cramped square and the low
sky-signs which can almost be touched with the hand,
where all the bars and the cinemas close at ten. But
there was a character hidden in this hotel; it wasn’t
chic, it wasn’t bright, it wasn’t international; there
remained somewhere hidden, among its long muffled
corridors, beneath the huge cliff-like fall of its walls,
the idea of an English inn; one didn’t mind asking
for muffins or a pint of bitter, while the boats hooted
in the Mersey and the luggage littered the hall; there
was quite probably a boots. Anyway enough re¬
mained for me to understand the surprise of Henry
James when he landed in England, “that England
should be as English as, for my entertainment, she
took the trouble to be.”

The natural native seediness had not been lost in
the glitter of chromium plate; the muffin had
been overwhelmingly, perhaps rather nauseatingly,
enlarged. If the hotel were silly, it was only because
magnificence is almost always a little silly. The mag¬
nificent gesture seldom quite comes off. When on
rare occasions beauty and magnificence do coincide,
one gets a sense of the theatre or the films, it is “too
good to be true”. I find myself always tom between
two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than
it is and the belief that when it appears better k
is really worse. But in the huge lounge at Liverpool,
like the lounge of a country inn fifty times magnified,

12

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

one was at home on the vast expanse of deep dark
carpet, only one business man asleep with his mouth
open; at home as one would certainly not have been
if the Hollywood imagination had run riot. One was
protectively coloured, one was seedy too.

Next morning, in the public-house near the Prince’s
Stage, four middle-aged women sat dr inking with an
old dirty man of eighty-four. Three had the dust¬
bin look; they carried about them the air of tene¬
ments, of lean cats and shared wash-houses; the
fourth had risen a little way in the world, she was
the old man’s daughter over from America for
Christmas. “Have another drink, Father?” He was
seeing her off. Their relationship was intimate and
merry; the whole party had an air of slightly dis¬
reputable revelry. To one the party didn’t really
matter; she had caught the American accent. To the
other women, who must return to the dustbin, it was
perilous, precarious, breath-taking; they were happy
and aghast when the old man drew out a pound note
and stood a round himself. “Well, why shouldn’t
he?” the daughter asked them, asked Jackie boy, the
bar-tender, the beer advertisements, the smutty air,
the man who came in selling safety-razor blades, half
a dozen for threepence, “it’s better than spending it
on a crowd of strange dames.”
w Liverpool waterside at least had not changed
since Jamess day: “The black steamers knocking
about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that
they seemed to touch it with their funnels, and in
the thickest, windiest light”;—even the colour was
the same, the grey mildness, shading away into black
at every pretext ”

THE CARGO SHIP

13

The cargo ship lay right outside the Mersey in the
Irish Sea; a cold January, wind blew across the tender;
people sat crammed together below deck saying good¬
bye, bored, embarrassed and bonhomous, like parents
at a railway station the first day of term, while
England slipped away from the port-hole, a stone
stage, a tarred side, a slap of grey water against the
glass.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CARGO SHIP
Madeira

My cousin and I had five fellow-passengers in the
cargo ship: two shipping agents, a traveller for an
engineering firm, a doctor on his way to the Coast
with anti-yellow-fever serum, and a woman joining
her husband at Bathurst. All except the woman and
the traveller knew the Coast; they knew the same
people; they had a common technique of living
enforced by common conditions. The daily dose of
quinine, mosquito netting over all the port-holes:
these to them were as natural as the table-cloth at
meals.

It is a condition favourable to the growth of legend.
Legend belongs naturally to primitive com muni ties
where min ds are so little differentiated, by work or
play or education, that a story can move quickly
from brain to brain uncriticised. But sometimes
these conditions arise artificially. A common danger,
purpose or way of life can very nearly destroy

14 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

differences of intellect and class; then you get the
angels of Mons and the miracles at a shrine.

“Yes,” they were saying in the smoking-room, “you
won’t find a tougher man than Captain W.” They
all knew of him because they all belonged to the
Coast: the captain, the doctor, the shipper.

“If he ran into a broken bottle,” the doctor said,
“his face wouldn’t look any different.”

“He’d take a tug round the world as soon as look
at you.”

“He doesn’t insure his cargo. He bears the risk
himself. That’s why his freight-rates are so cheap.”

“Will people take the risk?”

“His word’s as good as an insurance company’s.”

“But when he loses a cargo?”

“He hasn’t lost one yet.”

In the wireless room on a Saturday night the young
agent waited hour after hour for the League results.
He and the wireless officer shared an esoteric gossip
of the sea: how this or that man had quarrelled with
the Old Man and joined another line. The bulbs
flickered overhead; tubes hummed in the little cabin
with its rows of discs and bulbs, as mechanised as was
the engine-room below, a great black polished cliff,
pipes tied up at the joints in blue, yellow or scarlet
bags like hot-water bottles, a solitary negro with a
polishing rag in all the glittering desert of brass and
iron.

Coming in from the bulbs and gossip and the dusk
I overheard the Captain talking to the doctor in the
smoking-room. ‘Tour hundred and sixteen people at
Dakar,” he was saying. The subject came up again at
breakfast: plague at Dakar, yellow fever at Bathurst,

THE CARGO SHIP

*5

outbreaks hushed up on the French coast, never
reported on the Liberian: one was seldom allowed
to escape the subject of fever. One could begin a con¬
versation with religion, politics, books; it always
ended with malaria, plague, yellow fever. As long as
one was at sea it was a joke, like somebody else’s
vicious wife; when one was on land it was like a grim
story intended to make the flesh creep, but one
became conscious then of people who wouldn’t play,
who preferred something comforting.

Something like A Village in a Valley by Mr.
Beverley Nichols, which was in the small library. One
reads strange books in a ship, books one would never
dream of reading at home: like Lady Eleanor
Smith’s Tzigane , and the novels of Warwick Deeping
and W. B. Maxwell: a lot of books, written without
truth, without compulsion, one dull word following
another, books to read while you wait for the bus,
while you strap-hang, in between the Boss’s dicta¬
tions, while you eat your A. B. C. lunch; a whole
industry founded on a want of leisure and a want of
happiness.

At Madeira it was raining. The touts were out at
ten in the morning in the shabby notorious town.
One drank sweet wine at the Golden Gates, and the
rain dripped off the curious phallic hats hanging
outside the shops. The touts wore straw hats with
Cambridge ribbons; they kept at one’s elbow all the
way round Funchal; they weren’t a bit discouraged
because it was raining, because it was only just after
breakfast. “Luxe,” they kept on saying, and “Sex”
and something about dancing girls. Their industry,
like Mr. Beverley Nichols’s, was founded on a want

l6 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

of leisure and a want of happiness. Quick, quick, you
are only on shore for half an hour, you are only
vigorous for a few more years, have another girl
before it’s too late, you aren’t happy with the one
you’ve got, try another. The women sold violets and
lilies and roses in the rain, the phallic hats dripped,
the touts couldn’t understand that one didn’t want
a girl just after breakfast on a wet day. There were
other ways of fillin g up time, one could drink sweet
wine at the Golden Gates, one could go back on
board and read Lady Eleanor Smith or Mr. Beverley
Nichols.

A young German artist and his wife came on board
at Funchal as deck passengers and were given the
little hospital to sleep in. He was a thick spotty man
in a velvet jacket; he had known D. H. Lawrence at
Taos and Mabel Dodge Luhan. It hadn’t made any
difEerence, he wasn’t going to write a book about it.
In the little hospital he put out his canvases, crude
realistic landscapes and die baked faces of Mexican
Indians; it grew dark; and everyone drank bad
Madeira out of the botde and he talked about Art
and Sport and the Body Beautiful, and his wife, small
and curved and lovely and complaisant, was quiet
and seasick. He believed in Hitler and Nationalism
and swimming and love, he liked the pictures of
Orpen and De Laszlo, but Munke’s pictures left him
dissatisfied. They left out the Soul, he said, they
were materialist; not that he disbelieved in the Body,
the Body Beautiful and in physical Love. He agreed
to come to Africa too, and illustrate this book; an
artist was at home anywhere—but after dinner he
changed his mind; and his sweet complaisant nubile

THE CARGO SHIP

17

wife said, Yes, she wouldn't mind coming to Africa,
and after dinner she changed her mind too. He was
a bad artist, but he wasn't a bogus one. He lived on
almost nothing; he believed in himself and in his
hazy Teutonic ideas; and there was a sensual beauty
in their relationship. The two lived in a kind of
continuous intimacy, she had no ideas but his, no
vitality but his; he supplied all the life for both of
them and she supplied a warm friendly sensual death;
they shared the universe between them All the time,
in the cabin, at dinner, at a cafe table, they gave the
impression of having only just risen from bed.

By dinner-time everyone was drunk on bad
Madeira and the pink gin they called Coasters. The
shipping agent sang The Old Homeland and The
Floral Dance and I shot an Arrow into the Air and
the fat traveller called Younger said, "Pass me some
more eau de cow,” spilling his coffee. The aliens went
to their cabin, picking their way across the lower
deck and up the iron stairs into the stern; she was
seasick, but it only made her quieter; it didn't alter
her beautiful sensuous receptivity. The agent sang
The Old Homeland again—"Far across the sea, I
wonder will they pray for me”—and everyone felt
English and exiled and wistful, everyone except
Younger, who climbed carefully up the stairs, cling¬
ing to the banister: "Fm going home by rail.” He
was more English than any of them; the north
country was in his heart; he was firmly local and un¬
sentimental and bawdy and honest. He drank
because he needed a holiday, because he had heavy
work before him on the Coast, because he loved his
wife and had desperate anxieties. He had more cause

l8 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

to drink than anyone. The boom years were in his
heavy flesh and his three chins; one couldn’t at first
sight tell how the depression lay like lead in his
stomach. If one were to paint his portrait in the old
style of tiny landscapes and Tuscan towns, one would
have given him as background an abandoned blast¬
furnace or the girders of a great bridge left a perch
for birds.

Even when drunk, even when bawdy, he had an
admirable sanity. “Eighteen months on the Coast.
Tell me, doctor* what do people do about it?”

“Insoluble,” the doctor said.

“But what they do about it?”

“Even the Governor has asked me that. There’s
no answer.”

He was the last to go to bed, he would reel for ten
minutes up and down the corridor, there was some¬
thing common and royal about him which called for
devotion, nothing he did could offend. “Kipper,” he
would shout outside the Captain’s door, “Kipper,”
and obediently the Captain would emerge. He had
the way of Falstaff with a woman, an absurd
innocence that was quite content with a slap and a
tickle. “You saucy little sausage,” and even the young
shy inhibited married woman who had never left
Liverpool, who wouldn’t drink and wouldn’t smoke
and wouldn’t look at the moon, slapped him back.
There was a ballad quality about his bawdry. His
words had the merit of children’s art; they were vivid,
unself-conscious, uncorrupted.

THE CARGO SHIP

19

Ballyhoo

The cinema in Teneriffe was showing a film which
had been adapted from one of my own novels. It
had been an instructive and rather painful experience
to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the
photography undistinguished, the story sentimental.
If there was any truth in the original it had been
carefully altered, if anything was left unchanged it
was because it was untrue. By what was unchanged
I could judge and condemn my own novel: I could
see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit
the cheap banal film.

There remained a connection between it and me.
One had never taken the book seriously; it had been
written hurriedly because of the desperate need one
had for the money# But even into a book of that kind
had gone a certain amount of experience, nine months
of one’s life, it was tied up in the mind with a par¬
ticular countryside, particular anxieties; one couldn’t
disconnect oneself entirely, and it was curious, rather
pleasing, to find it there in the hot bright flowery
town. There are places where one is ready to welcome
any kind of acquaintance with memories in common;
he may be cheap but he knew Annette; he may be dis¬
honest but he once lodged with George; even if the
acquaintance is very dim indeed and takes a lot of
recognising.

Two Youthful Hearts in the Grip of Intrigue .
Fleeing from Life . Cheated? Crashing Across
Europe . Wheels of Fate .

Never before had I seen American ballyhoo at work
on something I intimately knew. It was magnificent

20

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

in its disregard of the article for which it had paid.
Its psychological insight was either cynically wrong
or devastatingly right.

The real Orient Express runs across Europe from
Belgium to Constantinople. Therefore, you will go
wrong if you interpret the word ‘Orient 5 to indicate
something of a Chinese or Japanese nature. There
is enough material of other kinds to arrange a lively
colourful ballyhoo, as you will see as soon as you
turn to the exploitation pages in this press book.

Date Tie-Up . In the exhibitors 5 set of stills avail¬
able at the exchange are three stills which show
Norman Foster explaining the sex life of a date to
Heather Angel, passing dates to Heather Angel and
Heather Angel buying dates from the car window.
The dialogue is quite enlightening on the date
subject at one point in the picture. Every city has
high-class food shops which feature fancy packages
of dates. Tie-in with one of these for window
displays, and for a lobby display, using adequate
copy and the three stills.

Another angle would be to have a demonstra¬
tion of date products, the many uses of dates, etc.
This would be quite possible in the much larger
cities. And in cases where working with large
concerns, patrons may be permitted to taste
samples. These tie-ups must be worked out locally
despite the fact that we are contacting importers
of important brands.

Don't under-estimate the value of a real smart
window fixed up with date products, baskets of
delicious fruits and dates, and the three stills shown
here with adequate copy for your picture. “Buy a

THE CARGO SHIP

21

package of delicious dates, and take The Orient
Express’ for Constantinople, a most thrilling and
satisfying evening’s entertainment, at the Rialto
Theatre.”

Do you Know That: Heather Angel’s pet kitten
Penang had to have its claws clipped because it
insisted on sharpening them on the legs of
expensive tables;

That the pet economy of Heather Angel is buy¬
ing washable gloves and laundering them herself;

That Una O’Connor permits only a very few of
her intimate friends to call her Tiny?

That blast of ballyhoo had not sold the film; to my
relief, because by contract my name had to appear
on every poster, it had kept to the smaller shabbier
cinemas, until now it was washed up in Teneriffe, in
a shaded side street behind an old carved door like
a monastery’s. This was what made it an agreeable
acquaintance; it hadn’t the shamelessness of success;
it might be vulgar, but it wasn’t successfully vulgar.
There was something quite un-Hollywood in its
failure.

The Canaries were half-way to Africa; the Fox film
and the pale cactus spears stuck in the hillside, a
Victorian Gothic hotel smothered in bougainvillaea,
parrots and a monkey on a string, innumerable
themes were stated like the false starts and indecisions
of a lifetime: the Chinese job from which one had
resigned, the appointment in Bangkok never taken
up, the newspaper in Nottingham. I can remember
now only the gaudy poster, the taste of the sweet
yellow wine, fiat roofs and flowers and an arbour full
of empty bottles, and in the small dark cathedral a

22

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Christmas crib (castles and little villages and women
with baskets of carrots, a donkey and a motor-car
and a comic man in a top-hat, little caves where
hermits or gipsies sat asleep on moss-covered rocks,
a man on an old-fashioned bicycle, and somewhere
right up in a comer, dwarfed by the world, the flesh
—those bright spring carrots, the devil—the man in
a top-hat, sat the Mother of God with an old-young
child, wrinkled and careworn and cross-eyed, and
Herod leant over a wall with his crown tilted).

Las Palmas

Of Las Palmas I can remember little more: a man
selling women’s pyjamas from a rowing boat after
midnight, the women in the ‘33’ with black theatrical
eyes and heavy figures. It was half-past one in the
morning before we got ashore and found a taxi.
Nobody could speak a word of anything but Spanish;
the drink was bad and dear, but Younger didn’t
mind. His inevitable expression, “You saucy little
sausage,” could be heard through all the rooms, his
progress was one long slap and tickle and free drink.
The manager followed him round with bills he
wouldn’t pay and Phil brought up the rear, the young
shipping agent who was afraid there would be trouble,
who had the unrequited devotion of a page in an
Elizabethan play. Every now and again to keep
the manager quiet Phil paid a bill and the manager
tore it up and dropped it on the floor and wrote
another. Then Younger stole the woman belonging
to a man with a guitar and the man kissed him and

THE CARGO SHIP

2 3

had a drink; the manager wrote a bill, and Phil
plucked at Younger’s sleeve and said, “Go steady,
old man. Go steady.” A madman came up and
threatened Younger, but Younger didn’t understand,
didn’t care anyway, didn’t even hear perhaps. He
sat on a chair playing pat-paw with his stout black
bitch; sometimes he made a pass at her mouth, but
she avoided that, nudging with her elbow, pushing
forward her empty glass while the manager wrote out
another bill. Then it began all over again, the refusal
to pay, the arguments, Phil’s “Go steady, old man,
go steady,” another drink all round, pat-paw, “You
saucy little sausage,” another bill. On the way to
the waterside he passed out altogether, had to be
carried, fourteen stone of him, into the rowing boat
in the dark, dragged up the rocking companion, un¬
dressed and put to bed. But no one grudged it him,
he could do these things, next day he was as well as
ever, bathed in a costume which wouldn’t meet across
him, called “Kipper, Kipper” in the passage, was
drunk by lunch-time, explained it was his last drink
before the Coast: he was going to work now. No one
believed him, but we were wrong.

He had the stamina of a bull; he could stop drink¬
ing when he chose. The islands were past, next port
of call was on the Coast, he had work to do. Nobody
knew how far afield his work was taking him and of
its importance; he was fat and boisterous, one
couldn’t tell from his manner the anxiety of nis
journey. He was taking a big risk; he had to get
orders; and yellow fever was not going to stop him.
There was an epidemic at one of the points on his
route; he didn’t know of it when he came on board;

24

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

everyone laughed at him about the fever, and one
could tell that he was a little scared; but one could
tell too that it was not going to make any difference.
He was like an old fighter who is forced back into the
ring because he needs the purse; he may be out of
condition, may be afraid of getting hurt, but he
cannot afford to lose, even if the effort kills him.
Younger talked about his wife; he had never before
been to a place where he couldn’t ring her up at
nine o’clock of an evening; he’d always done it when
he was in Brussels, in Berlin, in Warsaw.

Graveyard

The day after Las Palmas, passengers in West Coast
boats wake to a completely new air. It lasts for a
day and a day only. My sheets were damp with a
kind of dew; there was a warm wet wind and a haze
over the sea. The air smelt as salt and fishy as the air
on Brighton front. The sodden damp to a traveller
back from the Coast with malarial infection in his
blood is said to be very dangerous, and among sailors
this part of the Atlantic is known as the Elder
Dempster Graveyard. But the tradition is older than
the Line. Burton wrote of it in his Anatomy: “Such
a complaint I read of those islands of Cape Verde,
fourteen degrees from the Equator, they do male
audire; one calls them the unhealthiest clime of the
world, for fluxes, fevers, frenzies, calentures, which
commonly seize on seafaring men that touch at them,
and all by reason of a hot distemperature of the air.
The hardiest men are offended with the heat, and
stiffest clowns cannot resist it.”

THE CARGO SHIP

2 5

It made Younger think of yellow fever at Kano.
In the smoking-room that night, the first night of his
new sobriety, he said that he thought death was a
great adventure. But life, Phil said, was a great
adventure too. Science was making great strides these
days; you never knew; though of course Wells and
Jules Verne had foreseen it all; what wonderful
prophets they were. He said, “I thought Hannen
Swaffer was a prophet too once, but he let me down.”

“Isn’t Hannen Swaffer a woman?” Younger said.

“No, he’s a man.”

“Are you sure?” Younger said. But Phil was sure.
He’d seen him. He had even spoken to him one night
when he came up to address their literary club. It
was a change from bridge, that club; they got really
famous writers to talk to them. Chesterton had been
and Cecil Roberts. Then he went out to look at the
moon, leaning over the side, waiting in vain for my
cousin or the other woman on board to join him. If
one did, he put his arm round her and talked about
Wallasey or his wife or League results. He was only
formally romantic; he had a great respect for women.
He was really far more at home with Younger, looked
after Younger when he was drunk, protected him,
undressed him if necessary; when Younger became
sober he was rather lost, looked at the moon more
often, padding round the deck earnestly romantic,
irritable because no one would play at tropic nights
with him, disappearing at last into the little wireless
room to talk about football to ‘Sparks’. One night his
vitality which had no outlet overcame him and he
began to throw glasses overboard.

26

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Dakar

It must have been two days later that I woke to the
grating of iron against stone, and there was the Coast.
The word was already over-familiar. People said,
“Eldridge. Of course, he’s an old Coaster/’ and
Eldridge, the middle-aged shipping agent, at the
beginning of every meal would say, “Chop, as we call
it on the Coast,” or handing a plate of onions,
“Violets, we say on the Coast.” One’s pink gin was
called a Coaster. There was no other Coast but the
West Coast and this was it.

On the quay the Senegalese strolled up and down,
long white and blue robes sweeping up the dust blown
from the ridge of monkey-nuts twenty-five feet high.
The men walked hand-in-hand, laughing sleepily
together under the blinding vertical glare. Sometimes
they put their arms round each other’s necks; they
seemed to like to touch each other, as if it made them
feel good to know the other man was there. It wasn’t
love; it didn’t mean anything we could "understand.
Two of them went about all day without loosing
hold; they were there when the boat slid in beside
the monkey-nuts; they were there in the evening
when the loading was finished and the labourers
washed their hands and faces in the hot water flowing
from the ship’s side; they hadn’t done a stroke of
work themselves, only walked up and down touching
hands and laughing at their own jokes; but it wasn’t
love; it wasn’t anything we could understand. They
gave to the b l i n di n g day, to the first sight of Africa,
a sense of warm and sleepy beauty, of enjoyment
divorced from activity and the weariness of wifline.

THE CARGO SHIP

27

La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beaute,

Luxe, calme et volupti .

One found it hard to believe at Dakar that
Baudelaire had never been to Africa, that the nearest
he had come to it was the body of Jeanne Duval, the
mulatto 'tart* from Le Theatre du Pantheon, for
Dakar was the Baudelaire of UInvitation au Voyage,
when it was not the Rene Clair of Le Million .

It was Rene Clair in its happy lyrical absurdity;
the two stately Mohammedans asleep on the gravel
path in the public gardens beside a black iron kettle;
the tiny Syrian children going to school in white
topees; the men’s sewing parties on the pavements;
the old pock-marked driver who stopped his horses
and disappeared into the bushes to tell his beads;
the men laden with sacks moving rhythmically up
and down a ladder of sacks, building higher the
monkey-nut hill, like the tin toy figures sold in
Holbom at Christmas-time; in the lovely features
of the women in the market, young and old, lovely
less from sexual attractiveness than from a sharp
differentiated pictorial quality. In the restaurant, a
little drunk on iced Sauteme, one didn’t trouble about
the Dakar one had heard about, the Dakar of endemic
plague and an unwieldy bureaucracy, the most un¬
healthy town on the Coast. Mr. Gorer in his Africa
Dances tells how in Dakar the young negroes simply
die, not of tuberculosis, plague, yellow fever, but
apparently of inanition, of hopelessness. He stayed
too long, I suppose, and saw too much; that sudden
sense of happiness which came to one in Dakar
doesn’t last, which came to one in Le Million, a

38

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

happiness that tingles behind the eyes, beautiful and
insecure, a wish fulfilment.

Do not expect again a phoenix hour,

The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining.
Sudden the rain of gold and heart’s first ease. . . .

Undoubtedly the other Dakar (the Dakar of the
four hundred and sixteen dead, of the despair
and injustice) was there, but something else was
momentarily shining through, something which was
always stubbornly existing. So in an early Rend Clair
film one could believe that this was the life one was
bom to live, breaking through life as one had been
made to live it, breaking through anxiety and irrita¬
tion and financial depression and a lust which had
gone on too long, these voices in the air, this chase
of a lottery ticket among the flying opera-hats, this
tuneful miniature love behind cardboard scenery^
nothing was really serious, nothing lasted, you didn’t
have to think about to-morrow’s food or to-morrow’s
girl; you stuck up your leg in derision sewing pants
on the pavement, you fell asleep among the flowers
with your black kettle, you touched hands and felt
good and didn’t care a damn
One soon enough discovered, of course, that this
impression was not the Coast. The hawks flapping
heavily over Bathurst, a long low backcloth of houses
and trees along a sandy beach; a swarm of figures in
the native quarter like flies on a piece of meat; the
not being allowed to land because of yellow fever;
the sense of isolation that the woman had as she went
off to join her husband in the quarantined town; this

THE CARGO SHIP

*9

was more really the Coast—the seedy Pole in a singlet
and a pair of dirty white trousers who came on board
at Konakry, couldn’t speak any English or French
and wanted to learn the name of the suits in Bridge.
The Captain took his gun and shot a hawk which sat
in the rigging, the gulls scattered, twisting in the
glittering air, and the dusty body plunged through
them on to the deck, like a reminder of darkness.

The Shape of Africa

A reminder of darkness: the girl in the Queen’s
Bar. I met her weeping across Leicester Square when
the leaves had dropped and made the pavements
slippery; she went into the vestibule of the Empire
Cinema and verged violently away again (that
wouldn’t do), settled at last on a high chair in the
Queen’s Bar, made up her face, had a gin and tonic;
I hadn’t the nerve to say anything and find out the
details. Besides, it’s always happening all the time
everywhere. You don’t weep unless you’ve been
happy first; tears always mean something enviable.

The aeroplane rocked over Hanover, the last of the
storm scattering behind it, dipped suddenly down
five hundred feet towards the small air station, and
soared again eastwards. Behind the plane the sun set
along the clouds; we were above the sunset; looking
back it lay below, long pale ridges of stained clouds.
The air was grey above the lakes; they were sunk
in the ground, like pieces of lead; the lights of villages
in between. It was quite dark long before Berlin, and
the city came to meet the plane through the dark¬
ness as a gorse fire does, links of flame through the

30 JOURNEY WmiOUT MAPS

heavy green night. A sky-sign was the size of a
postage stamp; one could see the whole plan of the
city, like a lit map in the Underground when you
press a button to find the route. The great rectangle
of the Tempelhof was marked in scarlet and yellow
lights; the plane swerved away over the breadth of
Berlin, turned back and down; the lights in the cabin
went out and one could see the headlamps sweeping
the asphalt drive, the sparks streaming out behind
the grey Luft Hansa wing, as the wheels touched and
rebounded and took the ground and held. That was
happiness, the quick impression; but on the ground,
among the Swastikas, one saw pain at every yard.

Arrived about nine o'clock at the Gare St. Lazare,
Easter, 1924, went to an hotel, then on to the Casino
to see Mistinguette, the thin insured distinguished
legs, the sharp “catchy" features like the paper faces
of the Ugly-Wuglies in The Enchanted Castle
{“ 'Walk on your toes, dear,' the bonneted Ugly-
Wugly whispered to the one with the wreath; and
even at that thrilling crisis Gerald wondered how she
could, since the toes of one foot were but the end of
a golf club and of the other the end of a hockey
stick”). The next night the Communists met in the
slums at the end of a cul-de-sac. They kept on read¬
ing out telegrams from the platform and everyone
sang the Internationale; then they'd speak a little and
then another telegram arrived. They were poor and
pinched and noisy; one wondered why it was that
they had so much good news coming to them which
didn t make any difference at all. All the good news
and the singing were at the end of an alley in a wide
cold hall; they couldn't get out; in the little square

THE CARGO SHIP

3 1

tiie soldiers stood in tin helmets beside their stacked
rifles. That night from the window of an hotel I
saw a man and woman copulating; they stood against
each other under a street lamp, like two people who
are supporting and comforting each other in the pain
of some sickness. The next day I read in the paper
how the Reds had tried to get out, but the soldiers
had stopped them; a few people were hurt, a few went
to prison.

The first thing I can remember at all was a dead
dog at the bottom of my pram; it had been run over
at a country cross-roads, where later I saw a Jack-in-
the-Green, and the nurse put it at the bottom of the
pram and pushed me home. There was no emotion
attached to the sight. It was just a fact. At that
period of life one has an admirable objectivity.
Another fact was the man who rushed out of a
cottage near the canal bridge and into the next house;
he had a knife in his hand; people ran after him
shouting; he wanted to kill himself.

Like a revelation, when I was fourteen, I realised
the pleasure of cruelty; I wasn’t interested any longer
in walks on commons, in playing cricket on the
beach. There was a girl lodging close by I wanted
to do things to; I loitered outside the door hoping to
see her. I didn’t do anything about it, I wasn’t old
enough, but I was happy; I could think about pain
as something desirable and not as something dreaded.
It was as if I had discovered that the way to enjoy
life was to appreciate pain.

I watched from the other end of the bar; she wept
and didn’t care a damn; she embarrassed everybody;
they cleared a space as if a fight was on and she sat

32 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

there drinking gin and tonic and crying with empty
chairs on either side; the barman kept on serving
drinks at the other end. I thought for some reason
even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a
shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know. The un¬
conscious mind is often sentimental; I have written
'a shape’, and the shape, of course, is roughly that
of the human heart.

CHAPTER THREE

THE HOME FROM HOME
Freetown

Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, at first was
just an impression of heat and damp; the mist
streamed along the lower streets and lay over the
roofs like smoke. Nature, conventionally grand,
rising in tree-covered hills above the sea and the
town, a dull uninteresting green, was powerless to
carry off the shabby town. One could see the
Anglican cathedral, Iaterite bricks and tin with a
square tower, a Norman church built in the nine¬
teenth century, sticking up out of the early morning
fog. There was no doubt at all that one was back
in home waters. Among the swarm of Kru boats
round the ship the Princess Marina with its freshly
painted name was prominent. “Princess Marina” the
half-naked owner kept on calling. “Sweetest boat on
the coast.”

Tin roofs and peeling posters and broken windows
in the public library and wooden stores, Freetown

THE HOME FROM HOME

had a Bret Harte air without the excitement, the
saloons, the revolver shots or the horses. There was
only one horse in the whole city, and it was pointed
out to me by the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, a
thin piebald beast pulled down the main street like
a mule. There had been other horses from time to
time, but they had all died. Where there wasn’t a
tin shed there were huge hoardings covered with last
year’s Poppy Day posters (the date was January the
fifteenth). On the roofs the vultures sat nuzzling
under their wings with horrible tiny undeveloped
heads; they squatted in the gardens like turkeys; I
could count seven out of my bedroom window. When
they moved from one perch to another they gave no
sensation of anything so aerial as flight; they seemed
to hop across the street, borne up just high enough
by the flap-flap of their dusty wings.

This was an English capital city; England had
planted this town, the tin shacks and the Remem¬
brance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the
hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and
electric fans and perfect service. Every call one paid
on a white man cost ten shillings in taxi fares, for
the railway to Hill Station no longer ran. They had
planted their seedy civilisation and then escaped from
it as far as they could. Everything ugly in Freetown
was European: the stores, the churches, the Govern¬
ment offices, the two hotels; if there was anything
beautiful in the place it was native: the little stalls
of the fruit-sellers which went up after dark at the
street comers, lit by candles; the native women roll¬
ing home magnificently from church on a Sunday
morning, the cheap European cottons, the deep coraJ

34 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

or green flounces, the wide straw hats, dignified by
the native bearing, the lovely roll of the thighs, the
swing of the great shoulders. They were dressed for
a garden party and they carried off cheap bright
grandeur in the small back-yards among the vultures
as nature couldn’t carry off Freetown.

The men were less assured; they had been educated
to understand how they had been swindled, how they
had been given the worst of two worlds, and they
had enough power to express themselves in a soured
officious way; they had died, in so far as they had
once been men, inside their European clothes. They
didn’t complain, they hinted; they didn’t fight fox
what they wanted, they sourly prevaricated. “From
what I garnered here and there,” suggested the Creole
gossip-writer in the Sierra Leone Daily Mail, “it is
not the intention of the Governor and his wife to
make Governor’s Lodge, Hill Station, the official
residence of the representative of His Majesty the
King; those who maintain the view that the environ¬
ments at Hill Station may influence them to the
prejudice of the interest of the people are quite
mistaken. In fact, it is considered improbable to
entertain such an opinion, and I believe His
Excellency will burst into peals of laughter if he were
to hear such a thing. I leave it at that.”

That was the nearest they could get to a Petition
of Right. They wore uniforms, occupied official
positions, went to parties at Government House, had
the vote, but they knew all the time they were funny
(oh, those peals of laughter!), funny to the heartless
prefect eye of the white man. If they had been slaves
they would have had more dignity; there is no shame

THE HOME FROM HOME

35

is being ruled by a stranger, but these men had been
given their tin shacks, their cathedral, their votes
and city councils, their shadow of self-government;
they were expected to play the part like white men
and the more they copied white men, the more funny
it was to the prefects. They were withered by
laughter; the more desperately they tried to regain
their dignity the funnier they became.

Fashionable Wedding at St. George’s Cathedral

St. George’s Cathedral was the scene of the first
fashionable wedding to take place there this year,
on Wednesday, the nth instant.

The contracting parties were Miss Agatha
Fidelia Araromi Shorunkeh-Sawyerr, fourth
daughter of the late Mr. J. C. Shorunkeh-Sawyerr,
Barrister-at-law, and Mrs Frances M. Shorunkeh-
Sawyerr of “Bells Ebuts”, King Tom’s Peninsula,
and Mr. John Buxton Ogunyorbu Logan of the
Survey Dept., son of Mr. S. D. Logan, Retired
Civil Service Officer.

The bride entered the church at 1.15 p.m. lean¬
ing on the arm of her only brother, Mr. J. C. I.
Shorunkeh-Sawyerr, who subsequently gave her
away.

She wore a frock of white lace lined with white
satin, and of full length. Its full court train was
of white lace lined with rose-pink satin and it fell
from the shoulders. She had on a short veil held
in place on her head by a coronet of orange
blossoms. She carried a bouquet of natural flowers.

She was followed by five bridesmaids, the Misses
Molake Shorunkeh-Sawyerr (bride’s sister) and

36 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Annie Macaulay, being the chief. They wore
salmon-pink lace frocks with georgette coatees of
the same colour with white straw hats with pink
bands. The others were the Misses Fitzjohn,
Olivette Stuart, and Eileen Williams. These wore
pink georgette frocks and pink hats. The hymn
Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost, was sung as the bridal
procession moved slowly up the nave. The full
choir of the cathedral, of which the bridegroom’s
father is the Dux, was present, and Mr. A. H.
Stuart, F.G.C.O., the organist, presided at his
organ.

Immediately after the ceremony, the guests re¬
paired to the Crown Bottling Restaurant for Cake
and Wine. This function was presided over by
Mr. A. E. Tuboku-Metzger, M.A., J.P., an old
friend of the bride’s late father.

Here six toasts were proposed and responded to.
After this the company broke up, some going to the
bridegroom’s parents in Waterloo Street, and others
to the bride’s at King Tom’s for more solid refresh¬
ments.

About 6 p.m. Mr. and Mrs. John B. Logan left for
their honeymoon somewhere on the Wilkinson
Road.

Before leaving them there, we wish them connu¬
bial bliss, and the best of luck.

Sometimes it was almost Firbank, it recalled the
Mouth family forcing their way into the highest
social circles of the city of Cuna-Cuna, but alas! the
smell of the fish laid fourteen deep in the roadway,
the flowers withered ^and everlasting in the small

THE HOME FROM HOME

37

public gardens, the low church hymns did not belong
to Cuna—“Cuna, full of charming roses, full of violet
shadows, full of music, full of love, Cuna. . . !”
Wilkin son and Waterloo streets and the Crown
Bottling Restaurant were a poor exchange for Car¬
men Street, the Avenue Messalina, the Grand Savan*.
nah Hotel.

Freetown’s excitements are very English, as Dakar’s
are very French; the Governor-General’s garden party,
where white and black, keeping sedulously apart on
either side the beds, inspected the vegetables to the
sound of a military band: “Look, he’s really managed
to grow tomatoes. Darling, let’s go and see the
cabbages. Are those really lettuces?”; the Methodist
Synod: “Notices of motions fall thick and fast. We
pass over some questions in the agenda meanwhile.
We sit intently waiting to hear the Missionary Com¬
mittee’s letter, everyone is attentive, we listen, the air
is still, we can hear the dropping of a pin”; literature
from the Freetown Ededroko Store which advertised,
“Novels, Works of Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, R. L.
Stevenson, Bertha Clay, etc., e.g., by Corelli: Worm¬
wood, Sorrows of Satan, Barabbas, Vendetta, Thelma,
Innocent; by Caine, The Deemster, A Son of Hagar,
The Woman Thou Gavest Me; by Stevenson: Treas¬
ure Island, The Black Arrow; by Clay: A Woman's
Temptation, Married for her Beauty, Beyond
Pardon”

The contributions of Dorothy Violetta Mallatson
to the local daily Press vividly summarise the evan¬
gelical fun of Freetown: “Looking behind us, Christ¬
mas is just round the comer and out of sight. Out¬
spreading away into the distance there is sunshine,

38 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

sports, and all the outdoor joys we love so well. For
the school girl or boy there are school sports to take
away the dullness and flatness of the schoolroom life.
Then there is the Prize Distribution and Thanks*
giving Service. For older people there is the All-
Comers Tennis Competition and there is coming up
shortly many dances and concerts. For instance, there
is the Danvers Dance on the 8th of February, and the
Play and Dance of the Ladies of the National Con¬
gress of British West Africa which comes on the 15th
proximo.”

It would be so much more amusing if it was all
untrue, a fictitious skit on English methods of colon¬
isation. But one cannot continue long to find the
Creole’s painful attempt at playing the white man
funny; it is rather like the chimpanzee’s tea-party,
the joke is all on one side. Sometimes, of course, the
buffoonery is conscious, and then the degradation is
more complete. A few Creoles make money out of
their prefects, by deliberately playing the inferior,
the lower boy: R. Lumpkin alias Bungie is the most
famous example. He has become a character. Tour¬
ists are taken to see his shop. You are advised by
every white man you meet, in the long bar at the
Grand, in the small bar at the City, on board ship:
“You must go to Bungie’s.” He is the proprietor of
the British-African Workmen Store and he styles
himself ‘Builder for the Dead, Repairer for the
living’. This is one of his advertisements:

Fear God Honour Your King, be just to mankind
—Says Bungie.

THE HOME FROM HOME

39

Easy System

British-African Workmen Store undertake to
supply Coffin with Hearse, Men, Grave, etc., by
special arrangements for easy payment by instal¬
ment.

Contracts taken up for Carpentry, Masonry,
Painting, etc., at moderate charges.

Ready-made Plain and Polished Coffin supplied
with Hearse and Uniformed men at any moment.
Corpse washed and dressed.

Cornel I’ll bury the dead by easy system only be
true to your sympathetic friend.

That’s Bungie.

Do not live like a fool and die like a big fool. Eat
and drink good stuff, save small, be praying for a
happy death, then a decent funeral. Bungie will do
the rest.

I’ll bury the Dead.

(Book of Tobias)

I’ll bury the dead and feed the living.

THAT’S BUNGIE ALL OVER.

The City Bar

I wanted to do a pub crawl. But one can’t crawl
very far in Freetown. All one can do is to have a drink
at the Grand and then go and have a drink at the
City. The City is usually more crowded and noisy

40 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

became there’s a billiard table; people are rather more
dashing, get a little drunk and tell indecent stories;
but not if there’s a woman present. I had never
found myself in a place which was more protective to
women; it might have been inhabited by rowing
Blues with Buchman consciences and secret troubles.
Everyone either had a wife at Hill Station and
drank a bit and bought chocolates at the week¬
end and showed photographs of their children at
home:

(“I’m afraid I don’t care much for children.”)

(“O, you’d like mine.”)

or else they had wives in England, had only two
drinks, because they’d promised their wives to be
temperate, and played Kuhn-Kan for very small
stakes. They played golf and bathed at Lumley
Beach. There wasn’t a cinema that a white mari
could go to, and books of course rotted in the damp
or developed worms. You developed worms too your¬
self, after you'd been out a little time; it was inevit¬
able; nobody seemed to mind. Freetown, they told
you, was the healthiest place on the Coast. The day I
left a young man in the educational department died
of yellow fever.

Worms and malaria, even without yellow fever, are
enough to cloud life in ‘the healthiest place along the
Coast’. These men in the City bar, prospectors, ship¬
ping agents, merchants, engineers, had to reproduce
English conditions if they were to be happy at all.
They weren’t the real rulers; they were simply out to
make money; and there was no hypocrisy in their
attitude towards ‘the bloody blacks’. The real rulers
came out for a few years, had a Ion? leave every eigh-

THE HOME FROM HOME

4 1

teen months, gave garden parties, were supposed to
be there for the good of the ruled. It was these men
who had so much to answer for: the wages, for
example, of the platelayers on the little narrow-gauge
line which runs up to Pendembu near the French and
Liberian borders. These men were paid sixpence a
day and had to buy their own food, and yet in the
days of the depression they were docked one day's
pay a month. This was perhaps the meanest economy
among the many mean economies which assisted
Sierra Leone through the depression, a depression
caused by the fall in price of palm oil and palm
kernels, the preference Levers at that time were show¬
ing for whale oil. The economies were nearly all at
the expense of the coloured man; government staffs
were reduced by a clerk here and a messenger there.
Until the visit of Lord Plymouth, the Under-Secretary
of State, who arrived in Freetown on the day that I
did, there had been only one sanitary inspector for
the whole colony and protectorate. Badgered by the
central authority, constantly moved from a district
which he was attempting to clean up, he would apply
in vain for assistants. Forced labour is illegal in a
British Colony, but the sanitary inspector without a
staff had to choose between breaking the law or leav¬
ing villages as dirty as he found them.

One could exonerate the men in the bar; they were
not guilty of these meannesses; they were only guilty
of the shabbiness of Freetown, the tin roofs and the
Poppy Day posters. Santayana, with the romanticism
of a foreign Anglophil, has written that “what gov¬
erns the Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the
weather in his sour*. The inner atmosphere, he esj,-

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

42

plains, “when compelled to condense into words may
precipitate some curt maxim or over-simple theory as
a sort of war-cry; but its puerile language does it in¬
justice, because it broods at a much deeper level than
language or even thought. It is a mass of dumb in¬
stincts and allegiances, the love of a certain quality of
life”, and in a finely chosen if romantic metaphor, he
describes how “it fights under its trivial fluttering
opinions like a smo kin g battleship under its flags and
signals”. So to be fair to these men one must recog¬
nise a certain fidelity, a kind of patriotism in the dust
and anglicanism and the closing hours; this is their
“comer of a foreign field”, just as much as the flowers
and cafes and the neat tarts of Dakar are the French¬
men’s comer. If you are English, they would argue,
you will feel at home here: if you don’t like it you
are not English. If one must condemn, one should
condemn not the outposts hut the headquarters of
Empire, the country which has given them only this:
a feeling for respectability and a sense of fairness
withering in the heat.

No Screws Unturned

When I came on shore I was met by an elderly
Kru carrying an umbrella. He said reproachfully,
“I’ve been waiting for some hours.” He held a cable
in his hand from London; it asked him to get in
touch with Greene, who was leaving for the Republic.

My name, the Kru said, “is Mr. D.”. He knew
the Republic well, he could be.of use.

An even more august authority was giving me un¬
ited help. Before, I left the boat I had been

THE HOME FROM HOME

43

handed a letter from His Majesty’s Charge d’Affaires
in Monrovia, the capital of the Republic, saying that
he had announced my visit to the Secretary of the
Interior, and the Secretary had informed all the Dis¬
trict Commissioners in the Western Province. “Any
courtesies shown these persons by the Commissioners
and Chiefs with whom they contact will he very
highly appreciated, and it is incumbent that you leave
no screws unturned to mate their trip a pleasant one.
The phrase about the screws had a slightly sinister
ring) but this fairylike activity had been no part of
my plan. If there was anything to hide in the Re¬
public I wanted to surprise it. Luckily the Secretary
of the Interior had suggested a route for me to follow,
and it would be quite easy for me to avoid it, to avoid
indeed the Western Province, after a few days,
altogether.

It would have been easier if I had been able to
obtain maps. But the Republic is almost entirely
covered by forest, and has never been properly
mapped, mapped that is to say even to the rough
extent of the French colonies which lie on two
sides of it. I could find only two large-scale maps for
sale. One, issued by the British General Staff, quite
openly confesses ignorance; there is a large white
space covering the greater part of the Republic, with
a few dotted lines indicating the conjectured course
of rivers (incorrectly, I usually found) and a fringe
of names along the boundary. These names have
been curiously chosen: most of them are quite un¬
known to anyone in the Republic; they must have
belonged to obscure villages now abandoned. The
other map is issued by the United States War Depart-

4+

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

ment. There is a dashing quality about it; it shows a
vigorous imagination. Where the English map is con¬
tent to leave a blank space, the American in large
letters fills it with the word ‘Cannibals’. It has no
use for dotted lines and confessions of ignorance; it is
so inaccurate that it would be useless, perhaps even
dangerous, to follow it, though there is something
Elizabethan in its imagination. ‘Dense Forest’; ‘Can¬
nibals’; rivers which don’t exist, at any rate anywhere
near where they are put; one expects to find Eldorado,
two-headed men and fabulous beasts represented in
little pictures in the Gola Forest

But this was where Mr. D., the elderly Kruman,
could help; he knew the Republic.

Mr. D. lived in Krutown. Krutown is one of the
few parts of Freetown with any beauty; the Krus, the
great sailors of the coast, whose boast it is that they
have never been slaves and have never dealt in slaves,
have escaped Anglicanisation. The native huts still
stand among the palm trees on the way to Lumley
Beach, the women sitting outside with their long
tanging breasts uncovered. Mr. D.’s house was in
the only Europeanised street. A bare wooden stair
led into a room with wooden walls on which were
hung a few religious pictures in Oxford frames. There
were four rickety chairs and an occasional table with
a potted plant on it. Crudely painted Mothers of God
bore the agony of seven swords with indifference,
Christ just above his head exposed a heart the colour
of raw hver. Insects hopped about on the wooden
floor and Mr. D. gentiy instructed me how to reach
the frontier. A little way over the border there was
an Amencan mission, the Order of the Holy Cross at

THE HOME FROM HOME

45

Bolahun; it would be as well to stay there a few days
and try to get carriers to go through with me to
Monrovia. He examined the route suggested by the
Secretary of the Interior; that had got to he avoided
as far as possible; though I should have to follow
it to Zigita. On the blank spaces of the English
map, Mr. D. made his pencilled suggestions; he
couldn’t be really sure to a matter of ten miles
where to put the places he mentioned; the English
map confused him with its inaccuracies. At last he
gave it up altogether, and I simply wrote the names
down in my notebook, spelling them as best I might;
Mosambolahun, Gondolahun, Jenne, Lombola, Gbey-
anlahun, Goryendi, Bellivela, Banya. But it is un¬
necessary to give them all here, for as it turned out I
did not follow this route at all, didn’t even aim at
Monrovia, which had been my object when I sailed.
Circumstances in a country where the only way to
travel is to know the next town or village ahead and
repeat it as you go, like the Syrian woman in Little
Arthur’s History who said “Gilbert, London” across
England, were to alter my plans again and again until
my small book was filled with lists of probably mis¬
spelt names in smudged pencil of places I never suc¬
ceeded in finding. Examining it now I discover this
cryptic entry: “Steamer calling C. Palmas and Sinoe.
Keep S. dark. Get off at S. Take the beach to Setta
Kru, Nana Kru. At N.K., Dr. V., Am. missionary.
To Wesserpor or Dio. Tell people to take me to
Nimley. On to New Sasstown and C.P.”

This is the record of another plan which came to
nothing through lack of money and exhaustion. I
had brought with me from England a letter of intro-

4 6 JOURNEY -WITHOUT MAPS

duction to Paramount Chief Nimley of the Sasstown
Tribe of Krus, the leader of the rebellion on the coast
in 193a. It was in the fight against Nimley that the
Frontier Force under the command of Colonel
Elwood Davis, the President’s special agent, a North
American black, had, according to the British Con¬
sul’s report, killed women and children, destroyed
villages, tortured prisoners. Peace had been patched
up but not with Nimley, who with the remains of his
tribe was hidden in the bush vainly hoping for white
intervention. No white man, Mr. D. said, would be
allowed to travel to the Kru coast, but it would be
possible by booking a passage on a coasting steamer
from Monrovia to Cape Palmas to change one’s mind
on board and land unexpectedly at Sinoe. From Sinoe
one would travel along the beach to Nana Kru, and
from there it would be necessary to get guides who
knew the way to Nimley’s hiding-place.

I only mention these plans which came to nothing,
these routes which were not followed, because they
may give some idea of the vagueness of my ideas
when I landed at Freetown. I had never been out of
Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in
Africa. I intended to walk across the Republic, but I
had no idea of what route to follow or the conditions
we would meet. Looking at the unreliable map I had
thought vaguely that we would go up to the Sierra
Leone railway terminus at Pendembu, then go across
the frontier the nearest way and strike diagonally
down to the capital. There seemed to be a lot of
rivers to cross, but I supposed there would be bridges
of some kind; there was the forest, of course, but that
was everywhere. One apparently reliable book I bnH

THE HOME FROM HOME 47

read on Sierra Leone mentioned a number of pros¬
pectors who had crossed the border into what was
supposed to be an uninhabited part of the forest
looking for gold and had never returned; but that
was a little lower down (the Republic was on the bulge
of Africa’s coast-line, and I could never properly
remember the points of the compass).

Mr. D. discouraged me. It wasn’t possible, he said,
that way. It was evident that he was particularly
anxious for me to travel down by Bellivela. Bellivela
was the headquarters of the Frontier Force and was
being used as a concentration camp for political
prisoners, those who had given evidence before the
League of Nations Commission of Inquiry into
slavery in the Republic. “They’ll have to invite you
inside the camp for the night,” Mr. D. said, “and then
you can poke around and see things.”

That night I dreamed of Mr. D. and the Customs
at the border, a muddled irritating dream. I was
always forgetting something; I had arrived at the
Customs with all my bags and boxes and Mr. D. tied
up in a bale, but I’d forgotten to get any carriers and
I had no boys. I was afraid all the time that the
Customs inspector would discover Mr. D., that I
would be fined for smuggling, and have to pay a
heavy duty.

The Three Companions

I arrived in Freetown on a Saturday and the train
for Pendembu left on the following Wednesday; I had
hoped to find servants engaged for me when I arrived,
but Jimmie Daker, to whom I had an introduction,

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

48

who had promised months before to do his best, had
forgotten all about it. He was vague, charming, lost
and a little drunk. He sat in the Grand bar drinking
whisky and bitters and talking about the Nazis and
the war; he began as a pacifist but after his third
drink he was ready to serve again at any moment;
his face was scarred from the last war. He hadn't any
idea of how to get boys for the journey, though he
agreed that it wouldn’t be wise to take any of those
who stood all day at the entrance to the hotel offering
their services. He didn’t know anybody who knew
anything at all about the Republic. No one in Sierra
Leone had ever crossed the border.

"Dh, Jimmie,” they all said in Freetown, “poor dear
Jimmie, when I said that Jimmie was finding me
boys. “Jimmie doesn’t know a thing.”

In the end I got the best boys in Freetown. My
head boy, Amedoo, was famous all the way up the
line, and Amedoo chose the second boy, T.amino
and the old Mohammedan cook, Souri. And Jimmie
Daker was, in a way, responsible. If I had not been
to Jimmie’s for a sun-downer, I wouldn’t have met
Daddy, who had been twenty-five years in Freetown
and knew every native in the place. He was quite
drunk. He drove rapidly up and down the hills choos¬
ing the worst roads, he nearly got arrested for taking
off a black policeman’s hat, the atmosphere was rather
hke Boat Race night in Piccadilly. “Everyone knows
Daddy, he said, trying to drive into Government
House at two in the morning (but the gates were
closed) revising rapidly to the edge of a ditch, plung-
lyphill again While ** sentries st ood at attention
and watched the car disappear with impassive faces.

THE HOME FROM HOME

49

roaring past the barracks (the guardroom emptied at
sight of a car on to the grass and everyone stood to
attention in the green under-water light), up a muddy
track off the road, coming to a halt against a bank,
“You poor innocents,” he said. We were stranded
like criminals in a small lit cage above Freetown.
“Have you ever been in Africa before? Have you ever
been on trek? What on earth made you choose to
go There?” There/ it appeared, was quite unspeak¬
able, though, of course, he knew it only from hearsay;
he would never dream. . . . Had we any idea of
what we were up against? Had we any reliable maps?
No, I said. There weren’t any to be got. Had we any
boys? No. Had we let the D.C.s up the line know of
our coming and engaged rest-houses? No, I hadn’t
known it was necessary. When we crossed the border,
how were we going to sleep? In native huts.

'You poor innocents,” he said. He nearly wept
over the wheel. Had we ever considered what a native
hut meant? The rats, the lice, the bugs. What would
happen if we got malaria, dysentery? “Something’s
got to be done,” he said, reversing, driving rapidly
backwards downhill. His mind switched over to the
alternate theme: “Everyone here knows Daddy.” He
stopped the car in Krutown beside a policeman and
thrust his head out of the window. “Who am I?”
The policeman approached nervously and shook his
head. “No. Come here. Come close. Tell me; who
am I?” The policeman shook his head and tried to
smile; he was scared; he supposed it was a game, but
he didn’t know how to play. <r Who am I, you black
varmint?” A young girl tried to slip through the
zone of headlight back into the dark: she had no

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

5°

business out at that hour; but Daddy saw her. “Hi,”
he said, sacking his head out from the other side of
the car, “come here.” She came up to the car; she was
far too pretty to be scared; her bare breasts were
small and firm and pointed; she had the neat rounded
thighs of a cat. “Tell him,” Daddy said, “who am
I?” She grinned at him. She wasn’t scared by any
game a man could play. “You know who I am?”
Daddy said. She leant right into the car and grinned
and nodded. “Daddy,” she said. He slapped her face
in a friendly way and drove off. He seemed to think
he’d proved something. “Have you thought of the
leeches?” he said. “They’ll drop on you from the
trees.” We stopped outside our hotel; the wooden
floors, the stairs, were alive with ants. Daddy said,
“I’ve got to do something for you, I can’t just let you
go like this,” drooping over the wheel with sleep.

At dawn a madman began to go groaning down
the street; I had heard him at intervals all day; I
slipped out from under my mosquito net to watch
him trail his rags through the grey early mo rnin g-
he moved his head from side to side, groaning in¬
humanly like a man without a tongue. There were
no vultures to be seen so early, the tin roofs were
bare; do vultures nest? and the bats had gone, the
fruit bats which streamed out across the town at
seven o’clock.

Strange to say. Daddy remembered next morning
that he had promised something. He turned up early
at the hotel and said he had the boys outside wait¬
ing. I didn’t know what to say to them; they stared
lack at me from the bottom of the hotel steps waiting
for orders: Amedoo. grey-faced and expressionless,

THE HOME FROM HOME

51

holding his fez to his chest, a man of about thirty-
five; Souri, the cook, a very old toothless man, in a
long white robe; Laminah, the second boy, very
young, in shorts and a litde white jacket like those
barbers wear, with a knitted woollen cap on his head
crowned by a scarlet bobble. It was several days
before I learnt their names, and I could never fully
understand what they said to me. I told them to
come back next day, but they haunted the hotel from
that moment, the two older men appearing suddenly
in the passage, standing silently in front of me with
lowered head and fez pressed to the chests. I never
knew what they wanted; they always waited for me
to speak. It was only later that I realised Amedoo
was as shy as myself. I couldn't have imagined then
the affection I would come to feel for them.

Our relationship was to be almost as intimate as a
love-affair; they were to suffer from the same worn
nerves; to be irritated by the same delays; but our life
together, because it had been more perfectly rounded,
seemed afterwards less real. For there is so much
left over after a love-affair; letters and mutual friends,
a cigarette case, a piece of jewellery, a few gramo¬
phone records, all the usual places one has seen each
other in. But I had nothing left but a few photo¬
graphs to show that I had ever known these three
men; I would never again see the towns we had passed
through together and never run into them in
familiar places.*

* Six years later when the fortune of war brought me back to
Freetown, X met La min ah and asked after Amedoo. He broke
into peals of laughter, "Old cook," he said, "he all right, but
Amedoo he under ground." (1946). ' *

$2 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Up to Railhead

Everything was strange from the moment we
pressed our way into Water Street Station through
the crowd which always watched the twice-weekly
train depart, and waved good-bye to Younger, beyond
the black barrier of faces. I felt more at one then
with the Kuhn-Kan players; I could appreciate the
need in a strange place of some point of support, of
one or two things scattered round which are familiar
and understandable even if they are only Sydney
Horler’s novels, a gin and tonic. For even the railway
journey was strange. It is a small-gauge line, and
the train noses its way up-country with incredible
slowness (it took two days to go two hundred and fifty
miles). There are three first-class compartments. The
experienced traveller (there was one on the train)
engages the middle compartment, which is quite
empty, and puts up his own deck-chair; in the othei
two compartments the company provides wicker arm¬
chairs.

One was ‘ofF, and one was horribly afraid of doing
the wrong thing; the etiquette of travel in wild places
is as exacting as the etiquette of a new club. Nobody
in England had warned me of the centre compart¬
ment, although I now understood that as a white man
I should have made some effort to engage it. I began
to fear, too, my first meeting with a chief; I had been
told that I would be ‘dashed’, probably a rhirkeu or
some eggs or rice, and I would have to ‘dash’ back
money in return; I must shake hands and be friendly
but aloof (it was a relief to enter the Republic and no
longer feel that I was a member of the ruling race).

THE HOME FROM HOME

53

This question of dashes was a complicated one; in
the course of the journey we found ourselves dashed
not merely the usual chicken (value 6 d . or gd. accord¬
ing to quality; return dash, which should always
slightly exceed the true value, is. or is. 3J.), eggs
(return dash id. each), oranges and bananas (value
about forty for 3d.; return dash 6 d .), but a goat, a
dancing monkey, a bundle of knives, a leather pouch,
and innumerable gourds of palm wine. It was not
always easy to calculate the value, and it was a long
time before I overcame my reluctance to press a
shilling into a chiefs hand.

I had been told by Mr. D. that I might meet three
chiefs before we left Sierra Leone, Chief Coomba and
Chief Fomba at Pendembu, the end of the line, and
(Chief Momno Kpanyan at Kailahun, our last stop¬
ping place before the frontier. Chief Momno
Kpanyan was a very rich man, and the thought of
having to dash him a few shillings clouded the whole
of the journey.

I had never been so hot and so damp; if we pulled
down the blinds in the small dusty compartment we
shut out all the air; if we raised them, the sun
scorched the wicker, the wooden floor, drenched
hands and knees in sweat. Outside, the dusty Sierra
Leone countryside unrolled, like a piece of drab cloth
along a draper’s counter, grey and dull-green and
burnt up by the dry season which was now approach¬
ing its end. The train rattled and reeled forward
at fifteen miles an horn, burrowing intimately
through the native villages almost within hand’s
reach of the huts, the babies rolling in the dust, the
men lounging in tom hammocks hung under the

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

thatch. The bush was as ragged and uninteresting
as a back garden which has been allowed to run wild
and in which the aspidistras from the parlour have
seeded and flourished among the brown-scorched
grasses and the tall wrinkled greenery.

All the way along the line the price of oranges
went down, from six a penny at Freetown to fifteen
a penny the other side of Bo. The train stopped at
every station, and the women pressed up along the
line, their great black nipples like the centre point of
a target. I was not yet tired of the sight of naked
bodies (later I began to feel as if I had lived for years
with nothing but cows), or else these women were
prettier and more finely-built than most of those I saw
in the Republic. It was curious how quickly one aban¬
doned the white standard. These long breasts falling
in flat bronze folds soon seemed more beautiful than
the small rounded immature European breasts. The
children took their milk standing; they ran to the
breast in pairs like lambs, pulling at the teats. But
though the region of modesty had shrunk, it was still
there. The train crossed the Mano river; far down
below the bridge, a hundred yards away, natives were
bathing; they covered their private parts with their
hands as the train went by.

The railway journey began before eight and
finished some time after five; the first stage of the
journey ended at Bo; here the train and passengers
stayed the night. At some point during the day one
had emerged from the Colony into the Protectorate.
The change was more than a matter of geography
or administration, it was a change of manner. The
Englishmen here didn’t talk about the “bloody blacks’

THE HOME FROM HOME

55

nor did they patronise or laugh at them; they had to
deal with the real native and not the Creole, and
the real native was someone to love and admire. One
didn't have to condescend; one knew more about
some things, but they knew more about others. And
on the whole the things they knew were more
important. One couldn't make lightning like they
could, one’s gun was only an improvement on their
poisoned spear, and unless one was a doctor one had
less chance of curing a snake-bite than they. The
Englishmen here were of a finer, subtler type than
on the Coast; they were patriots in the sense that they
cared for something in their country other than its
externals; they couldn't build their English comer
with a few tin roofs and peeling posters and drinks
at the bar.

It might be thought that these men were more
fortunate, that their ‘comer', just because it was less
material, demanded less effort to construct. But one
cannot carry a country's art in one's head, and in the
climate of West Africa books rot, pianos go out of
tune, and even a gramophone record buckles.

Beside the line Sergeant Penny Carlyle, D.C.'s
messenger, swagger-stick under arm, waited for us.
Bare-legged and bare-footed, with a cap like a
Victorian messenger boy's perched on one side, a row
of medals on his tunic, he had the smartness and
efficiency of an N.C.O. in the Guards. He marshalled
his carriers, led the way to the rest-house, squashed
a beede under his toes, clicked his bare heels and
dismissed. There were egrets everywhere, like thin
snow-white ducks with yellow beaks. They provided,
in their slender Oriental beauty, the final contrast to

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

56

Freetown; there wasn’t a vulture to be seen, and sud¬
denly, inexplicably, I felt happy in the rest-house, the
square squat bungalow built on cement piles to keep
out the white ants,, as the hurricane lamps were lit
and the remains of the tough, dry, tasteless coast
chicken were laid out. There was a cockroach larger '
than a black-beetle in the bathroom, there were no
mosquito rods with the camp beds, my medical outfit,
which had cost me four pounds ten at Burroughs
Wellcome, had been left behind, a native stood out¬
side the rest-house all the evening complaining of
something with folded hands; but I was happy; it
was as if I had left something I distrusted behind.

On the lawn outside the headmaster’s house, beside
a tree covered with wax blossoms like magnolia, we
sat and drank gin and lime-juice; it was warm and
quiet; they talked of the Republic. I carried an intro¬
duction to C., a young Dutchman who was said to be
somewherein the Republic looking for diamonds. The
traffic superintendent had heard of him; C. had
slipped over the frontier somewhere near Pendembu
and rumours had come hack that he had found the
stones. He was alone, working for some small Dutch
company outside the great Trust. But the Trust, so
the story went, had been frightened by the rumours;
if diamonds were mined on a large scale in the
Republic, the Trust could no longer control the price.
They had sent spies over to trace C., slipped them
across horn Sierra Leone, from French Guinea and
from the Ivory Coast; they had to discover the truth;
the price of diamonds and their own existence
depended on k. It was a good story to hear there in
die dark,* near the borders of a country of which no

THE HOME FROM HOME

57

one in Sierra Leone had been able to tell me any¬
thing. It was a good story because it didn’t go too
far and tell too much, because it had not merely a
plot but a subject; it cast a light in so many direc¬
tions, the satiric, the social, the psychological; one
only had to wait for one’s own experience to add
colour and facts, though I was almost afraid to
find C., lest the vivid outline should be marred by
detail.

It was useless in Sierra Leone to ask for information
about the Republic. No one had been across; any
traffic there was came from the other side. President
King, who had been forced to resign soon afterwards
by the disclosures of the League of Nations Com¬
mission of Inquiry, had visited Sierra Leone a few
years back. He was received with royal honours;
there were banquets and receptions, guns were fired
the royal number of rounds. What the President
never knew was that he had been used as a dummy
for the Prince of Wales, who visited the colony soon
afterwards; the salutes had been rehearsed, the com¬
mittees had tried out their arrangements on him.
Later he came up to Bo on his way home. He had
planned to go back by land from the boundary,
escorted by his troops; it wasn’t safe for a President to
make his way through the tribes he ruled without
two hundred soldiers to guard him. There was a
dinner in his honour; it went well to the end; there
were the usual toasts; but when the President rose
there was an interruption. The Colonel Commandant
of the Republic’s Frontier Force was having a good
time. “Sit down, Mr. President,” he said. “I want
some more brandies and sodas.”

jg JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

A few days later his host got tired of the President
and had him escorted with proper ceremony to the
border, but at the wrong place. The Frontier Force
had marched to meet him at Foya and here he was
at Kabawana. The Presidential party sat on the
ground and waited and hoped; they were very
frightened; the British platoon marched off and left
them there.

Border Town

As it turned out I had no cause to fear a meeting
with the diamond prospector. The story was left
vague, unverified, suggestive. Six months in the
Republic had been too much for C.’s health; he had
gone home. This I learnt the next afternoon at
Pendembu, at the small German store where I had
been told to inquire for him. The train left Bo soon
after nine and arrived in the late afternoon. All my
food was still in bond, but I bought tinned food at
the P.Z. store in Bo. One could buy everything there,
drinks and tinned foods and dothes and ironware
and cures for gonorrhoea (P.Z. have branches all
down the coast, even in the Republic; they are a
Manchester firm, a kind of West African Selfridge,
and in towns where there is no accommodation for
white men, the P.Z. store can always be depended on
for hospitality.)

At Pendembu another Court Messenger was wait¬
ing for us, and a lorry to take us to Kailahun, to the
Government Rest-house, but I called first at the
Deutsche Kamerun Gesellschaft to inquire for C.
"You’ll find his partner, Mr. Van Gogh,” the German

THE HOME FROM HOME

manager said, “somewhere near Bolahun.” }

Gogh was looking for gold as well as for
He'had been out there for nine months. He"wv.
be at Bolahun or somewhere in the forest. The^
couldn't say more. The Paramount Chief was wait¬
ing by the lorry; he was a small man in a robe of
native cloth with a cocky little woollen cap; we had
nothing to say to each other, we shook hands and
smiled, and then the lorry drove away.

The old engine boiled, and the metal of the foot¬
board burnt through my shoes; the driver was bare¬
footed. We drove wildly up- and down-hill for an
hour on a road like a farm track, but the impression
of reckless speed was deceptive, formed by the bumps,
the reeling landscape, the smell of petrol and the
heat; the lorry couldn't have gone more than twenty
miles an hour. Cars are still rare in that comer of
Sierra Leone, men scrambled up the banks, women
fled into the bush or crouched against the bank with
their faces hidden, as civilisation went terrifyingly
by them in a fume of evil smoke.

In Kailahun at the time when we arrived there
were only two white men, the District Commissioner
and a Scottish engineer who was building a bridge,
but a third man, a stranger, drifted in during die
evening in a singlet and dirty ducks, with a little
black beard and shaven monkish head. The Com¬
missioner had arrived by the same train; he had been
down the line to Segbwana to investigate a Gorilla
Society murder. A child had been carried off and
killed, and a woman had sworn she had seen the
gorilla and that he wore trousers. A man confessed,
but none of the Commissioners believed that he was

00 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the real murderer. He had in his possession a gorilla
knife with curved prongs to make the rough claw¬
ing wounds, and possession of the knife was alone
sufficient to earn him fourteen years’ imprisonment
The Commissioner was small, dark, lively, subtle and
sensitive; he was new to the place; something had
happened to three of his predecessors. There had been
a boundary dispute in the district for years between
two chiefs, a suspicion of "medicine' in the food, and
in a month's time he would be alone again (the
engineer gone). Books came out to him from the
Times Book Club, he read them and then they rotted
on the shelves.

The engineer sat and smoked in silence. He didn't
read books; he had no conversation; he was white-
haired, rocky, slow; he might have been sixty and it
was a shock to hear that he was in his early forties.
He didn't mind the loneliness, he said, he was happier
here than in England, it suited him. But he had
more nerves than he cared to admit.

* "There's a Liberian messenger waiting here for
you,” the D.C. said. It was what I had feared, that
the authorities would send a guide to keep us to the
route they had suggested. The D.C. sent a man into
the village to find him, and soon afterwards the
stranger turned up in his dirty trousers and singlet.
Everyone took him to be the Liberian messenger,
nobody got up or offered him a drink; he was the
E n em y with his shaven head and his curious black
tuft of beard. He had nothing to say for himself,
standing there patiently while he was told what he
had to do. ‘"You are going to show this gentleman
the way to Bolahun. He will start the day after to-

THE HOME FROM HOME

6l

morrow. You know the way to the Holy Cross
Mission?”

Yes, he said, he had come from there.

It was a long while before anyone thought of ask¬
ing whether he was the Liberian messenger. He
wasn’t, the messenger had disappeared from
Kailahun, the stranger was a German. He wanted a
bed; he had dropped in to Kailahun as casually as
if it were a German village where he would be sure
to find an xnn. He had a bland secretive innocence;
he had come from the Republic and he was going
back to the Republic; he gave no indication of why
he had come or why he was going or what he was
doing in Africa at all.

I took him for a prospector, but it turned out later
that he was concerned with no thin g so material as
gold or diamonds. He was just learning. He sat back
in his chair, seeming to pay no attention to anyone;
when he was asked a question, he gave a tiny laugh
(you thought: I have asked something very foolish,
very superficial), and gave no answer until later, when
you had forgotten the question. He was young in
spite of his beard; he had an aristocratic air in spite
of his beachcomber’s dress, and he was wiser than
any of us. He was the only one who knew exactly
what it was he wished to learn, who knew the exact
extent of his ignorance. He could speak Mende; he
was picking up Buzie; and he had a few words of
Pelli: it took time. He had only been two years in
West Africa,

I discovered this very gradually; it took longer
than the breakfast to which he came next day, more
aristocratic than ever in a clean shirt and a pair of

6z

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

fawn trousers, with an ivory-headed stick, a round
white topee, a long cigarette-holder in the comer of
his mouth. It was a formal courtesy, but he wasn’t
interested in anyone; he was only interested in learn¬
ing what he wanted to know, and he could tell at
once that from us he could learn nothing at all. We
asked him questions and he retired more than ever
into his reserve of secrecy. Had he ever been to
Africa before he came out to the Republic two years
ago? No, never. Hadn’t he found things difficult?
No, he said with a tiny smile, it had all been very
simple. Would one have trouble with the Customs
at the frontier? Well, of course, it was possible; he
himself had no trouble, but they knew him. Should
one bribe them? That was one of the questions he
didn’t answer, putting it aside, s milin g gently, tipping
the ash off his cigarette on to the beaten earth of the
floor. The cockchafers buzzed in and out and he
sat with lowered head, smoking. No, he wouldn’t
have another biscuit. Only after a time he exerted
himself to give one piece of information; teaching
tired him as much as learning invigorated him It
would be as well, he said, while we were at the Holy
Cress to visit the Liberian Commissioner at Kolahun.
The Commissioner was a scoundrel; he could make
things very unpleasant; besides, it was necessary to
take out a permit of residence before one had been in
the Republic a week. Then he walked briskly away,
twirling his ivory-headed stick, his topee sloped at a
smart angle, looking around, learning things. One
day (it took a week to discover so much) he was
going to write a thesis for Berlin University (he came
from Hamburg, but Dr. Westermann was at Berlin

THE HOME FROM HOME

63

and he hoped to win the approval of that great
African scholar). The thesis was an end, but the
collection of material for the thesis had no end. The
thesis was as evasive as the Castle in Kafka’s religious
parable.

' We met him again in the long flat village. The
chief s new house stood up above the huts, an absurd
concrete skyscraper with row on row of stained-glass
windows not made to open; in one comer, t icked
away, an unpainted door and a flight of splintery
steps. This was the house of Momno Kpanyan, one
of the richest chiefs in the Protectorate. In the market
we got small change; the penny was too large a sum
for marketing, and the currency most in use was
irons. Their price varied; one could speculate in
irons: the rate that day was twenty for fourpence.
They were flat strips of iron about fourteen inches
long, like blunt arrows; the points must be un¬
damaged and the tails unchipped (this was as good
a way as a milled edge to ensure that the currency
was not debased); men were coming in to the market
with bundles of several hundred irons on their
heads.

Kailahun, in memory, has become a clean village,
one of the cleanest we stayed in, but what impressed
me at the time was the dirt and disease, the children
with protuberant navels relieving themselves in the
dust among the goats and chickens, the pock-marked
women smeared about the face and legs and breasts
with some white ointment they squeezed from a plant
in the bush and used for beauty and for medicine.
They used it for smallpox, for fever, for toothache,
for indigestion; for every ailment under their bleak

64 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

sun; when they were young it soothed their head¬
aches; when they were older they smeared it on their
big bellies to bring them ease in their confinement;
when they were dying it lay like a sediment of salt
on their dried-up breasts and in their pitted thighs.
Here you could measure what civilisation was worth;
looking back later to Kailahun from the villages of
the Republic, where civilisation stopped within fifty
miles of the coast, I could see no great difference.

“Workers of the World Unite”; I thought of the
wide shallow slogans of political parties, as the thin
bodies, every rib showing, with dangling swollen
elbows or pock-marked skin, went by me to the
market; why should we pretend to talk in terms of
the world when we mean only Europe or the white
races? Neither I.L.P. nor Communist Party urges
a strike in England because the platelayers in Sierra
Leone are paid sixpence a day without their food
Civilisation here remained exploitation; we had
hardly, it seemed to me, improved the natives' lot at
all, they were as worn out with fever as before the
white man came, we had introduced new diseases
and weakened their resistance to the old, they still
drank from polluted water and suffered from the
same worms, they were still at the mercy of their
chiefs, for what could a District Commisioner really
know, shifted from district to district, picking up only
a few words of the language, dependent on an inter¬
preter? Civilisation so far as Sierra Leone was con¬
cerned was the railway to Pendembu, the increased
export of palm-nuts; civilisation, too, was Lever
Brothers and the price they controlled; civilisation
was the long bar in the Grand, the sixpenny wages.

THE HOME FROM HOME 65

It was not civilisation as we think of it, a civilisation
of Suffolk churches and Cotswold manors, of Crome
and Vaughan. The District Commissioner’s work
was to a great extent the protection of the native
from the civilisation he represented. The 'noble
savage’ no longer exists; perhaps he never existed,
though in the very young (among the few who are
not disfigured by navel hernia) you seem to see
behind the present to something lovely, happy and
unenslaved, something like the girl who came up the
hill that morning, a piece of bright cloth twisted
above her hips, the sunlight falling between the
palms on her dark hanging breasts, her great
silver anklets, the yellow pot she carried on her
head.

Freedom to Travel

Kailahun is on the border of French Guinea; that
presumably is why the District Commissioner’s office
was transferred there from Pendembu at the rail¬
head. At Kailahun there is no railway and no tele¬
graph: to communicate with Freetown the Com¬
missioner must send a messenger the eighteen miles
to Pendembu. It is difficult to understand what
control he has over the border; natives pass freely to
and fro; indeed with a litde care it would be possible
to travel all down West Africa without showing
papers from the moment of landing. There is some¬
thing very attractive in this great patch of 'freedom
to travel’; absconding financiers might do worse than
take to the African bush. They could be buried there
for a lifetime, and they could^carry all the money

66 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

they needed with them in a country where oranges
are fifteen a penny, chickens sixpence each, and
wages, if you go deep enough, three s h il l i ng s a week;
where you can feed thirty men, as I found, on thirty
shillings a week.

That afternoon we went for a walk into French
Guinea with the engineer. The border is the Moa
River, about twice the width of the Thames at West¬
minster. We crossed in a dug-out canoe, standing
and balancing with the roll. It was quite easy, only
a little frightening because there were alligators in
the Moa. The curious thing about these boundaries,
a line of river in a waste of bush, no passports, no
Customs, no harriers to wandering tribesmen, is that
they are as distinct as a European boundary; stepping
out of the canoe one was in a difEerent country. Even
nature had changed; instead of forest and a rough
winding road down which a car could, with some
difficulty, go, a narrow path ran straight forward for
mile after mile through tall treeless elephant grass.
Along the hot wrinkled surface lay the skins of
snakes. Natives came stooping up the path, bowed
undo: green hammocks of palm nuts; they looked
like grasshoppers in a Silly Symphony. We walked
for an hour and a half without coming to a village
and at last turned back to Sierra Leone. The engineer
said the path went straight down to the coast by
Konakry, and again one felt the happy sense of being
free; one had only to follow a path far enough and
one could cross a continent. Sweating in the hot dry
day and growing cool again, one found it hard to
believe that this part of Africa should have so un¬
healthy a reputation; one forgot C.’s sickness and the

THE HOME FROM HOME 67

diseased villagers. I had not so much as heard a
mosquito and the daily five grains of quinine seemed
a waste of medicine.

But that was during the day; when it was dark,
sitting in the engineer’s bare bungalow and drinking
warm beer, I wasn’t so sure about the place. The man
looked sixty; one had to explain somehow the fifteen
years of white hair and lines he hadn’t really lived.
He said again how happy he was; he hadn’t been able
to settle in England, his wife was nervy, she had
never been out with him, West Africa wouldn’t suit
her, she was afraid of moths, and as he spoke, the
moths flocked in through the paneless windows to
shrivel against the hurricane lamp, the cockchafers
and the beetles detonated against the walls and
ceiling and fell on our hair. He didn’t mind insects
himself, he said, leaping from his chair, hitting at
the moths with his hand, squashing the beetles under¬
foot. (He couldn’t keep still for a moment.) The
only thing he feared, he said, was elephants. He had
been watching a shoot once beside his motor-cycle
when an elephant charged him; it was a hundred
yards away and he couldn’t start his cycle. When it
was ten yards away he got his cycle started, and after
a quarter of a mile at twenty miles an hour he looked
back and saw that the elephant hadn’t lost a yard.
He got up from his chair again and made for a
beetle, but it was too quick for him, driving up
against the ceiling. He said he wasn’t lonely, he
didn’t know what nerves were—bringing his hand
against the wall—he always believed in having one
hobby; the last tour it had been the wireless, another
tour butterflies, this tour it was his car.

68

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

“Those things are so noisy,” he complained. “They
keep one awake at night.”

“Surely it’s only the light that brings them in,” I
said.

“Oh,” he said, “I always leave a light burning at
night,” and his eyes followed the beetles up and down
the bare room. Somebody was playing something;
the sound came all the way from the village: a kind
of harp playing without melody, an endless repetition
of notes.

He said, ‘Tm sorry you are off to-morrow.” He
said it so often that one couldn’t doubt him, even
though in the next breath he would explain that he
wasn’t lonely, that he liked the life.

I had sent off a messenger that mo rnin g with a
letter to the Father Superior at the mission at
Bolahun. The act of sending a letter by messenger a
day’s journey ahead into another country was
pleasantly mediaeval. One paid the messenger
nothing when he left; he met one somewhere on the
road on his return journey, the road a foot-wide path
through thick forest, crossed and recrossed by other
paths. But the messengers never went astray; they
were as reliable as the English Post Office. Once, when
the message was urgent, I sent a man by night, giving
him a fill of paraffin for his lamp, and with a dagger
hanging over his shoulder he ran out into the dark
bush, the letter stuck in a deft stick.

It was January the twenty-sixth when we left for
the Republic (snow in London, yellow fever in Free¬
town, mist over the burnt grasses at Kailahun). There
ws a road for another fifteen miles towards the
*>order; I had ordered two lorries to call for myself

THE HOME FROM HOME 69

and the German, who had brought carriers with him
from the Republic, at seven o’clock. It was a twenty-
mile march from the end of the road to the mission
on the other side of the frontier and I was anxious
to be there before dark. Nor had I any idea how long
we might be held up at the Customs. Only one lorry
turned up and it was an hour and a quarter late. The
German doubted whether my cousin and I would
reach Bolahun before night, for we had only one
hammock and his aristocratic mind recoiled from
the idea of walking with the men, from the stumbling
and scrambling in the dust, and the tiredness. He
himself had a chair slung on poles so that he could
sit upright above the carriers. But I had to think of
money; one couldn’t have less than six carriers for
a four-man hammock and by walking from Biedu
I was saving seven and sixpence. We packed our¬
selves on the one small lorry; three whites, three boys,
eleven carriers, and thirty loads, and drove unsteadily
down the rough road through the thin morning mist.
Great flattened thimbles of perpendicular rock rose
above the dripping palms; we drove between.

I was vexed by the delay at Kailahun. I had not
yet got accustomed to the idea that time, as a
measured and recorded period, had been left behind
on the coast. In the interior there was no such thing
as time; the best watches couldn’t stand the climate.
Sooner or later they stopped. My own watch and my
cousin’s were the first to go, and afterwards, one by
one, I used up the six cheap watches I had brought
with me for 'dashes’ from Marks and Spencer’s. Only
one reached the coast and it had long ceased to record
the 'real’ time; when it got dark I simply put the

JO JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Viands at six-thirty. If I wanted to get up earlier in
the morning I put the hands on. Perhaps this was
what Stanley had in mind when he heard Big Ben
strike as he lay dying and exclaimed at the strange¬
ness, “So that is Timel”

But on the lorry from Kailahun I still believed
that I could plan my journey by time-table. I
thought that we were going to Monrovia, the capital,
straight from Bolahun and that we would be there
within a fortnight; I would not have admitted the
possibility that in four weeks we should be in a place
I had never heard of, in the middle of the Republic,
watching an old skinny woman who had made light¬
ning in her village carry water back on her head to
her fellow-prisoners in the horrible little gaol at
Tapee-Ta.

For one thing I hadn’t the money for so extended
a journey. I had cashed the last of my credit at Free¬
town and carried with me about twenty-five pounds
in shillings, sixpences and threepenny-bits. In a steel
moneybox with a padlock it made about half a man’s
load. It was no good taking anything but silver into
the Republic, and I was to find curious objections
here and there to the silver money I had brought.
One tribe wouldn’t look at money with Queen
Victoria’s head on it; the news of her death had pene¬
trated to the most unlikely places, to places where
I and my cousin were the first white people to be seen
in living memory, and the value of the coins, they
believed, had died with her. When we approached
the coast, among the Bassa tribe, we found that no¬
body would accept the ordinary English silver-
stamped with a crown or acorns; they would only

THE HOME FROM HOME 71

take the British West African coinage stamped with
a palm tree. But this trouble was for the future; I
was concerned only at the moment with time, with
the need to get to Bolahun before dark. It was an
unpractised traveller’s anxiety; it led to unnecessary
strain and my carriers’ mistrust. _ Later I got used to
not caring a damn, just to walking and staying put
when I had walked far enough, at some village of
which I didn’t know the name, to letting myself drift
with Africa.

To the Frontier

At Biedu the chief was waiting in the village with
the carriers and an interpreter. I knocked the price
down from one and sixpence a man to one and three¬
pence, conscious of the faint cynical amusement of
the German, who never paid more than sixpence. The
loads were spread out down the centre of the village
and for the first time I could see the full extent of
the luggage we had brought with us: the six boxes
of food, the two beds and chairs and mosquito nets,
three suitcases, a tent we were never to use, two boxes
of miscellaneous things, a bath, a bundle of blankets,
a folding table, a money-box, a hammock; I couldn’t
help being a little shamed by my servants, who each
brought with them a small flat suitcase.

Later I tried to calculate how lightly a man could
travel with safety for any length of time in the West
African bush. I had spent more than fifty pounds
on equipment and my invoices read like the list of
goods supplied to an Everest expedition, but I do not
think I could have cut down the loads by more than

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

72

four with safety, for in West Africa there are strict
limits to the lightness of travel, as the story of Dr. D.,
a German botanist, suggests.

A week after I crossed the frontier Dr. D. died at
Ganta in the Central Province, a town which I
reached on February the fourteenth. His pathetic
and dignified death, which was obviously deliberate,
brought the world of Hitler, of Dachau and the con-
centrarion camps and Nazi self-righteousness even
into this corner of Africa. Dr. D. had had forty years’
experience of West Africa. Before the war he was
German Consul in Monrovia and an agent for the
Woermann Line, but he was already known at Ham¬
burg University as a botanist. After the war he was
the first German to reopen business in the Republic,
but he failed, he left debts behind him, and the new
Hitler’s Germany to which he returned was not
sympathetic to failure. He was seventy years old and
a ruined man, and after forty years on the Coast he
cannot have been at home among the swastika
banners of Berlin, the Sunday processions with drums
and bugles and bayonets under the Brandenburg
Gate, the demonstrations at the Tempelhof. He was
interested in tropical flowers, he wasn’t interested in
who fired the Reichstag. Harvard University gave
him a little money to return to the Republic and
make a collection of botanical specimens in the
interior. He found Hitler’s Germany well established
in Monrovia; the two enthusiastic Nazis there dis¬
approved of Dr. D. Hearing a rumour that he would
be staying at the German Legation, they called on
the Consul-General to protest, so that in those last
days he was forced to find hospitality at an English

THE HOME FROM HOME 73

store. There is no evidence of Dr. D.’s intention, but
it seems obvious that he had no wish to return to
Europe and that he preferred to die in Africa. It
is the only satisfactory explanation of his recklessness.
For he went up from Monrovia through Bassa
country to Sanoquelleh, ten days’ trek, without a
hammock, without provisions, without even a bed or
a mosquito net; he can hardly have travelled lighter
when his body was brought down from Ganta for
burial in the Lutheran Mission at Miihlenburg. He
slept on native beds, ate the native food, and (Bed of
dysentery.

There are limits, then, to travelling light. A
District Commissioner in Sierra Leone seldom travels
with less than twenty-five carriers for himself alone,
and for much shorter treks than ours proved to be,
while at one time, after we had lost two men from
sickness, we were travelling with twenty-three. At
Biedu, with a four-man hammock for my cousin, I
had to take twenty-five carriers. A journey of about
twenty miles therefore cost a litde more than thirty
shillings. Travel in Africa, if carriers have to be hired
by the day, is expensive. This was the experience in
the Republic of Sir Alfred Sharpe, whose route I
followed at the start. He was forced to take carriers
from village to village, sometimes paying two sets of
carriers in twenty-four hours at the fixed rate of a
shilling a day. At most villages there would be delay
in finding new carriers; all the men might be working
on the farms; and often it was impossible to travel
more than eight miles in a day. I learned from his
experience and waited at Bolahun a week until I had
engaged carriers willing to come with us all the way

74 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

and apart from the saving in wages I was able to
average more than twelve miles a day over a period
of four weeks.

The chief at Biedu gave me a chicken, I gave the
rhipf a shilling. Souri, the cook, tied the chicken’s
legs together, Amedoo went down the line of loads
testing the weights, the German sat down on his ham¬
mock chair, and “Off!” I said. I felt like a subaltern
facing my platoon for the first time. I couldn’t really
believe that when I said “Off! ” the twenty-five carriers
would be set in motion. I stood back and watched
thpTn with an odd feeling of pleasure, an absurd sense
of pride, when like a long mechanical toy they were
set in motion and wavered and straightened and
strode out through the village on to a wide track
which narrowed soon into a path through the
elephant grass, into a tree-trunk over a stream, which
wound into woods and clearings and woods again,
and at last after two hours broadened out into a wide
plateau which was the frontier; three or four huts,
a few riflemen in scarlet fezzes with a gold device,
the Liberian flag (a star and stripes), and a little man
with a black moustache and a yellow skin and a worn
topee who came out into the clearing and greeted me
with a shifty nervous jubilant air as much as to say:
we’ve got you here, ‘leave no screws unturned,”,
plenty of tin for yours truly. He said, oh yes, he was
expecting me; he had been warned.

One couldn’t help having, however unjustifiably, a
sense of the dramatic; the way forward through the
clearing was as broad as the primrose way, as open as
a trap; the way back was narrow, hidden, difficult,
to the English scene.

THE HOME FROM HOME

75

The Way Back

Rather more than two thousand miles away Major
Grant was probably buttonholing another friend. “It's
just how you look at it,” he would say; “the fellows
are always bragging about Paris, but I say England's
good enough for me.” He used to visit a brothel in
Savile Row; there were scenes of luxurious abandon¬
ment in close proximity to the select tailors. He
would ring up on the phone and make an appoint¬
ment, “Three this afternoon,” then explain rather
guardedly what he wanted, guardedly because you
never knew when the police might listen-in and to
procure a woman was a criminal offence. “Young,”
he would say, “mind it's young”; “Fair or dark?” the
maid would say at the other end and sometimes
Major Grant replied “fair” and sometimes “dark”,
according as his passion urged him at the moment
towards his fair or dark angel. Then it was as well
to add a few details, “Something rather lean,” and
in another mood, “Curved but not too curved.” He
didn't, he told me, find the place very satisfactory;
shop-girls and nursery-maids adding a little to their
wages on the slant were pitiably lacking in finesse. I
think it was the theatre rather than the play which
exercised its fascination over Major Grant; he liked
the idea of ordering a woman, as one might order a
joint of meat, according to size and cut and price.
There was a wealth of dissatisfaction in his in¬
dulgence; he knew the world, and all the time he took
his revenge for the poor opinion he had of it.
Presently he shifted his custom to an address in

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

76

Hanover Street, and faded out of my knowledge,
though occasionally the old voice came to me in¬
sinuatingly across the Corner House tables. “Like a
pig in a poke. That’s what I enjoy. Never know what
you are going to get.” “And if they were not quite
up to mark?” “I take what comes,” the voice would
say, “I always accept ’em.”

“Having to construct something upon which to
rejoice.”

Miss Kilvane lived in the Cotswolds in a strange
high house like a Noah’s ark with a monkey-puzzle
tree and a step-ladder of terraces. The rooms were
all tiny and of the same shape, like the rows of rooms
in an advertising exhibition or in the brothel quarter
of an eastern city. The rooms were packed with china
ornaments, like Staffordshire and Woolworth pieces
and Goss presents from Bournemouth. She was a
follower of the Regency prophetess, Joanna South-
cott, had a manuscript collection of her” prophecies,
two counterpanes the prophetess had made, seals and
locks of hair and a Communion glass engraved with
little ludicrous symbolical figures. She was old and
innocent and terribly sure of herself; she took down
Joanna’s life from the ghost’s lips. At tea a mouse ran
backwards and forwards in a cupboard behind Miss
Kiivane’s back; I could see it moving through a crack,
between the tins of rather dry biscuits. The old lady,
with dear pale-blue eyes, wore an old-fashioned dress
of faded mauve and horn-rimmed glasses; in the
drawing-room there was a portrait of Joanna, china
ornaments, antimacassars on horsehair chairs, a wire¬
less set and a Radio Times. She spoke with complete
confidence of the millennium which would come in

THE HOME FROM HOME

77

the next fifty years; she described it in mundane
detail. “I have always wanted to see Jerusalem.” She
showed me her volumes of manuscript, prophecies
taken down by Joanna’s servant, sometimes in
doggerel verse. “Impostors can copy the prose,” she
said, “but not the poetry. People go away and think
they can write like that too. Gentlemen send me the
strangest sensual verses.” She spent a long time look¬
ing for someone to publish her life of Joanna. She
made her way down Paternoster Row and saw a pub¬
lisher’s office called Sion House; it really looked, she
said, as if inspiration had brought her to the right
place. She told a man behind a counter that she had
brought the manuscript of Joanna’s life and he went
away and never came back. “It’s the worst snub I’ve
ever received,” she said, but nothing could deter her.
She was so innocent and in a way she was so worldly;
she printed the life at her own expense; she founded
a press to do it. Maori followers of Joanna sent her
a motor-car, but she couldn’t learn to drive it; it lay
in a garage in the village. A pity; it would have been
useful, for since the Lindbergh Baby Case (she kept
her old clear hom-rimmed eyes sharply on the world)
she had made the discovery that even babies could
be “sealed” for Joanna. Her companion was in the
north at the time sealing babies. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
she said, turning over the Radio Times . Before I left
she sold me a pound of tea “from my plantations”;
she meant she had some shares in the company;
she thought I would like it; the blend was very sooth¬
ing. It was hot in the small shut rooms and the mice
were restless. I climbed down the terraces to the road,
past the monkey-puzzle tree, and she watched me

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

?8

go, perched up beside the Noah’s ark with the lonely
convictions she shared with the Maoris. She had been
made to pay two hundred pounds for her relics; the
printing press had passed out of her hands; but she
had an immense conviction of success. “They tell m e
the movement is making great progress in the Oxford
colleges.”

Mr. Charles Seitz was the son of a doctor. He
was bom in Bombay two years before the Mutiny
and he died in 1933 frozen to death in a cottage
on a bed of straw. He was the kind of figure that
attracts legends. Even his real name was lost in
common speech, so that he was known among the
Campden villagers as Charlie Sykes, as he padded
down the High Street bent double under a weight of
incredible rags, clutching a tall stick, his bearded
Apostle face bent to the pavement, his eyes flicker¬
ing sideways, aware of everyone who passed. He
was suspiciously like a stage ma dman ; he played up
to strangers, bellowing and shaking his stick, so that
they edged away a little daunted. Sometimes in
s umme r he went berserk in the market-place, shout¬
ing and s h a k i n g all alone in a desert of indifference;
no one took him seriously, least of all himself.
He earned money from Americans with kodaks,
snapped picturesquely in front of the ancient butter
market.

There were two rival stories of how his madness
started. One was romantic, an unhappy love-affair.
The other was probably the true one, that his brain
gave way from overwork for a medical degree. Once
an inhabitant of Campden spoke in his hearing of
an operation; Charlie Sykes, beating his chest.

THE HOME FROM HOME

79

described the operation in detail. That was how he
would speak, gruffly and disconsolately, beating his
chest. He had a grudge against God. “There He
is,” he said to me, “up there. We think a lot about
Him, but He doesn’t think about us. He thinks about
Himself. But we’ll be up there one day and we won’t
let Him stay.”

He had an extraordinary vitality. There was a
time when five men could not hold him, and once
when two policemen tried to arrest him at Evesham
for begging, he flung them both over a hedge. He
walked several times a week into Evesham; it was
eight miles each way by road, but he didn’t go by
road. He knew every gap in every hedge for miles
around, and once two men camping in a field above
Broadway woke up to see his face in the tent-opening.
“Naughty,” he said and disappeared.

He had banked several hundred pounds which he
never touched. The only work he ever did, after
his reason went, was cattle-droving. He begged, if
that word can be applied to his friendly demands,
“Now, what about potatoes? Or a cabbage? Well
then, turnips? What have you done with all that
dough you had yesterday?” I never saw him in a
shop, but on Friday mornings he toured the dust¬
bins in the long High Street, turning over their
contents in a critical unembarrassed way like
a lady handling silk remnants on a bargain
counter.

His cottage in Broad Campden had two rooms with
one broken chair and a pile of straw in the comer
and sixteen pairs of old shoes. He stopped a sweep
in the village once and asked him to clean his

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

80

chimney, repeating the one word, “Shilling-
shilling.” The sweep began to clean, but he couldn’t
finish, in the airless room and the app allin g stench
But the stench didn’t keep out the cold of a hard
winter, and when a policeman broke in because no
smoke had been seen from the chimney, he found
Mr. Charles Seitz frozen to death on his straw in
the upper room. They didn’t care to undress him;
he was so verminous that the fleas jumped on them
from Ms wrists; they put round his shoulders the
web with wMch coffins are lowered into the grave,
and dragged him head first down the stairs. Then
they crammed him quickly into his coffin, rags and
all, and nailed Mm down. It was terrible weather for
grave-diggers, the ground hard enough for an electric
drill six inches down.

Major Grant said with relish that the shabbiest
adventure he had ever had was in a flat off the Strand
with two bawds. They wouldn’t give him change for
his note or give him his note back; it was only a
question of ten shillings, but he suddenly grew tired
of being cheated; he had made a bargain and he’d
stick to it. He sat on the bed and wouldn’t leave the
flat; they threatened Mm and badgered Mm, but he
wouldn’t move; through a crack in the blind he could
see the flame and flicker of the Strand reflected in
the windows of a winehouse. They gave in and he
went home,

Buckland digging in the garden turned up a she-
man ake. He said that it was good for cows and pigs
to keep them in condition; he put some snails on one
ade to take home for his supper. Buckland was a
(didicoi, wMch was the name they gave in Gloucester-

THE HOME FROM HOME

81

shire to gipsies. He had run away from home when
he was a boy and walked for two days without food;
then he stole a loaf from a baker’s van and ate it
behind a hedge. The next day he got a job at a dairy
farm. The farmer asked him whether he could milk
a cow; he said yes, and the other men milked his cow
for him until he’d learnt to do it for himself; and the
farmer never knew.

On either side the Ridge Way the fields were being
harrowed, the horses disappeared over the swell of the
down, the men singing in the pale autumn sunlight.
Once when one of them came parallel with the other,
he called out: “Old Molly George has a night out to¬
night.” A flock of crows was picking at the turf
beside the White Horse. A man was ploughing in a
cup of land so far below that he was the size of a grain
of oats; the brown-turned earth grew in size, the olive-
coloured unturned earth diminished until there was
only a thin lozenge in the middle of the field. The
crows were flat below, wheeling in mid-air at the
height of a cathedral spire. The man sang as he
ploughed, his voice as loud as a gramophone in the
next room, but I could only catch one word—“angels”.
When the lozenge disappeared, I could see him lead
his horse to the hedge and a thin fume of smoke came
up but dispersed long before it reached me. He was
burning weeds.

It was winter now, snow in London, the fierce noon
sun on the clearing, yellow fever in Freetown, behind
on the way to the Coast the mist was rising from the
forest, drifting slowly upwards, ’like the smoke of
burning weeds below the Ridge Way. We turned
away from Major Grant and Miss Kilvane, from the

8a JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

peace under the down and the flat off the Strand, from
the holy and the depraved individualists to the old
the unfamiliar, the communal life beyond the
clearing.

PART II

CHAPTER ONE

WESTERN LIBERIA
The Forest Edge

It was midday. We followed the Customs man into a
thatched shelter, sat on high uncomfortable drawing¬
room chairs and smoked: the little yellow man
sat opposite us in a hammock and smoked too,
swinging back and forth. I smiled at him and he
smiled back; they were surface smiles; there was no
friendliness anywhere. The man was thinking how
much he could exact, I with how little loss I could
escape. A woman brought in a child to see the white
people and it screamed and screamed uncontrollably.
The men of the Frontier Force lounged and spat in
the vertical sunrays, and one could almost see the
brown earth cracking. I began a second cigarette.

Then Laminah burst in, a small detonating bomb
of fury in the stillness, the doing nothing. He was
like a Pekinese who has been insulted by an Alsatian.
Somebody had told him he must pay duty on his
white barber’s jacket which had a rubber lining. The
Customs officer surrendered the point with courtesy,
but it seemed to be the signal for the fun to start. I
produced my invoices, the German opened a small
suitcase and paid half a crown; the officer was in a
hurry to get on to bigger game, and the Gem®*
passed out of the frontier station bobbing above?
heads of his carriers. The officer settled to worfeuoh

84 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the invoices and the soldiers spat and grinned and
passed remarks and I wiped off the sweat.

“This will take all day,” the Customs mar| sa j,j
“Everything here except the tin of Epsom salts, the
quinine and the iodine has got to pay duty.” He
explained that he would let me go through to Bola-
hun if I left a deposit; any change would be sent
after me; he calculated that four pounds ten would
be sufficient guarantee. I extracted a bag of sixpenny-
bits from the money-box without disclosing the auto¬
matic. But it wasn’t quite the end. I had to pay two
cents each for the eight forms on which my dutiable
goods were to be set down in detail. I had to pay for
two Revenue stamps, and I had to sign my at
the bottom of the eight blank sheets saying that the
items listed above were correct. I was completely in
their power; they could fill up anything they liked on
the forms. The alternative was to stay where I was
for the night and have all my bags and bales opened.

As it was I didn’t escape so easily. The next day
he sent a soldier over to Bolahun demanding another
six pounds ten, and when the soldier went back
empty-handed, he came himself, borne in a ham¬
mock the long rough path from Foya with four
carriers and a couple of soldiers, a dirty white topee
on his head and a ragged cigarette in the comer of
his mouth. He swaggered across the verandah, a little
sour, mean, avaricious figure, grinning and friendly
and furious and determined. He got his money,
drank two glasses of whisky, smoked two cigarettes;
there was nothing one could do about it; it was im¬
possible to bribe an official who probably took a lion’s
.share anyway of what he exacted. -

WESTERN LIBERIA

85

I enjoyed the first day’s trek into the Republic
because everything was new: the sense of racing the
dark, even the taste of warm boiled water, the smell
of the carriers; it wasn’t an unpleasant smell, sweet
or sour; it was bitter, and reminded me of a breakfast
food I had as a child after pleurisy, something vigor¬
ous and body-building which I disliked. This bitter
taint was mixed with the rich plummy smell of the
kola nuts the carriers picked from the ground and
chewed, with an occasional flower scent one couldn’t
trace in the thick untidy greenery. All the smells
were drawn out, as the heat increased, like vapour
from moist ground. The carriers walked naked except
for loin-cloths, the sweat leaving marks like snails on
their black polished skins. They didn’t look strong,
they hadn’t the ugly muscular development of a
boxer; their legs were as thin as a woman’s, but they
ended in typical carrier’s feet, flat like enormous
empty gloves, spreading on the earth pancake-wise as
if the weights they carried had pressed them out in a
peine forte et dure . Even their arms were childishly
thin, and when they raised the fifty-pound cases a few
inches to ease their skulls, the muscles hardly swelled,
were no thicker than whipcord.

We were on the edge of the immense forest which
covers the Republic to within a few miles of the coast;
we climbed steeply from the frontier post at Foya
and from the first village we came to we could see
the bush below the huts, falling away, a ragged
cascade, towards the sea, lifting and falling and swell¬
ing into green plains; hundreds of miles of them* tall
palms sticking out above the rest like the brushes
of chimney sweeps. The huts here, and in all tfae

86

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Bande territory, were circular with a pointed thatched
roof overhanging the parti-coloured mud walls, white¬
washed halfway up. There was one door and some¬
times a window; in the middle of the floor were the
ashes of a fire which would be lit again at sunset
from a communal ember and fill the single room with
smoke; the fumes kept out mosquitoes, kept out, to
some extent, the fleas and bugs and cockroaches, but
not the rats. They were all much alike, these villag e
built on a hill-top on several levels like medieval
towns; the path one had followed through the bush
would drop steeply to a stream where the villagers
came to wash their clothes and bathe, then rise
abruptly up a wide beaten track out of the shade to a
silhouette of pointed huts against the midday glare.
The ground in the villages was scarred by the dry
beds of streams. In the centre was the palaver-house
and at the limit of the village the blacksmith’s forge,
both open huts without walls.

But though nearly all the villages at which I stayed
had these common properties—a hill, a str eam
palaver-house and forge, the burning ember carried
round at dark, the cows and goats standing between
the huts, the little grove of banana-trees like clusters
of tall green feathers gathering dust—not one was
quite the same. However tired I became of the seven-
hour trek through the untidy and unbeautiful forest,
I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the
night: the sense of a small courageous community
barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in
by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness
nlled with evil spirits—love was an arm round the
neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little

WESTERN LIBERIA

87

pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a
few stones in the centre of the village where the dead
chiefs lay, a grove of trees where die rice birds, like
yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in
a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This
never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the
extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their
terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed
the most courageous things in nature. Love, it has
been said, was invented in Europe by the trouba¬
dours, but it existed here without the trappings of
civilisation. They were tender towards their children
(I seldom heard a crying child, unless at the sight of
a white face, and never saw one beaten), they were
tender towards each other in a gentle muffled way;
they didn’t scream or 'rag’; they never revealed the
rasped nerves of the European poor in shrill speech
or sudden blows. One was aware the whole time of a
standard of courtesy to which it was one’s responsi¬
bility to conform.

And these were the people one had been told by
the twisters, the commercial agents, on the Coast that
one couldn’t trust. 'A black will always do you down’.
It was no good protesting later that one had not come
across a single example of dishonesty from the boys,
from the carriers, from the natives in the interior:
only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one
would not have found, or at least dared to assume was
there, in Europe. It astonished me that I was able to
travel through an unpoliced country with twenty-five
men who knew that my money-box contained what
to them was a fortune in silver. We were not in
British or French territory now: it wouldn't have

88

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

mattered to the black Government on the Coast if
we had disappeared and they could have done little
about it anyway. We couldn’t even count as armed;
the automatic was hidden in the money-box, never
loaded, never seen; it would have been easy when we
were crossing one of the fibre bridges to stage an
accident; it would have been easy, less drastically,
simply to mislay the money-box or to lose us in the
bush.

But “poor fool”, one could tell the Coast whites
were thinking, “he just didn’t know how he was being
done”. But I wasn’t ‘done’; there wasn’t an ins tan c e
of even the most petty theft, though in every village
the natives swarmed into the hut where all day my
things were lying about, soap (to them very precious),
razor, brushes. “You can have a boy for ten years,”
they’d say, “and he’ll do you at the end of it,” and
laying down their empty glasses they’d go out into
the glaring street and down to the store to see whom
they could ‘do’ in the proper understood commercial
way that morning. “No affection,” they’d say, “after
fifteen years. Not a scrap of real affection,” expecting
always to get from these people more than what they
had paid for. They had paid for service and they
expected love thrown in.

I had hoped to reach the mission at five o’clock; but
five o’clock brought us only to another bill, another
group of huts and stones, and the forest thick below.
The balls of cotton were laid outside the huts to dry
and a small tree ruffled a pale p ink blossom against
the sky. Somebody pointed out the mission, a white
building which the low sun picked out of the forest.
„It was at least two hours away, and the journey be-

WESTERN LIBERIA

89

came more than ever a race against the dark, which
the dark nearly won. It came down on us just as we
left the forest and wound through the banana planta¬
tion at the foot of Mosambolahun, and it was quite
dark and cold as we passed between the huts, the old
cook flitting ahead in his long white Mohammedan
robe, carrying a trussed chicken. All the fires had
been lit in the huts and the smoke blew across the
narrow paths stinging the eye; but the little flames
were like home; they were the African equivalent of
the lights behind red blinds in English villages.
There must have been nearly two hundred huts on
Mosambolahun, packed together on a thimble of
rock,' and it stood apart in its remote pagan dirt from
the neat Christianised garden village of Bolahun in
the cleared plain below. A wide flattened path ran
down across the plain to Bolahun and a swaying ham¬
mock came up it and a little noisy group of men. The
hammock stopped at my side and an old, old man in
a robe of native cloth with a long white beard put out
a hand. It was the chief of Mosambolahun; ninety
years old he quivered and shook and smiled while
his people chattered round him. He couldn’t speak
any English, but a boy with a gun whom I found at
my side told me that the chief was on his way home
from Tailahun, where a brother chief had died. He
was swept away again by his impatient hammock-
bearers, waving his dried old hand, smiling gently,
curiously, quizzically. He was the explanation, I later
learnt, of Mosambolahun’s dirt; he was a puppet of
the younger men, without authority. He had about
two hundred wives, but they would sell him the same
wife over and over again; he was too old to keeg

cp JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

count. He knew that he was too old, he wanted to
retire for a younger man, but it didn’t suit his lawless
village to lose their puppet. When he became impor¬
tunate they told him they had made him a bishop,
and that pleased and quieted him.

It was a two-mile walk up to the mission through
the village of Bolahun, through the deep barking of
the frogs. The mission belonged to the Order of the
Holy Cross, a monastic order of the American Epis¬
copal Church. I dumped my loads outside the long
bungalow and waited for the priests to come out from
Benediction. I could hear the low murmur of Latin
inside; in the darkness only the white eyeballs of my
carriers were visible, where they squatted silent on the
verandah; everyone was too tired to talk. But the
sound of the Latin represented a better civilisation
than the tin shacks of the English port, better than
anything I had seen in Sierra Leone; and when the
priests came out and one led the way to the rest-
house, his white robe stirring in the cold hill wind, I
was for the first time unashamed by the comparison
between white and black. There was something in
this comer of a republic said to be a byword for
corruption and slavery that at least wasn’t commer¬
cial. One couldn’t put it higher than this: that the
little group of priests and nuns had a standard of
gentleness and honesty equal to the native standard.
Whether what they brought with them in the
shape of a crucified God was superior to the
local fetish worship had to be the subject of future
speculation.

That night, as the filter dripped and dripped in the
J>are rest-house living-room, after the carriers had

WESTERN LIBERIA

9 1

been paid off and the case of whisky opened, I went
outside to find the sick C.’s partner, Van Gogh. For
the prospector’s tent was just outside and a hurricane
lamp was burning. “Van Gogh,” the priest had said,
“you’ll like Van Gogh,” and seeing a syphon standing
on the boxes by the tent, I thought that I would
invite him to bring his soda over for a drink. I raised
the flap and there Van Gogh was, lying wrapped in
blankets on his camp-bed; I thought he was asleep,
but when he turned his head I saw that he was sweat¬
ing; the pale golden stubble of his chin was drenched
in sweat. Five hours before he had gone down with
fever, and all that night the German doctor attached
to the mission sat up with him. He was bad, very
bad; he had spent a lifetime in the tropics, but nine
months in the Republic had got him down. Next day
they took him to the little mission hospital in our
hammock; the boys from his gold-camp in the Gola
forest came and packed up his tent and goods and
carried him down, sick and swaying under the
blazing sun.

Sunday in Bolahun

It was Sunday in Bolahun, unmistakably Sunday.
A herd drove out his goats among absurdly Biblical
rocks, a bell went for early service, and I saw the five
nuns going down in single file to the village through
the banana plantations in veils and white sun-helmets
carrying prayer-books. They were English; tea with
them (a large fruit cake and home-made marmalade
and chocolate biscuits wilting in the heat and de¬
licious indigestible bread made with palm wine instead

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

92

of yeast) was very like tea in an English cathedral
town; it was an English corner one could feel some
pride in: it was gentle, devout, child-like and un¬
selfish, it didn’t even know it was courageous. One
couldn’t help comparing the manner of these nuns
living quite outside the limits of European protection
with that of the English in Freetown who had electric
light and refrigerators and frequent leave, who de¬
spised the natives and pitied themselves.

A great deal of nonsense has been written about
missionaries. When they have not been described as
the servants of imperialists or commercial exploiters,
they have been regarded as sexually abnormal types
who are trying to convert a simple happy pagan
people to a European religion and stunt them with
European repressions. It seems to be forgotten that
Christianity is an Eastern religion to which Western
pagans have been quite successfully converted. Mis¬
sionaries are not even given credit for logic, for if one
believes in Christianity at all, one must believe in its
universal validity. A Christian cannot believe in one
God for Europe and another God for Africa: the
importance of Semitic religion was that it did not
recognise one God for the East and another for the
West. The new paganism of the West, which prides
itself on being scientific, is often peculiarly neurotic.
Only a neurosis explains its sentimental lack of con¬
sistency, the acceptance of the historic duty of the
Mohammedan to spread his faith by the sword and
the failure to accept the duty of a Christian to spread
his faith by teaching.

The missions in the interior of the Republic are, of
course, peculiar in being completely free from poli-

WESTERN LIBERIA

93

deal or commercial contacts. The black Govern¬
ment distrusts them and no European firm has any
trading posts in the Liberian hinterland. Faith in
their religion is the only thing which can have in¬
duced American monks and English nuns to settle
at Bolahun. There is no drama to compensate i-Vipm
for the fever, the worms and the rats; the only danger
is the danger of snake-bite or disease. They are not
ascetics, who find satisfaction in cords and hair-shirts;
they have done their best, once settled in Bolahun, to
make themselves comfortable. The fathers have built
a little hospital, they get their chop boxes from Fort-
num and Mason, wine comes in over the French
border, vegetables once a month from Sierra Leone;
they have even built a kind of rough hard court for
tennis. They haven’t forced Christianity on an un¬
willing people, they haven’t made a happy naked race
wear clothes, they haven’t stopped the native dances.
The native in West Africa wifi always wear clothes if
he has the money to buy them, he will always prefer
a robe to a loin-cloth, and to anyone who has spent
much time in the bush villages the roughest native
robe will appear aesthetically preferable to the human
body—the wrinkled dugs, the running sores. As for
the dances and the fetish worship, the missionaries
have not the power to stop them if they wished to;
Christianity here has its back to the wall. Converts
are comparatively few; there is no material advan¬
tage in being converted; the only advantage is a
spiritual one, of being released from a few fears, of
being offered an insubstantial hope.

And in Bolahun particularly there were material
disadvantages in Christianity. No white man is

94 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

allowed to own land in the Republic, the missions are
at the mercy of the Government, and nine miles away
at Kolahun lived Mr. Reeves, the District Commis¬
sioner. Mr. Reeves was a Vai, a Mohammedan; he
belonged, psychologically, to the early nineteenth
century, to the days of the slave trade He hated
Christians, he hated white men, especially he hated
the English language. With his seal-grey skin, dark
expressionless eyes, full deep red lips, dressed in a
fez and a robe of native cloth, he gave an effect, more
Oriental than African, of cruelty and sensuality; he
was gross, impassive and corrupt. His wife was a Miss
Barclay, a member of the President's household, and
it was said among the natives that when he was
appointed the President promised him that he would
be a District Commissioner for ever. He was sent first
to Sanoquelleh at the other end of the country and
an unpleasant story had followed him to Kolahun, a
story of some Mandingo traders whom he was said
to have caught smuggling goods over the border from
French territory, and to have shut in a hut and
burned to death. It was impossible in the Republic
to investigate a tale like that, but there were other
stories of cruelty and despotism for which I found
plenty of evidence: stories of his house built by
forced labour and paid for by the seizure of the
natives' produce; stories of how *his messengers
flogged the men working on the road, how no man
from Christianised Bolahun dared show his face in
the town. The nuns one day had seen him pass
hurriedly by in a hammock, his messengers whipping
the carriers on. So many stories leaked down to Mon¬
rovia that even a Government separated by ten days'

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95

rough trekking was forced to take notice, and the
President was on his way, at this very time, to Kola-
hun to listen to the chiefs’ complaints.

One had to remember that background to Benedic¬
tion in the little ugly tin-roofed church. The raised
monstrance was not a powerful political symbol:
“Come to me all ye who are heavy laden and I will
give you commercial privileges and will whisper for
you in the ear of a Minister of State.” It offered, like
early Christianity, stripes from the man in power
and one knows not what secret oppression from the
priests of the fetish. There were not many at Bene¬
diction : Christianity here was still the revolutionary
force, appealing to the young rather than the old, and
the young were on holiday. A tiny piccaninny wear¬
ing nothing but a short transparent shirt scratched
and prayed, lifting his shirt above his shoulders to
scratch his loins better; a one-armed boy knelt below
a hideous varnished picture. (He had fallen from a
palm-tree gathering nuts, had broken his arm, and
feeling its limp uselessness had taken a knife and cut
it off at the elbow.)

A Chiefs Funeral

A few days after our arrival Amedoo fell ill. All
through the night I heard his racking cough, and in
the morning the German doctor examined him and
found one lung affected. He lay on the doctor’s couch
dumb with terror, but he agreed to go into the
hospital; he was frightened, but he was still the per¬
fect servant. His illness introduced me to Mark.
Mark was a Christian schoolboy; he came down from

D*

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

98

The local “devil”, Landow from Mosambolahun had
entered the village for the funeral, and it was really
to see him dance that I was there. I had caught one
glimpse of him at dusk in Bolahun striding by in his
long raffia skirts and his wooden snouted mask. From
each village on the way he collected irons, for on
entering Tailahun he must pay the new chief a
tribute of several bundles.

The new chief dozed in his hammock in the tiny
palaver-house. I dashed him two shillings; it was the
heat of the day, and he was bored and embarrassed
by the visit. Two chairs were fetched for us, and
about thirty people crowded into the cramped hut;
the insects were hopping on the floor. Presendy two
men with long drums arrived; dangling below each
drum a metal disc. They wore red caps with gold stars
on them and a long tassel very like the caps of the
Frontier Force I had seen at Foya. They stamped
their bare feet among the jiggers and tapped their
drums and metal discs with littie curved hammers.
More musicians slowly gathered in the cramped hot
hut at the sound, of the drums. Three women came
with varying sizes of ratdes—gourds containing grains
of rice which they shook in nets, and a man with a
harp of five strings made of palm fibre, attached to
half a gourd which he pressed to his breast (the faint
sweet twanging could only be heard when the drums
and rattles were still). Last came a man with an
ordinary big drum, which did give a kind of sexual
urgency to a music hard for a European to under¬
stand. The music was continually mounting to a
climax as the drummers beat their feet and sweated
( and the women rattled and swayed, but nothing ever

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99

happened. It seemed only one more meaningless
climax when the devil at last appeared.

The Liberian ‘Devils*

I call him 'devil’ because it is the word most com¬
monly used among the whites and English-speaking
natives in the Republic. It is no more misleading, I
think, than the word 'priest’ which is sometimes used
elsewhere. A masked devil like Landow (of what are
known as the Big Bush Devils I shall have something
to say later* might roughly be described as a head¬
master with rather more supernatural authority than
Arnold of Rugby ever claimed. Even in the Sierra
Leone Protectorate, where there are many missionary
schools, most natives, if they are not Mohammedan,
will attend a bush school, of which the masked devil
is the unknown head. Even the Christian natives
attend; Mark had attended, though the Christians
are usually favoured with a shortened course because
they cannot be fully trusted with the secrets of a
bush school. And the bush schools are very secret.
All the way through the great forest of the interior
one comes on signs of them; a row of curiously
cropped trees before a narrow path disappearing into
the thickest bush: a stockade of plaited palms: in¬
dications that no stranger may penetrate there. No
natives, girls or boys, are considered mature till they
have passed through the bush schools, and the course
in the old days lasted as long in some tribes as seven
years, though now two years is the more usual period.
There are no holidays; the children are confined to
the bush; if a child dies his belongings are deposited

IUU

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

outside his parents' hut at night as a sign that he is
dead, and he is buried in the bush. When the
children emerge again they are supposed to be born
anew, they are not allowed to recognise their parents
and friends in the village until they have been intro¬
duced to them again. One definite mark they bear
with them from the bush, the mark of ‘tattooing’.
The tattooing varies with the tribes: in some tribes
a woman's body from the neck to the navel is
elaborately and beautifully carved. ‘Carved' is a
better word than ‘tattooed' to convey the effect, for
tattooing to a European means a coloured pattern
pricked on the skin, but the native tattoo marks are
ridged patterns cut in the flesh with a knife.

The school and the devil who rules over it are at
first a terror to the child. It lies as grimly as a public
school in England between childhood and manhood.
He has seen the masked devil and has been told of
his supernatural power; no human part of the devil is
allowed to show, according to Dr. Westermann,
because it might be contaminated by the presence of
the uninitiated, but it seems likely also because the
unveiled power might do harm; for the same reason
no one outside the school may see the devil unmasked
for fear of blindness or death. Even though the
i n itiates of his particular school, who have seen, as it
were, the devil in his off-moments, know him to be,
say, the local blacksmith, some supernatural feeling
continues to surround him. It is not the mask which
is sacred, nor the blacksmith who is sacred; it is the
two in conjunction, but a faint aura of the super¬
natural continues to dwell in either part when they
are separate; so the blacksmith will have more power

WESTERN LIBERIA

IOI

in his village than the chief, and the mask may con¬
tinue to be reverenced, even when discarded, and fed
by its owner like a fetish.

Mark, when I knew him better, told me a little of
his own experience. As a Christian boy he spent only
a fortnight in the bush, and all he did, he said, was to
sit and eat rice. He was in the mission school one
day when the devil, this same Landow, came for him.
There had been no warning. His teacher told him
not to be afraid, but the devil, through his interpreter
(for the devil does not speak a language the native
can understand), said, ‘Tm going to swallow you.”
He was not allowed to go home first; he was bound
hand and foot and his eyes were bandaged and he was
carried into the bush. He was very scared. Then
they flung him on the ground and cut him with a
razor, but he said it didn’t hurt much. They made
two little ridges on his neck, two under the armpit,
two on the belly. I asked him if he was beaten, for
Dr. Westermann, writing of the Pelle tribe in Liberia,
has described a kind of Spartan training. He said he
was beaten once: one day the devil told the boys they
were not to go outside their huts all day whatever
they heard; of course they disobeyed and were beaten.
At the end of a fortnight he was dressed in white
clothes and taken back to the village in the dark. He
admitted at last rather reluctantly that the devil, who
didn’t wear his mask in the school, was the black¬
smith at Mosambolahun: so perhaps they were
wise to teach him nothing, but just to let him sit and
eat rice for a fortnight. In any case they are easy¬
going, lazy, not very religious in Bande country. It
was to be different among the Buzies.

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

102

The Masked Blacksmith

It was the blacksmith of Mosambolahun then who
now swayed forward between the huts in a head-dress
of feathers, a heavy blanket robe, and long raffia mane
and raffia skirts. The big drum beat, the heels
stamped and the gourds rattled, and the devil sank
to the ground, his long faded yellow hair billowing
in the dust His two eyes were two painted rings and
he had a flat black wooden snout a yard long fringed
with fur; when it opened one saw great red wooden
tusks. His black wooden nose stuck up at right angles
between his eyes which were almost flat on his snout.
His mouth opened and closed like a clapper and he
spoke in a low monotonous sing-song. He was like a
portmanteau word; an animal, a bird and a man had
all run together to form his image. All the women,
except the musicians, had gone to their huts and
watched Landow from a distance. His interpreter
squatted beside him carrying a brush with which,
when the devil moved, he kept his skirts carefully
smoothed down lest a foot or arm should show.

The devils need an interpreter because they do not
speak a language the native can understand. Lan-
dow’s mutterings were fluent and quite unintelligible.
Anthropologists, so far as I can gather, have not made
up their minds whether it is a real language the devil
speaks or whether the interpreter simply invents a
meaning. Mark’s explanation has the virtue of
simplicity, that the Bande devil speaks Pessi, that
the Pessi devil speaks Buzie; the Buzie devil, on the
Qther hand, he continued with a convincing lack of

WESTERN LIBERIA

IO3

consistency, spoke Buzie, but in so low a tone that no
one could follow him.

The devil was paying his respects to the rhiV f an( j
to the strangers, so the interpreter explained in
Bande, and was ready to dance for them. There was
an uneasy pause while I wondered with the
embarrassment of a man in a strange restaurant
whether I had enough in my pocket. But a dash of a
shilling was sufficient and the devil danced. It was
not so accomplished a dance as we saw later by a
devil belonging to a woman’s society in Buzie
country; the lack of religious enthusiasm in the
Bande tribe, if it allows them to lead an easier life,
less under the fear of poisoning, dimini shes their
artistic talent. Vitality was about the only quality
one could allow Landow; he lashed a small whip; he
twirled like a top; he ran up and down between the
huts with long sliding steps, his skirts raising the dust
and giving his progress an appearance of immense
speed. His interpreter did his best to keep up with
him, brushing him when he was within reach. The
spirit was definitely carnival; no one above the age
of childhood was really scared of Landow; they had
all passed through his school, and one suspected that
the blacksmith of Mosambolahun, the slack grimy
town, had not maintained very carefully his un¬
masked authority. He was a ‘good fellow’, one felt,
and like so many good fellows he went on much too
long: he would sit on the ground and mutter, then
run up and down a bit and sit down again. He was a
bore as he played on and on in the blistering after¬
noon sun, hoping for another dash, which I simply
hadn’t got with me. One woman ran up and flung

io4

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

down two irons and ran away again, and he cracked
his whip and raced and turned and spun. The
villagers stood in the background smiling discreetly;
it was a carnival, but it wasn’t a carnival in the vulgar
sense of Nice and the Battle of Flowers; it wasn’t
secular and skittish; like the dancing in the Spanish
cathedral at Easter, it had its religious value.

I remembered a Jack-in-the-Green I had seen when
I was four years old, quite covered except for his
face in leaves, wearing a kind of diving-suit of leaves
and twirling round and round at a country cross¬
roads, far from any village, with only a little knot of
attendants and a few bicyclists to watch him. That as
late as the ninth century in England had religious
significance, the dance was part of the rites cele¬
brating the death of winter and the return of spring,
and here in Liberia again and again one caught hints
of what it was we had developed from. It wasn’t so
alien to us, this masked dance (in England too there
was a time when men dressed as animals and danced),
any more than the cross and the pagan emblems on
the grave were alien. One had the sensation of having
come home, for here one was finding associations with
a personal and a racial childhood, one was being
scared by the same old witches. They brought a
screaming child up to the devil and thrust him under
the devil’s muzzle, under the dusty raffia mane; he
stiffened and screamed and tried to escape and the
devil mouthed him. The older generation were play¬
ing the same old joke they had played for centuries,
of frightening the child with what had frightened
them. I went away but looking back I saw a young
girl dancing before Landow, dancing with the sad

WESTERN LIBERIA f* ioj

erotic i nfin ite appeal of projecting buttocks and
moving belly; she at least didn’t know it was, : ,the
blacksmith of Mosambolahun as she danced''"like.
Europa before the bull, and the old black wooden
muzzle rested on the earth and the eyes of the
blacksmith watched her through the flat painted
rims.

Music at Night

That night Gissi, a Buzie man, came up to play the
harp. A row of black heads lined the verandah, while
he sat with dangling legs picking out of the palm
fibres light melancholy monotonous music, beauti¬
fully superficial music which just tickled the surface
of the mind, didn’t tiresomely claim any deep
emotion whether of grief or exaltation, the Haim
which fixes strained masks on the faces in a concert
hall. This was the music of a cigarette-box; it was
sad, but it didn’t really care, everything would always
be the same. The little recurring notes plucked with
four nails died out and began again unvaried against
the night, the black faces, the hurricane lamp and
the moths that drove by in swarms to shrivel their
wings against it. Mark shovelled them from the table
in handfuls, and Gissi didn’t watch his harp or his
fingers or his friends; he looked away smiling gently
at the hopping wingless moths. He was not a
handsome man, he was beautiful as a woman can be
beautiful, without effeminacy. His round skull and
tiny ears, projecting lower lip and long curling eye¬
lashes had nothing in common with the buck negro
type, who represents Africa to the European,

106 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

lounging round the bars off Leicester Square, beating
the piano in dance orchestras. His chin was very
gently moulded, his hair fitted his head like a skull¬
cap; he was more Grecian than African, early Grecian
before the decadence. He wore an elephant-hide
bracelet and a silver ring.

The goat-herd came and danced, stamping and
flinging out his arms, and one by one the men came
out of the dark on to the verandah, into the lamp¬
light, hurling themselves this way and that, sending
the shadows flying from their arms and legs. Their
faces were strange but soon they were to become
familiar, for these' were the labourers whom Vande,
my newly-appointed headman, had found for me, to
carry fifty-pound weights for four weeks on end, for
three shillings a week and their food. It sounded to
a stranger next door to slave labour, but these were
not slaves stamping up and down with a controlled
wildness and an unconscious grace. There was Amah,
my second headman, a tall sullen humourless Man-
dingo with a shaven head in a long blue and white
robe; there was Babu, a Buzie man like Gissi with the
same delicate cultured features, the features of a tribe
sensitive to art and fear, weavers of exquisite cloth,
in touch more than any tribe with the supernatural,
makers of lightning, poisoners; Fadai, a gentle-
mannered boy from Sierra Leone with soft sad eyes,
infected with yaws; there was one-eyed shaven shifty
Vande Two.

They didn’t speak a word as they swayed and
stamped; each improvised, dancing alone with no
reference to the others; it was only the music and
the shadows which lent them unity. I was to see

WESTERN LIBERIA ^7

these improvised dances again and again during the
long trek.. The slightest hint of a tune would set
them off; if there was no music someone would tap a
twig on an empty tin. They were more easy to
appreciate than the communal dances. They had
obvious dramatic qualities and one could see hidden
under the personal idiosyncrasies the germ of the
Charleston. But to the native, I suppose, the com'
munal dance was on a higher, more subtle level; only
one hadn’t oneself got a clue to their appreciation. I
saw such a dance in the village. A band of youths
with drums chanted an air, while about seven boys
shuffled in a small circle with their hands at their
sides, one foot forward, the other brought up beside
it, then forward again. Presently three girls joined
them and the circle became smaller than ever: a
girl’s nipples bulged against the back in front, her
buttocks were pressed by the girl behind. Round and
round they went to the monotonous beat, a snake
eating its own tail.

That night of dancing on the verandah was
specially memorable because it was the last at
Bolahun. The next day the real journey was going to
begin. Amedoo had returned from hospital; even
Van Gogh, pale as a ghost under his bleached goid
stubble, a curiously intellectual sensitive face for a
prospector (he treated the natives with a harsh lack of
consideration one would never have guessed existed
behind the horn-rimmed glasses), had staggered over
for a cup of tea. Long study of the manuscript maps
the Dutch prospectors had made of die Western
province, consultadons with the German linguist, had
decided us to take a different and longer route. I

108 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

wanted to deliver my letter to Chief Nimley, and so
I planned to walk down to Sinoe and Nana Kru, first
st rik i n g along the northern border to Ganta, where
an American medical missionary. Dr. Harley, might
be expected to know something of the route. Nobody
in Bolahun had been so far as Ganta, but the Ger man
doctor at the hospital had been to Zigita, and there
one might expect to get more information. The
fathers with a saintly trust in human nature cashed
my cheque for /40 in small silver on a trading firm
in Monrovia and sold me two hammocks which
could be carried by two men apiece. With these
light hammocks I hoped to economise in men and
time.

The first stop, so at first it was decided, was to be
Pandemai, and I sent off two carriers ahead to warn
the chief, but as we talked at tea, the distance to
Pandemai seemed to increase while the kindness one
might look for from the chief in Kpangblamai
became more desirable. The truth was, I couldn’t
help being a little scared. I wanted to break the
strangeness and wildness gently.

Mark I had decided to add to the company as
interpreter, jester and gossip. I hadn’t been able to
resist the letter he thrust on me one day over the
verandah.

Sir In honour to ask you that I am willingly to go
with you down Monrovia please kindly I beg you.
Because you love me so dearly I don’t want you
must live me here again, and More over I am too
little to take a load. I will be assisting the hammock
till we reach. Me and the headman. Please sir

WESTERN LIBERIA

lOg

don’t live me here again . 1 was fearing to tell you
last night please Master, good master and good
servant . 1 am yours ever friend Mark .

It proved always possible, however tired and vexed
and sick I felt, to gain a little of the old zest at
second-hand through Mark, for Mark had never seen
the sea nor a ship nor a brick house. It was the
greatest adventure he was ever likely to have and he
was still only a schoolboy. One could see in his avid
gaze at new people and new customs the dramatising
instinct at work: he was going to have stories to tell
when he got back to school.

Now on the verandah, with the dancers, appre*
hensions gathered. This was the last rest-house we
would occupy for a long while. It was to be native
huts after this. I remembered what the sisters had
said of the rats which swarmed in every native hut.
You couldn’t, they said, keep them off your bed; the
mosquito net was useless; once a sister had woken to
find a rat sitting, on her pillow savouring the oil on
her hair. But you soon got used to rats, they said.
They were right, but I didn’t believe them. I had
never got used to mice in the wainscot, I was afraid
of moths. It was an inherited fear, I shared my
mother’s terror of birds, couldn’t touch them,
couldn’t bear the feel of their hearts beating in my
palm. I avoided them as I avoided ideas I didn’t
like, the idea of eternal life and damnation. But in
Africa one couldn’t avoid them any more than one
could avoid the supernatural. The method of psycho¬
analysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which
he is repressing: a long journey backwards without

IIO JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

maps, catching a clue here and a clue there, as I
caught the names of villages from this man and that,
until one has to face the general idea, the pain or
the memory. This is what you have feared, Africa
may be imagined as saying, you can’t avoid it, there
it is creeping round the wall, flying in at the door,
rustling the grass, you can’t turn your back, you
can’t forget it, so you may as well take a long look.

A dog ran whining across the verandah, between
the dancers’ legs, and off down the path to the con¬
vent. Some instinct told it to keep moving; it
slathered and whined and ran; it had been bitten by
a snake. The sisters had called in a medicine man
who had poured medicine down its throat and tied
sticky charms to its legs, but these the sisters had
removed when the man had gone. It was still alive,
but it had to keep on running.

It wasn’t so good when the dancers went. Neither
of us felt too happy; I couldn’t help remembering C.
and Van Gogh. My cousin had been bitten all over
(if by mosquitoes, then malaria might easily find us
less than half-way through the forest). I had a rash
over my back and arms like the rash of chicken-pox.
I didn’t feel so well: perhaps I had drunk too much
whisky. There did seem to be an air of sickness about
the prospect; Amedoo’s lung and Van Gogh’s fever
contributed to it. After dinner I went out to the last
pail-closet I should see before Monrovia; the wooden
seat, of course, was swarming with ants, but I realised
by this time that it was luxury to have a closet at
all. We had discovered we hadn’t enough lamps with
us. The boys needed both lamps while they were
washing up the dinner things, which meant that we

WESTERN LIBERIA.

Ill

must sit in the waning light of our two electric
torches. The mosquito-netting over the windows and
door was broken and anything came in, large horse¬
flies, cockroaches, beetles, cockchafers, and moths.
Now and then to save light we sat in darkness. It was
a grim evening and our nerves were rather strained.
Big spiders dashed up and down the wall, the filter
in the corner slowly and regularly dripped, a tom¬
tom was beating somewhere some message, probably
about the President’s coming, and a big black moth
the size of a bat flapped against the walls. The only
thing to do was to go to bed early and sleep well.

But that was impossible; a great storm of rain beat
upon the roof and afterwards it was too cold to sleep
properly, just as in the day it had been too hot to
walk. I dreamed uneasily I was present at the
assassination of the President. It took place in
Bolahun close to one of the green leafy arches they
had raised in case he passed that way, between the
borders of the path where the pineapple plants were
sprinkled with white powder which meant “There is
joy in our hearts at your coming.” He was shot in a
carriage by one of the drummers I saw at Tailahun
and I tried in vain to send the story to a newspaper.
At four I woke and got out of bed, without putting
on my shoes, and found my vest, it was so cold. I
knew some days later that I had caught a jigger by
my carelessness, the small insect which burrows into
the toe under the skin and lays its eggs and goes on
multiplying until it is cut out. I slept again and had
more restless dreams: that there was a case of yellow
fever in Bolahun and I was put in quarantine and my
diary was burnt; I woke weeping with fury. I began

1 12 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

more than ever to wish I hadn’t got to go at dawn.
The process of psycho-analysis may be salutary, but
it is not at first happy. This place was luxury, it was
civilised in a way that I was used to and could under¬
stand. It was foolish to be dissatisfied, to want to
penetrate any further. People had made their home
here. I thought of the five sisters who had come from
Malvern; I thought of the young German doctor with
his duelling scars and his portrait of Hitler. He was
the best kind of Nazi; he had been given the strength
and the enthusiasm and the hope, and he hadn’t been
in Germany to see the dirty work done. His wife,
dark and thin and lovely in a fierce tired way, had
borne her first child at the mission three weeks
before. Bolahun in the early morning of the last day
seemed a lovely place, where oranges were twelve a
penny and mangoes three for a farthing and bananas
so cheap that one hadn’t time to eat them before the
ants and flies got into them. These were what I
remembered most clearly through the monotony of
the forest: the lovely swooping flight of the small
bright rice-birds, the fragile yellow cotton flowers
growing with no stalk directly out of the canes, some¬
thing like a wild rose, transparent primrose petals
with a small red centre and a black stamen; butter¬
flies, palms, goats and rocks and great straight silver
cotton trees, and through the canes the graceful walk¬
ing women with baskets on their heads. This was
what I carried with me into new country, an in¬
stinctive simplicity, a thoughtless idealism. It was
the first time, moving on from one place to another,
that I hadn’t expected something better of the new
country than I had found in the old, that I was

WESTERN LIBERIA

lr 3

prepared for disappointment. It was the first time,
too, that I was not disappointed.

New Country

Coming into Riga three years before, I had
deceived myself into thinking I was on the verge of
a relationship with something new and lovely and
happy as the train came out from the Lithuanian
flats, where the peasants were ploughing in bathing-
slips, pushing the wooden plough through the stiff
dry earth, into the shining evening light beside the
Latvian river. I had left Berlin in the hard wooden
carriage at midnight; I hadn’t slept and I’d eaten
nothing all day. There was a Polish Jew in the
carriage who had been turned out of Germany; he
couldn’t speak any English and I could speak no
German, but a litde stout Esthonian girl who had
been a servant in London could speak both. She was
an Esthonian patriot, she hadn't a good word for
Riga, she regarded the grey spires beyond the river
with firm peasant contempt.

And there was something decayed, Tarisian’,
rather shocking in an old-fashioned way about the
place. One could see why someone so fresh and un¬
spoiled was disgusted. The old bearded droshky
drivers and their bony haggard horses at the station
were like the illustrations to a very early translation
of Anna Karenina; they were like crude and foxed
wood engravings. They must have dated back to the
days when Riga was a pleasure resort for Grand
Dukes, a kind of aristocratic Brighton to which one
slipped away from a duchess’s bed with someone

114 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

from the theatre, someone to be described in terms
of flowers and pink ribbons, chocolates and cham¬
pagne in the slipper, of black silk stockings and
corsets. All the lights in Riga were dimmed by ten:
the public gardens were quite dark and full of
whispers, giggles from hidden seats, excited rustles
in the bushes. One had the sensation of a whole town
on the tiles. It was fascinating, it appealed immensely
to the historical imagination, but it certainly wasn't
something new, lovely and happy.

Even the street women were period. They were
not, poor creatures, young enough to be brazen under
what little light there was, though they had a
depraved air of false youth as if they knew their
only hope was to appeal to the very old. Their
manners too, one felt, dated back to the Grand
Dukes. Their allure was concentrated in an ankle,
a garter, which they would bend down to adjust with
a dreadfully passe gesture of allurement. Their street
manners were infinitely more elegant than the street
manners of London, but they weren't in the picture
any longer. There were no more Grand Dukes on the
spree to be attracted by their immature girlish legs,
their corseted waists, their slipping garters, their
black silk stockings; unless perhaps one of the old
droshky drivers was a Grand Duke. It was not im¬
probable. At Tallinn a Baron carried luggage at the
air-port. And there could be no more suitable ending
of an evening than for a street-walker to go home
with the droshky driver; the garter with the long
grey Franz Josef whiskers.

You couldn't really pity them. They belonged so
completely to a different world. A war and a revolu-

WESTERN LIBERIA

”5

tion came between, left you on one side with the little
stout Esthonian peasant girl who spoke English and
German and didn’t trouble to flirt, and them with
the ikons in the second-hand shops, the Orthodox
priest selling pictures on the pavement, a wilderness
of empty champagne bottles. . . .

It was a late winter evening when I drove through
into the Nottingham suburb from the station, round
streets quite as dark as Riga’s, down and down below
the castle rock and the municipal art gallery with
the rain breaking on the windows. I had a job, it
excited and scared me, I was twenty-one, and you
couldn't talk of darkest Africa with any conviction
when you had known Nottingham well: the dog
sick on the mat, the tinned salmon for tea and the
hot potato chips for supper carried into the sub¬
editor's room ready-salted in strips of newspaper (if
you had won the football sweep you paid for the lot).
The fog came down in the morning and stayed till
night. It wasn't a disagreeable fog; it lay heavy and
black between the sun and the earth; there was no
light but the air was clear. The municipal ‘tart’ paced
up and down by the largest cinema, old and haggard
and unused. Her trade was spoilt; there were too
many girls about who hadn’t a proper sense of values,
who would give you a good time in return for a fish
tea. The trams creaked round the goose market, and
day after day the one bookshop displayed a card in
the window printed with Mr* Sassoon's poem:

Have you forgotten yet? . . .

Look up, and swear by the green of the
Spring that you'll never forget.

11 6 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Somebody must have put it in the window for
Armistice Day, and there is stayed, like the Poppy
Day posters in Freetown, through the winter months,
black sooty dripping months.

In Nottingham I was instructed in Catholicism,
travelling here and there by tram into new country
with the fat priest who had once been an actor. (It
was one of his greatest sacrifices to be unable to see a
play.) The tram clattered by the Post Office: “Now
we come to the Immaculate Conception”; past the
cinema: “Our Lady”; the theatre: a sad slanting
look towards The Private Secretary (it was Christmas
time). The cathedral was a dark place full of inferior
statues. I was baptised one foggy afternoon about
four o’clock. I couldn’t think of any names I par¬
ticularly wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone
with the fat priest; it was all very quickly and
formally done, while someone at a children’s service
muttered in another chapel. Then we shook hands
and I went off to a salmon tea, the dog which had
been sick again on the mat. Before that I had made
a general confession to another priest: it was like a
life photographed as it came to mind, without any
order, full of gaps, giving at best a general
impression. I couldn’t help feeling all the way to the
newspaper office, past the Post Office, the Moroccan
cafe, the ancient whore, that I had got somewhere
new by way of memories I hadn’t known I possessed.

I had taken up the thread of life from very far back,
from so far back as innocence.

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT

1 17

CHAPTER TWO

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT

“Boss of the Whole Show”

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

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

For the first mile along the wide beaten way to-

Il8 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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

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

It occurred to me that though I had been told that
the President had gone, and Mr. Reeves presumably
with him, it would be wise at least to inquire for
the Commissioner. The town seemed empty, the
green triumphal arches for the President were dusty

THE BUZIE DEVIL AT KPANGBLAMAI

PAGAN MOSAMBOLAHUN

DUOGOBMAI: THE HORRIBLE VILLAGE

NICOBOOZU

CROSSING THE ST. PAUL

gala ye: the ceaseless watch

A REST BY THE ST. JOHN

THE LOUSE HUNTER

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V

M-^r

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yM3|

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HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 119

and wrinkled with heat; one two-storeyed concrete
house stood apart from the huts in a compound
where the star and stripes dangled from a post. This
was the house built, according to the natives of
Bolahun, with forced labour. That extra storey gave
it a formidable air; it stood there above the town as
if it watched and knew all that happened; it would
be unwise to pass it by with such a long caravan
of men; it couldn't help noticing.

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

A gramophone was playing, and Miss Josephine
Baker's voice drifted across the compound with an
amusing and sophisticated melancholy. It made
everything for the moment rather unreal: the
carriers sitting in the dust, the quiet drift of huts, the
forest edging up over the horizon became no more
than a backcloth for a lovely unclothed cabaret
figure. One couldn't really believe in Mr. Reeves, who

120

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

appeared in a sinister melodramatic way from behind
some curtains dressed in a scarlet fez and a long
native robe; his heavy black Victorian side-whiskers,
his thick grey skin, fds voluptuous mouth were just
part of the Paris revue. But somebody turned the
gramophone off upstairs, and we were removed at
once from the dour company of Mr. Reeves by a
smart miniature black officer with glittering gaiters.
He said, “Won’t you come upstairs? The President
will see you in a moment.”

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

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

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 12 1

tinctly Stuart air about the civilisation of the
Liberian Coast.

She was the loveliest thing I saw in Liberia; I
couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I wanted to talk to
her, somehow to express the pleasure the sight of
her gave in the empty sun-cracked place. Josephine
Baker’s voice couldn’t compete with her, whining out
at the end of the record before the soldier could
change it. It was as if suddenly one saw what Africa
might be if she were left’to herself to choose from
Europe only what would beautify her; she promised
more than the frozen rhetoric in the declaration of
independence. I never said a word to her ( 4< Very
hot marching in this weather,” the little shining
officer said politely, making small talk), I only saw
her once again from a distance when she stood on
the President’s balcony in Monrovia watching the
Krus demonstrate their loyalty below, but she
remains the kind of vivid memory which draws one
back to a place, even after many years.

Then the President came in: a middle-aged man
called Barclay with curly greying hair in a thick dark
suit, a pinned and pinched old school tie and a cheap
striped shirt. Africa, lovely, vivid and composed,
slipped away, and one was left with the West Indies,
an affable manner, and rhetoric, lots of rhetoric. But
there was a lot of energy, too: he was a politician
in the Tammany Hall manner, but I never saw any
reason to change my opinion that he was something
new on the Coast. He might be out to play his own
game, but he was going to play it with unexampled
vigour and the Republic would at least pick up some
chips from his table. I asked him whether hi^

122

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

authority was much the same as the American
President’s. He said it was more complete. “Once
elected,” he said, “and in charge of the machine”—
words ran away with him; something candid and
childlike and excited continually peeped through
the politician’s dignified phrases—“why then. I’m
boss of the whole show.”

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

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 123

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

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

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

124 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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

This attitude is unreasonable, but their minds do
not move on the level of reason. To accept a black
overlord offended some deep communal instinct
which was unaffected by the fact that under the
worst black Commissioner they had not suffered
what the natives in French West Africa had suffered
under white Commissioners. They did not take into
account at all from what they were saved by the
nominal nature of black rule. In that rough, un-
mapped country, if they were twenty miles from a
Commissioner’s headquarters, they were fifty years
away. They were left alone to their devils and secret
societies and private terrors, to the paternal
oppression of their chiefs. They weren’t interfered
with as they would certainly have been interfered
with in a white colony, and one was thankful for
their lack of education, when one compared them

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 1 2 $

as they were in Buzie country, striding along the
narrow forest paths, the straight back, the sword
with an ivory handle swinging against the long
native robe, with the anglicised ‘educated’ blacks of
Sierra Leone, the drill suits and the striped shirts
and the dirty sun-helmets. Every head of a family
in this tribe had his sword and wore it when he left
his village, every young man had his dagger, and
even the tool of the men working on the farms, the
broad-bladed cutlass in its beautifully-worked leather
sheath, had an air of chivalry, of an older civilisation
than the tin shacks on the Coast. Even the poorer
tribes beyond the Buzie country, the Gios and the
Manos, with their loin-cloths and sores, were not
more neglected than were the natives of a Protec¬
torate under the care of a single sanitary inspector.

Hospitality in Kpangblamai

His Excellence the President talked for more than
an hour in the little room above the Sunday-stricken
town. He was very courteous, and it went against
the grain to deceive him and give the impression that
Zigita was the farthest extent of the journey I in¬
tended to take. The Commissioners in the Western
Province had been warned of my coming, and I
wanted as quickly as possible to slip over into a
province where I was not expected. As quickly as
possible . . . but it was not easy to stem the rolling
tide of the President’s hopes, the roads, the aero¬
planes, the motor-cars. It was a paradoxical situa¬
tion; a black preaching progress to a sceptical white,
but the white had come out of the busy bustling

126

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

progressive scene and he had noticed there nothing
more lovely than the Buzie cloths the President
spread for his inspection. There was nothing crudely
peasant, nothing art and crafty, nothing to remind
one of stalls at bazaars and dear ladies with pale-blue
bulbous eyes, about these cloths: they were sophisti¬
cated in their design, but the sophistication had a
different source from ours. It sprang directly from a
deeper level; it wasn’t tinged by the artistic self-
consciousness of centuries.

There was a world of difference between these
cloths and the Mandingo cloths from French
Guinea, one of which I had bought in the market
at Bolahun and which can be bought, too, at double
the price, on the Coast, at Freetown and Monrovia.
The Mandingo is a trader, his line of country is
immense when it is computed less in mileage than
in difficulty: in forest, swamp, river and flood. One
finds him in the ports, one finds him five hundred
miles in the interior in places where no white man
has been seen in living memory. He is unmistakable;
his height and shaven head, his Semitic features^ his
air in his scarlet fez and his long robe, a verse of
the Koran hung round the neck, of a long trading
lineage. He rides the only horses to be seen in the
interior, but more often he does the journey on foot.
In French Guinea I met a Mandingo who could tell
me the whole route to the Coast at Cape Palmas or
Grand Bassa. He made the wild four weeks’ journey
as regularly as a traveller in silk stockings who
catches the Brighton Belle once a week. But the
cloths, the swords and knives they carry with them
.are not superior to the peasant arts of Central

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 127

Europe; they have the same crude tourist stamp;
lozenges of bright crude colours on the heavy cloth.
And this is interesting when one considers that there
are no tourists in French Guinea, and few white men
at all in the far comer of the colony which touches
Liberia. The trade goods have to be carried through
hundreds of miles of forest to reach the kind of
public which enjoys the bogus gaudy article.

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

These first few days of trekking had a beauty that
later one completely missed: everything was new^

128

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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

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

The other man on the first day who went ahead
with me was Alfred. Alfred was another type
altogether, in his cloth cap and shorts. He had learnt
to read and write, he knew English; he thought he

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 1 2 $

was out for a jaunt. Plump and sweaty and horribly
ingratiating, he managed to be the one who carried
the harp and not the empty hammock. He pointed
out everything which he considered of interest, he
hung around; but among the men he was the focus of
discontent; he always knew that a town was “too far”,
I gould hear his fat grumble doing its work when¬
ever a group gathered together to voice their com¬
plaints, and a moment later there he would be, back
at my side, doing me a little service, oily and friendly
and proud of his English.

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

130 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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

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

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 131

arrived; and the presents multiplied rapidly. Later I
learnt from Amedoo that I should dash once only at
the end of my stay,

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

It came out between the last huts at the end of the
wide little whitewashed town, then swayed and
simpered forward in a country robe, swinging a great
raffia bustle, nodding its black mask. The bustle
swung up and showed huge pantaloons of fibre, like
a caricature of a Victorian dress. One remembered
Miss Tilly Losch in a Cochran revue hesitating before
a pillar-box with just this air of coyness, the sophisti¬
cated copy of something young and artless. This
devil seemed to a European to have a mock female,
mock modest manner, which was curiously and
interestingly gross when combined with the long
cruel mask, the slanting eyes, the heavy mouth. It
turned and turned, swinging the bustle above the
pantaloons, and the interpreter ran round and round
carrying a small whip. There was something about it
of the witch of one's childhood; perhaps because it
remained so feminine even while it was unrecog¬
nisable as a woman; perhaps because of its curious
headgear; the tall tufted pole taking the place of the*

132 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

sugar-loaf hat. It sank on to the ground and recited
its greetings on a low gushing note. It was a far more
accomplished dancer than Landow. To compare
Landow’s wild rushes, matching the great crude
muzzle, with the simpering silly sinister gait of this
woman’s devil was like comparing brutality with
cruelty. It may have been a tribal difference: no
Bande craftsman could have made this mask.
Landow’s was a mask of childish fancy running in
the vein of nightmare: this was a work of conscious
art in the service of a belief.

After the dance the chief’s son, Peter Bonoh, said
that his father wished to show the visitors his town.
The whole length of Kpangblamai cannot have
exceeded a hundred and fifty yards, but before we
had seen all the activities of that small settlement, I
felt much as a member of the royal family must feel
after a tour of an industrial fair. I had been allowed
no rest after the march, the palm wine was lying
heavy in my stomach, there was no air on the baked
plateau, and I thought that I was going to faint before
I reached the end. Five weavers were at work, each
under his own little shelter of palm branches; a man
was cutting leather sheaths for daggers; and in the
smithy they were making blades, one man working
a great leather bellows, another beating out the white-
hot blade (I would have paid them more attention if
I had known then the importance of the smith, how
frequently he is the local devil and his word more
powerful than the chief’s). In front of another hut
two women were spinning a kind of top upon a plate,
working the thread out of a mass of cotton. In a
'little wooden enclosure a woman was boiling the

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 133

leaves of a forest plant in a great cauldron to make
a dark-blue dye. The smell of the cauldron, the
pressure of the crowd fingering my sleeves and the
cloth of my trousers, the necessity of keeping my face
fixed in a bright cheerful interested mask made me
feel weak and ill. There seemed no end to the parade
of industry. It was a tiny plateau, not much larger
than the Round Pond; wherever I looked, between
the shoulders of the crowd, I saw the huts give way
to trees, and above the trees the high forested ridge of
the Pandemai hills; but in the hot stuffy evening it
seemed as endless as a maze of which one doesn't
know the clue.

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

*34

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the headman giggled saladously somewhere in the
dark nearby, until at last he slipped away into the
moonless night carrying his chair.

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

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

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT

135

place. It wouldn’t pay me not to believe it; time was
money, and it wouldn’t do to lose myself my first day
loose in the Liberian interior.

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

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

The Primitive

I was called at five by Mark and Amah, whom I
again sent on ahead to warn the chief at Duogobmai.
It was just as well to get Amah out of the way; Vande
had chosen him as second headman, but already I
could tell how unpopular he was. He was the only
Mandingo among the carriers, and for the first week
of the march tribal differences caused almost con-

136 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

tinuous trouble. He was strong, reliable, the best-
looking man of a rather weedy set, but he had no
sense of humour and they teased him mercilessly
until he got into a sullen rage.

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

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

I had been warned of this; I knew what to expect;
Jhe food hadn’t been in their bellies five minutes

fflS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 137

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

It was eight o’clock before the men had finished
eating and were ready to start. They were very slow
and quarrelsome, and I went on ahead with my two
spare hammock-men. Alfred walked in front
dangling the monkey, and Babu walked behind carry-
ing two harps. Almost immediately we were in the
forest, but it was only the edge of the great waste of
bush which covers the Republic to within sight of the
sea. I felt rather absurd with my two companions^

138 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

climbing up out of the forest, over the crest of a small
cracked hill covered with round huts while the natives
came to the door and stared at the sight of the first
white man they'd seen for months. One really
needed to be a minor prophet to emerge suddenly like
this, almost unaccompanied, with two harps and a
monkey. . . .

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

A little later a tiny stream, a patch of sand, a cloud
of butterflies, marked the boundary between Bande
country and Buzie country, and soon after we came
out into a broad sun-drenched clearing below
Pandemai. A concrete house was being built beside
the path with a fence and a garden gate, and a black
man in a European suit with an old white topee came
out to meet me and laughed and lifted his hat and
laughed again. He was a middle-aged man with a
hard mean face which he had covered defensively for
the occasion with an expression of silliness and sub¬
servience. He said, “Mr. Greene, we were expecting

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 139

you last night.” He had the name pat, he laughed in a
nervous servile way after every sentence, and there was
something unmistakably clerical about his manner.
One felt the Sermon on the Mount was somewhere
about, though it had gone sour. He was a missionary
from Monrovia, and now he was engaged in building
his new mission. Like Mr. Reeves he believed in con¬
crete and like Mr. Reeves he kept his brother blacks
well in hand.

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

Sir Alfred Sharpe passed through Pandemai, “an
old war town”, in 1919, and was received with great
hospitality by the local chief. Perhaps the black
missionary had not then arrived: now the town
seemed dead: the chief when he came, a sullen sup¬
pressed man who presented his dash of a chicken and

X^o JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

a pail of rice as if they had been exacted from him
by force. The missionary ruled him. When, thinking
of the wasted chop and the trouble he had taken the
night before, I prepared to dash him five shillings in
return, the missionary caught my hand. He said he
couldn’t allow it; there was no need to give the chief
anything; I was the guest of the country. At last he
allowed two shillings to pass to the chief, who stood
by with a beaten smouldering air like an honest man
who watches, without the power to intervene, two
racketeers squabbling over his property.

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

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT

141

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

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

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

142 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

if it came to a show-down, to refuse to pay them
or would we go tamely back with them to
Bolahun?

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

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 143

of stunted charred trees like funeral cypresses or a
fence of woven palm leaves. A few banana trees at
the edge of one village were fenced in: “the devil’s
bananas”.

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

Under the vertical sun we reached another village,
I and my two spare hammock-men and Amedoo.
They led me to the palaver-house, the low thatched
barn in the middle of the village where the old men
were drowsing out their siesta. I sat down in a ham¬
mock which was slung on one side, and the old
men ranged themselves opposite and blinked and
scratched. It was too hot to talk. A woman lay in a
patch of shade, on her face in the dust, and slept.
The chickens scratched on the floor for the grains of
rice which sometimes fell between the slats of the
roof. A long time passed; I wanted to scratch too.
I wasn’t bitten; it was a nervous reaction. The old
men blinked and scratched their armpits and heads
and thighs; they burrowed inside their loose robes to
find a new spot to scratch. It was too hot to be really
curious about anyone, though a few of the younger
men of the village stooped under the thatch and sat
down and stared and began to scratch. The dela^

144 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

irritated me. I wanted to eat my lunch and get away,
but it was nearly an hour before the carriers began to
stumble in, tired and stubborn, suspicious and com¬
plaining. Alfred went round among them, urging
them to rebel, gathering evidence from the villagers
as to how far Duogobmai was.

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

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

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

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

""It’ll be only three hours from here,” I said. ""Only

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 145

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

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

So they followed after me, though a long way
behind. Three hours went by and there was no sign
of Duogobmai. The worst midday heat wore off soon
after four. Another village offered hospitality I
wouldn’t take. Babu and Kolieva stayed and drank

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

146

water outside one of the ragged huts, but I went stub¬
bornly on to where the forest began again. A man
followed me. He had a few words of English: he said
we would never reach Duogobmai before dark. There
was still another village between. But I went on: I
couldn’t bear the thought of waiting; I had been
walking now for more than eight hours, but I had
gained my second wind. One of the two men dropped
behind; I was alone with Babu and the harps; it
was not only the heat that was fading out of the
air, the ferocity of the light between the branches
was tamed.

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

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 147

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

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

Half-way across Mark was standing with a chicken
in his hand. He was sick and tired and hungry. He
could hardly stir another yard. But Amah, who had
been carrying a load all day since they left more than
twelve hours before, was quite fresh. He was waitings

148 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

for Mark on the other side. He had taken off his
robe and was naked except for his loin-cloth. He
picked up the Revelation suitcase and swung it up
to his head as if he were only beginning the day’s
march. He was admirable when things went wrong;
he sulked and grumbled only on a day of rest or
after a short march. It amused him that I.should
have overtaken them, and he strode up the path from
the Loffa laughing and chattering in Bande.

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

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

The chief was a middle-aged man with thick lips
and little cunning eyes who looked more Oriental
than West African in his red fez. He sat in a ham¬
mock before his hut. I couldn’t tell whether he was
friendly or not. He just sat there and listened to

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 149

Amah speaking, to Amah asking for huts and food
for thirty men. He was a slow thinker and he was
startled by our sudden appearance. He hadn’t seen a
white face for years. I still believed that this must
be the Dagomai the doctor had directed me to, but
no, the chief said, no white people had stayed here
since they had begun to pay hut tax, and that was as
far back as memory took him. In his slow way he
was immensely tickled; it was as good as a circus. He
sent some men to clean a hut.

It was quite dark: there was no moon. The blacks
moved between the huts with smouldering torches,
but the litde cheerful embers lit only wretched¬
ness and dirt. A few carriers tottered in and sank
immediately to the ground beside their loads with
their heads in their hands. There was no hum¬
bugging; they were completely exhausted. Amah
led me to the hut which had been chosen for us:
a small round hut with a native couch at one side,
where there was just room for two beds. The chief’s
lamp, the only one in the village, stood on the floor
and the sweepers raised clouds of dust which rose and
settled again: there was a burnt-out fire in the middle.
Somebody put a box on the floor and I sat down to
wait. I was anxious: I couldn’t imagine how my
cousin and the carriers could get across the long ham¬
mock bridge in the dark, avoiding all the gaps where
the creepers had given way. I sent Amah with the
lamp down the hill to see if he could find them and
sat in the dark and heard the first rustle of the rats
above. I dropped into a doze, and nearly an hour
later voices roused me, a lamp swaying between the
huts, a sudden pack of worn-out men. Amedoo

1 S° JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

rushed like a whirlwind into the hut, lashing with his
stick at the legs of the few blacks who sat there with
me: he could never remember that he wasn't any
longer in the British Empire. He was worn out and
in a despairing rage because half the carriers, he said,
had stayed at the village the other side of the LofTa*
refusing to cross the bridge in the dark. There were
no beds, no mosquito nets, no lamps, no torches, no
food, and worst of all in the blasting heat of the hut
no filter.

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

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

And suddenly I felt curiously happy and careless
and relieved. One couldn’t, I was sure, get lower than
Ouogobmai. I had been afraid of the primitive, had
wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a
breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the
cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping
jslace among the rats. It was the worst one need fear,

mS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 151

and it was bearable because it was inescapable. Only
one thing worried me a little: it seemed likely after
a night without nets we should both go down with
fever when we were farthest from both Bolahun and
Monrovia, though luckily our quinine was on the
right side of the Loffa.

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

And then luck changed. It was as if fate had been
merely curious to see how the worst would affect us.
Suddenly the carriers arrived with Vande grinning
and happy and proud in the rear. Somehow he had
persuaded them to cross the river in this pitch dark¬
ness, and there they were with the beds and nets and
food and filter, sinking to the ground by the hut too
tired to grumble. So after all one was protected,
protected from the flies which stayed awake all night,
from the mosquitoes, the cockroaches and the rats,
by one’s net. But it wasn’t easy to sleep. Outside, the
carriers sat round the lamps and had their chop and
I heard vitality come slowly back to them and
Alfred’s voice sowing dissension. When their lamp
went out the rats came. They came all together, fall^

152 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

ing heavily down the wall like water. All night they
gambolled among the boxes, and the cows snuffled
round the wall and made water noisily. A jigger
burrowing under one of my nails burned like a match
flame. By half-past five the village was awake again.

CHAPTER THREE

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY
The Horrible Village

I wasn't surprised when the carriers struck work next
morning and demanded a day's rest. They .said Nico-
boozu was a full day’s journey away. I sent for the
chief and Mark interpreted. The chief said Nico-
boozu was seven hours off; he was lying or Mark
was lying. But I had stood out against die 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
/or us in the dust outside a hut, skinny chickens every-

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

*53

where, 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 anyw r ay 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 self-consdousnesfe

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

*54

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 naked¬
ness, 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
*he middle of lunch the chief arrived again to intro-

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

155

duce 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

156 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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.*

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 Luxem¬
bourg. 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 dis¬
tinctly the rough brown fur at its neck. I suppose
one of the million or two rats in Paris was recon¬
noitring. Its appearance had a premeditated sinister
air. I thought of the first Uhlans appearing at the
end of a Belgian country road.

The next rat I saw was dead. I had taken a cottage
in Gloucestershire and the country scared me. Some¬
thing 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

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

£946).

INTO BU2DE COUNTRY

157

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-

158 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 irrita¬
tion, 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

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

l 59

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 naive 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 mid¬
day 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 black¬
smith 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
unself-conscious. There was an air of happiness about
the place which next day we did not find in Zigita^

l6o JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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
tom, 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 tbe

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

161

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 the 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 north¬
west, 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*

102

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 King. 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 meet¬
ing the President.

A Liberian District Commissioner is stationed at
Zigita: the compound Ees 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 com¬
pound a crowd of men with swords and daggers and
jewellery for sale, seemed young and downtrodden.
He was ordered about by the D.C.’s clerk (the D.C.
was away at Voinjema), but if the D.C. had the
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 unini tiated native so much as to see
-and who must be distinguished from the devils we

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

163

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. ‘Til 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, unwill¬
ingly brought a lovely sword in a worked leather

164 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 be¬
longed 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 he healed, standing dumbly, holding out his rot¬
ting 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 drink¬
ing whisky and lime; the hurricane lamp was turned
Ipw to save oil; we couldn’t understand what the man

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

i6 5

wanted when he spoke urgently to us from the
shadows. We called Mark to translate. It was a com¬
mand 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 tom, 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 com¬
pound. 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: ‘Tut 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.

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

166

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 de¬
serted; 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 of 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 BUZIE COUNTRY

167

into your calculations its possibilities become prac¬
tically 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 money-box to load it; only
self-consciousness 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 enjoy¬
ing 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 un¬
easily 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 gate-

168

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

way of the compound. He had with him a little ole
man with a white goatee beard who wanted us to buy
some crude leather pouch. Tes’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 head¬
man and the old man with the goatee beard his
medicine man. The headman had frightened hirn
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

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

169

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 stand¬
ing outside the devil’s hut in the pouring rain fan¬
ning 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 prepara¬
tion 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^

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

170

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 sick¬
ened 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, poison¬
ous with gentility, a Faberge 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 hill-top opposite Zor¬
zor: 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
jhat this was the house: the dusty rambling shut-

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

171

tered house stuffy with the smell of vermin, tom
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,
naive, 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, prac¬
tical 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

172 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 diffi¬
cult 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 comer 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.

INTO BUZIE COUNTRY

173

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 setde-
ments. 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 comers 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.
Biittikofer 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

174 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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.

CHAPTER FOUR

BLACK MONTPARNASSE
The Carriers’ Strike

h

Next morning we entered France: so the colony was
known among the natives of the Republic. One of

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

l 15

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 ham¬
mock 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 com¬
mercial 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 Dome 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 Trance’ 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 head-

176 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

man 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 no thing of the kind in
Liberia. Their heads were often completely shaved

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

177

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 some¬
times 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 modem
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 inhabi¬
tants 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

178 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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
comer 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

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

179

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 com¬
plete 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 disgrace¬
fully 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 a*

l80 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 listen¬
ing 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*

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

181

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 can¬
nibalism 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*

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

l 82

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 multi¬
plicity 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 excep¬
tion 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

BLACK MONTPARNASSE 1 83

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 destina¬
tion, 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*

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

184

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 com¬
pletely 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 river 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 wind¬
ing 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 comer
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. This

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

iS 5

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. Kolieva 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 Bamakamfc

lOU

JUUKNJSY WITHOUT MAPS

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 Eureopean 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 in¬
stead. 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

BLACK MONTPARNASSE 187

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 happi¬
ness to last. Their mood changed more rapidly than
April weather. They, too, were appreciating some¬
thing 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 thrust¬
ing 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 fore¬
head, 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, like £

1 88 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 Calpumius 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 misero mihi, lilia nigra videntur,

Pallentesque rosae, nec dulce rubens hyacinthus,

Nullos nec myrtus nec laurus spirat 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
g£ where we should spend the next night, except that

BLACK MONTPARNASSE 1 89

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

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

190

seven hours on end. I remember for what a long tune
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 all 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 %o
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
bathing as the carriers did in the rivers. The

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

191

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 un¬
broken 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

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

192

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 Words*
worth and many English Nature poets, that Nature
^as something alive which could be possessed as

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

m

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 psycho¬
analysis 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 flash¬
ing back enchantingly all day long one’s own image,
a period when other people were as distinct from one¬
self 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 occa-
sion 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 march at
seven. There was nowhere in between where we
could sleep. The men were .grumbling already •as

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

194

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,
die hammock-men and Amedoo.

We went for more than three hours without pass¬
ing 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 inhospit¬
able, 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
ifc-as they lay about in the verandah. I sat listening

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

*9J

to snatches of argument, until just before sunset, as
the storm gathered and bore down out of the north¬
west, 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 ham¬
mock 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 Com¬
missioner 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 far/ It seemed unlike ly,
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

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

ICJU

like one prolonged flickering illumination. The
carriers slept on the floor of the verandah. The sound
of their breathing and snores was very companion¬
able 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 some¬
times 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.

Cafe Bar

Suddenly in the inconsequent maimer of Africa
Ganta came dose 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 gate¬
way, 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 suspidous. 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 some¬
thing to do with Switzerland.

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

*97

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 Com¬
missioner, 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 Trance' 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 bar¬
gained for, but at that moment there was an interrup¬
tion. 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-bums, 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

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

198

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 cafes 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 die 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; the 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

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

199

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 litde 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 friendli¬
ness 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 ex¬
changing 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 be ginn i n g to feel a deep emotional friendship for
the man on the other stool. He seems to know every¬
one: you don’t understand a thing, but you are
happy.

We were there two hours, right into the full heat of

200

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 fol¬
lowed us a little way out of the village, sleepily im¬
ploring 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

BLACK MONTPARNASSE

201

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 cannibal¬
ism 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 hill-top, 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

202

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 in¬
tent on joining that odd assortment of 'characters’
(the Grants and the Kilvanes) one collects through
life, vivid grotesques, people so simple that they
alway have the same side turned to one, damned by
their unself-consciousness to be material for the novel¬
ist, to supply the minor characters, to be endlessly
caricatured, to make in their multiplicity one’s world.

PART in

CHAPTER ONE

MISSION STATION
The Lowlands

Mr. Somerset Maugham, I suppose, has done more
than anyone to stamp the idea of the repressed prud¬
ish man of God on the popular imagination. There
was an earlier time when Stevenson’s Open Letter
allowed us to recall Father Damien; Rain has im¬
pressed the image of Mr. Davidson over the mission¬
ary field: the Mr. Davidson who said of his work in
the Pacific Islands, “When we went there they had no
sense of sin at all. They broke the commandments
one after the other and never knew they were doing
wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part
of my work, to instil into the natives the sense of
sin”: the Mr. Davidson who slept with the prostitute,
Sadie Thompson, and then killed himself.

I remember at school finding it a little hard to
reconcile the popular idea of missionaries with the
thin tired men who used to stand on a platform rap¬
ping with a small stick while the starved-looking
bodies of black children slid across the screen. They
seemed to be less Biblical than Mr. Davidson; they
seemed to be more concerned with raising a few shil¬
lings for the support of the hideous tin church which
was projected as a grim climax onto the sheet than
with the sense of sin. The sense of sin lay far deeper
across the altar steps of our own school chapel. Her*

204

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

was all the prudery and pornography one needed.
These visitors from Africa, I felt, were not only
innocent beside our own masters, they were innocent
among the blacks they taught. There they stood, in
their ruined health and their worn simplicity, beg¬
ging for our shillings for a new altar cloth, a silver
cruet stand; I couldn’t believe they had done much
harm among the alligator societies, the human
leopards, nor corrupted very effectively those men
whose secret ritual it is to sacrifice a child once a year
to the great python.

In Liberia I discovered another kind of missionary.
I do not imagine Dr. Harley, the Methodist medical
missionary, is unique in Africa: a man with a body
and nerves worn threadbare by ten years’ unselfish
work, cutting away the pus from the huge swollen
genitals, injecting for yaws, anointing for craw-craw,
injecting two hundred natives a week for venereal
disease. He had made his home in this comer of
Liberia with his wife and two children, curious little
elderly yellow-faced boys; he had lost one child, who
was buried at the mission.*

All the way along the Liberian border I had heard
of him; he was the man in Liberia who knew most
about the bush societies; the little time that the long
hopeless fight against disease allowed him was de¬
voted to these investigations. But he did not care to
talk about them before his servants for fear of poison.

We had been lent a house a hundred yards from
the mission, a luxurious little house it seemed to us
by this time, for it was built of wood with a tin roof,

* Dr. Harley has now completed more than 20 years at Ganta
”11946).

MISSION STATION

20 J

the floor raised to escape the ants. At one end was a
dispensary, and just outside was the open hospital
building, long wooden benches under a roof of
thatch. The forest came up at the back, like a small
private wood. Ganta scared me: there was a smell of
chemicals, of sickness and death about the place.
Quite suddenly we had dropped down from the high¬
lands, and the air had changed. It was heavy and
damp. There were palms about and a sense of
drenched ground, flies and ordure. I would never
have believed that a climate could so completely
change in the course of a day’s march. It had an
immediate effect on the health: all energy left me:
that night it was difficult to walk as far as the mission
house for dinner; my stomach quite suddenly ceased
to function.

I remember a rather grim dinner. Dr. Harley had
been out all day and was tired and ready to fall
asleep where he sat; it was the dead boy’s birthday.
When he heard that I had walked from the Sierra
Leone border without using a hammock, he said I
was mad to do it; he had just sent a man—Dr. D.—
home dead who had made the comparatively short
trek from Monrovia on his feet. Nobody could walk
long distances in this climate without danger. I tried
to turn the conversation to the bush societies, but he
sheered away from them. He said that Sinoe, which
we had planned to reach, was at least four weeks
away. The pain I had been feeling for some days
now in my stomach seemed to get worse at the news.
I could have been happy enough settled in one place
for months, but the thought of four more weeks of
physical exertion, of rising before dawn and walking

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

206

for six or seven hours through the dreadful monotony
of the forest, I could not bear.

On the way back to our house I remembered we
hadn't taken our quinine for two days. The rats had
been at the hair-brushes and gnawed the bristles.
They ran along between the wall and the roof in my
room without even waiting for me to put out the
light. I took a handful of Epsom in the warm boiled
water from the filter which was dripping regularly in
the comer and watched them scamper along the
narrow crack above my head. I didn't care a
about the rats any longer, the sisters at Bolahun were
right; I was scared in the same way as I had been in
England when I suddenly found that my plans had
gone too far for me to back out of the Liberian jour¬
ney; I could remember reading the British Blue Book
and thinking, “In three weeks I shall be there”
‘there' meaning the long list of diseases and of
Colonel Davis's atrocities. I got no thrill at all; I was
just scared. I comforted myself, “I shan't try for
Sinoe," but I knew I hadn't the moral courage to
make straight for Monrovia. The rats jumped down
when I turned out the lantern, but I wasn’t any longer
afraid of rats. I was discovering in myself a thing I
thought I had never possessed: a love of life.

Liberian Commissioner

Of,course by daylight I felt better; it is difficult to
believe in death before sunset. But a four weeks'
longer trek to Sinoe was beyond me, especially as I
hadn't enough men with me now to use the ham¬
mock. There was one other excuse, too; no money

MISSION STATION

207

I had no means of getting more money at Sinoe and
I should not have enough to pay the carriers after
the longer trek.

We thought it politic to walk up through Ganta to
call on the D.C. He wore a well-cut tropical suit, a
small military moustache, his skin was slightly yellow;
he looked more Latin than African. He had a reputa¬
tion for fairness, honesty and efficiency. Now he was
engaged in driving the Sanoquelleh-Ganta road south.
Once again we were encountering Liberian patriot¬
ism. This time it was of a more European brand.
There was not a carrier who would not have wel¬
comed white intervention; patriotism in their minds
had nothing to do with who ruled them, it was love
of a certain territory. But Commissioner Dunbar was
one of the rulers. His patriotism was like a Euro¬
pean's; to him the thought of white interference was
hateful and because England's attitude to the Kru
rebellion suggested a danger to Liberian indepen¬
dence, he suspected and disliked the English. He was
courteous and reserved and it was hopeless to try to
convince him that our journey had no political
motive. I felt our amicable expressions becoming
shrill in the effort to convince, beating hopelessly
against the hard courteous surface of his mind. There
was no need to convince him; but he was a man'with
such admirable qualities that one wanted to leave
him with a good impression. But the more we strug¬
gled to leave that good impression, the more our
voices sounded in our own ears false and hypocritical.

I tried to make him express some of his suspicions
by mentioning the town on the forbidden coast-line,
but he contented himself with saying that it would

208

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

probably take us another five weeks to reach Shoe*
Should we have to wait long for a boat to Monrovia?
Perhaps a month, he said, leaning back in his wicker
chair, the blazing sun over the compound behind
giving his yellow handsome face a blurred black out¬
line. It was a politic inaccuracy, because, as we learnt
later, there was a weekly launch. I suggested Grand
Bassa as an alternative and he encouraged the idea:
we could do it in ten days, he informed us, but that
was an exaggeration. He didn't know the road him¬
self, it was used only by the Mandingo traders; im¬
passable in the rains, it would be a very rough way
through the biggest bush, but ten days should see us
on the Coast.

The Commissioner had other reasons than patriot¬
ism to distrust the white man. There was a Catholic
priest at Sanoquelleh, his headquarters, and the pre¬
vious Commissioner had been married to a Catholic.
The priest had resented the difference between
Dunbar and his predecessor; Dunbar had stood
strictly to the letter of the law, allowing the priest no
privileges. The priest tried to get rid of him, writing
letters to the President in Monrovia; and the heat: and
desolation worked on both men. The priest saw his
chance when one of the men working on the roads
fell side. He took him into the mission and the man
died there. Immediately the priest wrote a letter
accusing Dunbar of having starved his workers and
beaten one to the point of death. Dunbar acted with
admirable promptitude; he arrived at the mission
with a squad of soldiers before the man was buried
and carried both the body and the priest over the
eighteen miles to Ganta, where he asked the

MISSION STATION

209

American doctor to examine the body. Dr. Harley
exonerated him and the priest was expelled from the
Republic. As for Dunbar, he had been made to
realise that whites were not only hypocritical in their
attitude to the Republic, they could be crooked in
their dealings with individuals.

The Secret Societies

That afternoon the doctor came in to talk about
the bush societies. His investigations were the only
enthusiasm he had kept after ten years, but he
wanted to be sure that my boys were out of the house.
I went and looked in the kitchen where they slept.
It was empty. Laminab was sitting in the shade of
the hospital looking sick. The doctor had drawn a
tooth of his in the morning: I had heard the painful
dog-like howls through the wooden wall: and now
he was afraid that he was going to die because the
gum still bled. He was too sophisticated to paint
himself with native medicine, but he had brought a
pot of cold cream with him from Freetown and was
smearing it all over his face and neck and scalp.

I am not an anthropologist and I cannot pretend
to remember very much of what Dr. Harley told me;
a pity, for no white man is closer to that particular
‘heart of darkness”, the secret societies being more
firmly rooted in Liberia than in any other country on
the West Coast. The Government have put up the
feeblest of resistances: though Colonel Davis, so he
told me later, had court-martialled and shot fifty
members of the Leopard Society in a village near
Grand Bassa. Indeed, they could not properly resist

210

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

because they believed . President King himself was
rumoured to have been a member of the Alligator
Society. When the League of Nations Commission
was appointed to inquire into Liberian conditions,
Mr. Kin g and several members of his cabinet—-so it
was believed in Monrovia—had sacrificed a goat.
After the sacrifice, which should traditionally have
been a human one, a boadoad of young Krus had
been drowned close to the beach at Monrovia, and
it was generally felt that the alligator was dissatisfied
with the goat.

It is a grim world, this of the societies, of the four
men who, Dr. Harley said, came to Ganta a year or
two back from the north looking for a victim. Every¬
one in Ganta knew they were there, with their ritual
need of the heart, the palms of the hands, the skin
of the forehead, but no one knew who they were.
The Frontier Force were active, searching for
strangers. Presendy the fear passed. The Manos
round Ganta knew what the men were seeking, for
they have their own cannibalistic societies, and
though I had said nothing of this to my boys and
there were no Manos among the carriers, Laminah
and Amedoo knew all about it. Laminah said to me
one day, “These people bad, they chop men,” and
they were happy to leave the Manos behind. This is
the territory the United States map marks so vaguely
and excitingly as “Cannibal”.

The Terrapin Society of the women and the Snake
Society of the men, of course, are not peculiar to the
Manos. There is the ordinary snake society, a kind
of post-graduate course in handling snakes, in curing
their bites and dancing the snake dance, and the

MISSION STATION

211

secret society which does actually worship a python,
to which one baby should be sacrificed each year by
the fully initiated. This was a common terror once:
we came across the memory of what I suppose was a
related cult at the sacred waterfall beyond Ganta;
now only in Liberia, where the secret societies are so
immune from interference, do cases of child murder
or disappearance occur with any frequency.

Dr. Harley was particularly pleased with having
discovered the nature of one devil, the most sacred
in the women’s eyes, whom it is death for a woman to
see. He found it was not an individual at all, but a
circle of young warriors who had entered bush school
at the same time as the chiefs son. The women were
warned by drums that the great devil was out, and
the young men danced fully armed beating the
ground with staffs.

Among all these devils. Dr. Harley said, there was
one supreme devil, whose fiat ran the length of the
Coast and who had the power to stop war between
tribe and tribe. He could appear simultaneously in
places far apart: he was known by his distinctive
mask and robes. These were probably stored in every
place of importance along the Coast, above the
palaver-house or in the blacksmith’s hut. For the
blacksmith of Mosambolahun, it appeared, was not
peculiar in being the local devil. Dr. Harley was in¬
clined to believe that the craft of blacksmith was
always linked with the status of devil.

It is a curiously Kafka-like situation: headmasters
who wear masks and turn out to be the local black¬
smith . . . One reaches the village at the foot of
the Schloss, to discover that almost anyone may he

212

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the master o£ the Schloss; his agents are everywhere
. . . there is an atmosphere of force and terror . .
occasionally beauty . . . ‘meaning behind meaning,
form behind form’. I can imagine that after seven
years of investigating this formal but Protean re¬
ligion, one may still despair of an interpretation.
Olga in Kafka’s novel, it will be remembered, tried
to construct “out of glimpses and rumours and
through various distorting factors” an image of
Klamm. “He’s reported as having one appearance
when he comes into the village and another on leav¬
ing it, after having his beer he looks different from
what he does before it, when he’s awake he’s different
from when he’s asleep, when he’s alone he’s different
from when he’s talking to people, and—what is com¬
prehensible after all that—he’s almost another person
up in the Castle.” Take the case of the rich and
sinister headman at Zigita: for all anyone knew he
might be the devil himself ... or was the devil the
blacksmith? or was there a devil in the sense of an
individual at all, any more than the group of young
warriors had been a devil, was it perhaps a fraud
practised by the initiates? But it was a mistake to
suggest that the young warriors were frauds: in their
composite form they were the devil.

Then take the masks. I had asked Mark whether
he feared Landow when he was out of his mask and
just the blacksmith of Mosambolahun; and it was
obvious that he feared him less, but that even then
the blacksmith retained an aura of something not
quite human. Did the supernatural rest in the mask?
No, one person would say, it was in the combination
of the two, but on the other hand old disused masks

MISSION STATION

213

were often retained as charms and 'fed’, and there
were masks, even apart from the man who wore them,
which it was fatal to a woman to see: fatal presum¬
ably because the devil’s agents would exact retribu¬
tion, with the knife or with poison, but to what extent
was this human punishment also supernatural?

'Devil’, of course, is a word used by the English-
speaking native to describe something unknown in
our theology: it has nothing to do with evil. One
might equally call these big bush devils angels—for
they have the angelic properties of alacrity and in¬
visibility—if that word contained no element of
'good’. In a Christian land we have grown so accus¬
tomed to the idea of a spiritual war, of God and Satan,
that this supernatural world, which is neither good
nor evil but simply Power, is almost beyond sympa¬
thetic comprehension. Not quite: for those witches
which haunted our childhood were neither good
nor evil. They terrified us with their power, but we
knew all the time that we must not escape them.
They simply demanded recognition: flight was a
weakness.

That night Dr. Harley showed us a grotesquely
horrible collection of devils’ masks. Each one had
obviously been made by a conscious artist. No effect
was accidental. Here were the two-faced masks of a
woman’s society; here male masks which women
were forbidden to see. These were different from the
masks worn by the dancing devils. Those had been
part human, part animal, these were modelled closely
on human features. There was one with a thin beard
made of chicken’s feathers, and another, the oldest
(it looked at least three hundred years old), had dje

214

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

thin nose, the high brow of a European. It was quite
different from any other mask I saw. It might have
been modelled on the features of some Portuguese
sailor wrecked or marooned on the West Coast, or it
may have gone back no further than a slave-trader
at the beginning of the last century, a man like Canot
whose autobiography is set on this Liberian coast, a
hanger-on perhaps of his Portuguese employer, Don
Pedro Blanco, who built his extraordinary palace on
the debated marshy land between Liberia and Sierra
Leone, near Sherbro, where the cargo steamers of
Elder Dempster still sometimes call, to their crew's
discomfort, a palace with separate islands for his
seraglio, with billiard rooms and all the advantages
of both European and African civilisation. The man
on whom the mask was modelled, of course, was as
dead as Canot, as the Liberian forest which some
urgent motive had caused him to penetrate—perhaps
the desire for gold or slaves: but all the power of his
motive had gone into the mask. I do not think it was
greed: it was a fanatical Curiosity which leant out of
the empty eyeballs.

A Sacred Waterfall

Before we left Ganta I learned of a sacred waterfall
in the forest near the village of Zugbei. If we made a
detour on the way to Sakripie, our next big town, we
would pass the village. One of Harley's pupils at the
mission school was chief there, and though the exist¬
ence of the waterfall had been kept secret from Dr.
Harley for many years, his pupil had lately shown
signs of willingness to guide him to it. Human sacri-

MISSION STATION 21 J

fice had once been offered at the falls, but now the
paths were no longer kept open.

Next morning, as we were about to start along
Dunbar’s new road north-east to Zuluyi, I heard that
Babu could go no further, he was sick. He had been
one of the few men, though he spoke no word of
English, with whom I thought I had some contact. I
had known him to be completely dependable; he had
not joined with the carriers who had struck for more
pay. I think he was genuinely sick; he had been
given heavy loads the last few days and he was not.
strong, and none of the carriers would have chosen
by this time to stay behind alone among a strange
tribe, at least ten days’ trek away from his own people.

I should have liked to dismiss him with a handsome
present, but it would only have encouraged others to
go sick. I had to pretend anger and pay him off with
a very small dash. I felt guilty of a meanness; he had
no friends among the carriers, except Guawa, the
other Buzie, and they taunted him. I would have lost
any of them more willingly.

But it was awkward to lose any man when I was
beginning to feel that I might soon need a hammock
badly. There were not enough men now to carry even
an empty hammock. I had to tell them to take the
heavy pole out and leave it behind and add the ham¬
mock to one of the lighter loads. I could see the
doctor watching me, critically; he didn’t have to tell
me what he was thin k ing.

It was about two hours’ walk to Zuluyi. The chief
there had been one of Harley’s pupils and came to
guide us to Zugbei. We passed through a thick steep
forest country, up the slopes of what the natives be-

2l6

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

lieved to be a holy hill. Tiny fairy people, the chief
said, had lived on this hill and they used to come
down and help the Manos in war. Harley was
interested; it was the first he had heard of any pygmy
traditions in Liberia. There might be remains ... \
think he was picturing to himself reports, excava¬
tions, wall paintings, and the only kind of glory his
altruistic spirit could appreciate. There was a big
hole, the chief said, pointing up a path which dis¬
appeared a few feet away into the trees and under-
brush, where the small people used to live. Boys used
to go once a year with gifts into the hole. The last
boy who had gone to the hole was still alive, an old
man, in Zugbei. He had had his head shaved, but
when he came out his hair was dressed in ringlets.
Now no one went into the hole any more, but gifts
were still brought.

We reached Zugbei, a tiny village, in the fiercest
heat of the day: a worse heat than we had had in
the highlands; the air wa,s already saturated with the
coming rains. The villages were no longer perched
on thimbles of rock above the forest. One camp
straight into them from the bush; they were like little
dried-up airless pools.

The chief led us to the waterfall. None of us
expected to see more than a thin trickle of water over
a few boulders, for some of the large rivers were so
low that the carriers could wade through them and
the dug-out canoes lay on the banks cracking for want
of use. We walked straight into the thickest wall of
forest. The chief and another man led, clearing a
path with cutlasses. It was impossible to tell how
drey knew the way. They walked along fallen trees,

MISSION STATION

217

scrambled down slopes at an angle of forty-five
degrees, cutting all the time; there was no sign of a
path. Then suddenly at the bottom of the steepest
hill we came out into a dell full of the sound of water,
which streamed under feathers of foam over a fall
sixty feet deep. All the slopes became alive with
people, girls with the pretty horn-shaped breasts of
the Manos, men with cutlasses. The whole village
seemed to have come with us, but the forest had been
so thick we had seen only the chief and his com¬
panion. They sat on the slopes staring at the
incredible bounty of water. Within the young chiefs
memory there had been human sacrifices at the fall,
the feeding of a slave at the end of each dry season
to a snake, a hundred feet long, who had lain below
the fall. It was the myth of the rainbow snake which
one finds as far afield as Australia: the materialisa¬
tion of the rainbow shimmer in the falling water.
The sacrifice had ended when the present chief was
a child. The slave, though his hands were tied
behind him, had grasped the chiefs robe and carried
him over the edge of the fall. That had been the end
of the sacrifice and the snake had gone down the
river to the St. John and lived now in a pool, very
dose to where we crossed, between Ganta and Djiecke.

We said good-bye to Dr. Harley in Zugbei. We
could have slept there, but I couldn’t bear the thought
that we had not yet turned south. I wanted at least
the sensation of moving, however short a distance,
towards the coast. So we went on for half an hour
due south to a dull village of which I couldn t learn
the name. It sounded like Mombei. The chief would
have no chop cooked for the men, but he dashed me

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

2l8

a hamper of rice and they cooked their own. As 1
usual there was no peace when we arrived. I was
feeling sick and tired. The scramble in the heat to
and from the waterfall had exhausted me more tha^
a long trek, and it angered me that, directly I sat
down, a carrier called Siafa came to show me his
venereal sore. He had had it for three years, he hadn’t
shown it to the doctor, who could have injected him ,
and I felt he might have kept it for a few more weeks
untended. But there was one thing I couldn’t afford
to do, show my impatience or my lack of knowledge.
Daily after that I went through the farce of dressing
the sore. Afterwards I dosed myself heavily with
Epsom and went to bed; suddenly I felt hopelessly
tired of rats; we were no longer short of kerosene, so
I left my lamp burning, but it made no difference.
There were always shadows for them to play in. The
Epsom brought me out of my bed in the night to the
edge of the forest. It was almost full moon and the
huts stood out in a bright greenish daylight. It was
absolutely quiet: not a sound from the dark dead
forest. Every door was closed and the goats were the
only living things in sight, as they wandered sleep-
lessly between the huts. I thought even then that the
scene was beautiful, but the thought did not alter my
impatience to be gone. The spell would only work
after many months; now all I wanted was medicine,
a bath, iced drinks, and something other than this
bush lavatory of trees and dead leaves where at any
moment I might crouch upon a snake in the
darkness.

MISSION STATION

219

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 comer 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 Thibetans 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 tide
of the Princess of Time who haunted my sleep. Tfce

220

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

poisoned flowers, the Thibetan 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.

CHAPTER TWO

“CIVILISED MAN”

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
tjpnt like an old man with the tips of its fingers just

“CIVILISED man” 221

touching the ground- a leopard’s pads marked the
sand by a stream, where a snake had come to drink
^d outside the first village, Yeibo, there was a
round shailow pond under thorn trees with great
ca^-hke fish lounging lazily in the shadows. It was
sull early morning, I was happy with the sense that
every step was towards home, there was somethin*
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 undulatin*
pasture, a few cows, and groups of trees, like elms, m
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 our¬
selves into Africa, while they with their hows 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 ma k ing a mat when we arrived,
and when he had finished the villagers crowded on
to it, pushing the chief off. There they lounged oqf-

222

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

side our hut until the full heat of the afternoon dis¬
persed 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
apd until very late the village was full of song and

“civilised man” 223

laughter and run n ing 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 self-
conscious 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 happy/’ 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
ame to meet us next day in the wide clean streets
f Sakripie, where there were stores and Mandingo
•aders 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
tief s compound, a huge square with a flag-pole
rrounded by whitewashed huts belonging to his
ves. He had the ingratiating air of a motor sales-

m, 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

H* *

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

224

would give him prestige. He sent for a chicken and
some eggs but nobody brought tbem. He swore at
everyone he could see; he was almost in tears with
vexation.

“My name,” a voice said softly behind me, “jg
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 chain
are very interesting. I have not seen anything like
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. 1
am interested also in your bed. And this table” fit
was a card-table bought for three and elevenpence),
“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 want
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.

“CIVILISED man” 22 J

“No, no,” I said. “To Monrovia. But first to Grand
Bassa. AndTapee-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 die 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

226

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 hum¬
bugged.

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 pour¬
ing into the compound behind two huge stilted and

“civilised man” 227

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 die

228

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

mistake of giving him whisky, thinking it would
malfp 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,
di gnifipd and dr unk 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
chiefs 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 in¬
tended for the carriers. A few. sullen notabilities of

“civilised man” 229

the place loitered at the edge of the dark, hating us,
hating the young drunk chief. We returned and pre¬
sently 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 start¬
ing. Then the young chief appeared in the com¬
pound; 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
Imper ialis t, 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

23O JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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 inhabit¬
ants 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 tom white trousers, backless slippers

“civilised man” 231

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 con¬
tested 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 every¬
one 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

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

232

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, school¬
master 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

“civilised man” 233

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 read¬
ing, 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 stopd

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

234

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 tim/> f or
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 morn¬
ing 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 match-box: inside the match¬
box 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.

3 35

“civilised man”

“All Hail, Liberia, Hail!”

I woke at five. In my dream someone had been
reciting Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Chrisfs
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 Mil to n.
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 good-bye 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 move¬
ment 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 die 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

236 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

an easy idea to convey to someone who had never
seen an ordinary train. “Very remarkable, 1 ” 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.

2 37

“civilised man”

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
f them later bawled by a school of two hundred
children in Monrovia; here it was “the land be¬
nighted”, 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 die 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.

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

238

And when Victor Prosser angrily demanded why th<
school bell had not been rung, the young assistan
pointed to a rusty kitchen alarm clock on the desk
By his time it was only eight-forty-five. Victor Prossei
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 c?ste by exposing ourselves to the

3 39

“civilised man”

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 some¬
one had painted little bright child-like 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 half-way 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 every¬
one 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 some¬
thing 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.

240

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Tapee-Ta

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 ham¬
mock 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 charm¬
ing, 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.

“CIVILISED man” 241

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 pass¬
ing natives all along the great four-mile stretch of
road. His name carried weight; his friends in admira¬
tion and his enemies in derision, I discovered later,
railed him “The Dictator of Grand Bassa”.

The road did not stretch as far as Tapee-Ta. Alter
an hom: 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
Wiring 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

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

242

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 fly¬
ing 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.

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA

HZ

CHAPTER THREE

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA
Black Mercenary

1 felt very dirty as I followed the sentry into the wide
clean compound and rather absurd, with my stock¬
ings over my ankles, my stained shorts, my too, too
British khaki sun helmet. I was very much at a dis¬
advantage, standing beneath a verandah crowded
with black gentlemen in the smartest of tropical
lounge suits and uniforms. They had just finished
lunch and were smoking cigars and drinking coffee:

I wondered which was Colonel Davis. There was an
air of subdued activity as I stood there in dirty
neglect in the sun: clerks kept on delivering messages
and running briskly off again, sentries saluted, and
the supercilious diplomatic gentlemen leant over the
verandah and studied with well-bred curiosity the
dusty arrival.

The sentry returned and led me across the com¬
pound to another bungalow, a less smart one this
time, with a few rickety chairs on the verandah. The
District Commissioner appeared in the doorway, a
slatternly mulatto woman peered over his shoulder.
He was a middle-aged man with a yellow face and
Victorian side-whiskers; he hadn’t shaved for a long
time; his teeth were bad, and he wore a shabby khaki
uniform and the dirtiest old peeling white sun helmet
I had ever seen. He was like a stem and sadistic papa
in a Victorian children’s story; his name was Worda-

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

244

worth, but he was more like Mr. Fairchild than the
poet. I think his appearance maligned him and that
really he was shy and afraid of humiliation; I think
quite possibly, like Mr. Fairchild, he had a heart of
gold under that repressive exterior. Now he stood
above me like a little yellow tyrant, and I really
believed at first that he would refuse me a house, but
instead he called his young brother, the Quarter¬
master.

Mr. Wordsworth, junior, was quite different. He
had a round seal-grey face with soft lips (there seemed
to be less white blood in his veins) and he had a
passion for friendship. He it was who had raised his
hat to me at the crossing of path and road at Ganta.
He led me to the next bungalow: a palatial building
of four rooms and a cookhouse. In one of the rooms
we found the Paramount Chief, squatting on the
native bed, eating his lunch with the clan chief; he
was very like the ex-King of Spain and wore a soft
hat and a native robe. We had arrived at Tapee
dining a conference of the local chiefs. They had
made complaints against the District Commissioners,
especially against Mr. Wordsworth, and Colonel
Davis had arrived as the President’s special agent to
hear the complaints. There were several D.C.s now
staying in the compound. We had arrived in the
lunch interval.

I sat down in a wooden chair and waited for the
others to arrive. The Paramount Chief hastily came
out of the bedroom and said the chair was his. I
could sit in it, but it was his. The palaver-house m
the compound began to fill up with chiefs who
streamed in at the gates in soft hats under umbrellas,

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA 245

their chairs carried by boys. I began to ask the Para¬
mount Chief to sell me rice for my men. Thin, vital,
Bourbon-nosed, he seemed to pay no attention what¬
ever. He strode away to say something to the clan
chiefs, then strode back and said I could have rice at
four shillings a hamper. I said that was too- much,
but he was gone again. His mind was full of state
affairs, he hardly had time to bring the price down
to three shillings, and before I could propose half a
crown, he was off to the palaver-house. Then a bugle
blew and Colonel Davis, accompanied by the D.C.s,
walked across the compound to the council.

Even at a distance there was something attractive
about the dictator of Grand Bassa. He had
personality. He carried himself with a straight
military swagger, he was very well dressed in a
tropical suit with a silk handkerchief stuck in the
breast pocket. He had a small pointed beard and one
couldn't at that distance see the gold teeth which
rather weakened his mouth. He was like a young
black Captain Kettle and reminded me of Conrad’s
Mr. J. K. Blunt who used to declare with proud sim¬
plicity in the Marseilles cafes, “I live by my sword.”
He had noted our arrival and presently the seedy
Commissioner appeared to say that the President’s
special agent wished to see our papers.

It was the first time in Liberia that our passports
had been examined. The absconding financier whom
I have imagined settling in the unpoliced hinterland
of Liberia, taking his holidays at will in French
Guinea, a good enough substitute for Le Touquet
without any tiresome bother about papers, would do
well to avoid Tapee-Ta. For there is a prison in the

246

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

compound at Tapee-Ta, and though the dictator of
Grand Bassa was satisfied with our passports, which
certainly did not include permission to pass through
Central Liberia, the financier might have fared worse.

That prison, next door to our own bungalow, com¬
bined behind its thatch and whitewashed walls and
tiny port-holes the sense of darkness and airlessness,
and the kind of min dless brutality which sometimes
vents itself in this country in the torture of a cat (the
head warder was a moron and a cripple). Each port¬
hole, the size of a man’s head, represented a cell. The
prisoners within, men and women, were tied by ropes
to a stick which was laid crosswise against the port¬
hole outside. There were two or three men who were
driven out to work each morning, two skinny old
women who carried in the food and water, their ropes
coiled round their waists, an old man who was
allowed to lie outside on a mat tied to one of the posts
which supported the thatch. In a dark cavernous
entrance, where the whitewash stopped, a few
warders used to lounge all through the day shouting
and squabbling and sometimes diving, club in hand,
into one of the tiny cells. The old prisoner was a
half-wit; I saw one of the warders beating him with
his club to make him move to the tin basin in which
he had to wash, but he didn’t seem to feel the blows.
Life to him was narrowed into a few very simple, very
pale sensations, of warmth on his mat in the sun and
cold in his cell, for Tapee-Ta at night was very cold.
One of the old women had been in prison a month
waiting trial. She was accused of having made light¬
ning in her village, and there was a pathetic
impotence in her daily purgatory under the staggep

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA

247

ing weight of water from the stream half a mile
away. If she could make lightning, why did she not
burn the prison down or strike the dilatory Com¬
missioner dead? Very likely she had made lightning
(I could not disbelieve these stories; they were too
well attested), but perhaps the natural force had died
in her during her imprisonment, or perhaps she
simply hadn’t the right medicines with her in that
place. I asked the Quartermaster when she would be
tried; he didn’t know.

The council in the palaver-house went on till after
five: the place was packed. It must have been
appallingly hot. One suspected that the whole inquiry
was designed to quiet the chiefs rather than try the
Commissioners, for the judge was a cousin of the
principal accused. But at any rate he showed patience
and endurance.

Later that evening came the ceremony of lowering
the Liberian flag, carried out with solemnity; two
buglers played a few bars of the national anthem—

In joy and gladness with our hearts united,

We’ll shout the freedom of a land benighted .. /

and everyone on the verandahs stood at attention.
When it was over I sent a note across to Colonel
Davis asking for an interview and received a reply
that he was worn out by nine hours of council, but
would spare me a few minutes.

The Tew minutes’ developed into several hours, for
the Colonel was garrulous, and after more than an
hour’s conversation on his verandah, we adjourned
to mine for whisky. He had once been a private m

S48 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the American army and his career, if frankly written,
would prove one of the most entertaining adventure
stories in the world. As a private or a medical orderly
in a black regiment—I forget which—he had served
in Pershing’s disastrous Mexican expedition when
hundreds of men died in the desert for lack of water;
later he had seen service in the Philippines; and
finally, for what reason I do not know, he had left
America and come to Monrovia. He was very soon
appointed medical officer of health, though I do not
think he had any kind of medical degree, and from
this vantage point he had worked his way into
politics. Under Mr. King’s presidency he had been
appointed Colonel Commandant of the Frontier
Force and had managed to shift his allegiance to Mr,
Barclay when Mr. King was forced to resign after the
League of Nations inquiry. No story was undramatic
to Colonel Davis, and the whole shabby tale of Mr.
King’s participation in the shipping of forced labour
to Fernando Po and his rather cowardly acceptance
of the League’s condemnation, which threatened
Liberian sovereignty, followed by his resignation
when the Legislature proposed to impeach him,
became an exciting melodrama in which Colonel
Davis had played an heroic part.

“They were thirsting for his blood,” Colonel Davis
said dramatically, but nothing which I saw later of
the coastal Liberians lessened my doubt whether they
had the vitality to assault anyone; with cane juice
they would work themselves up to a height of oratory,
but as for murder . . . He lowered his voice. “Fot
twenty-four hours,” he said, “I never left Mr. King’s
sede. The mobs were going about the streets, thirsting

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA

249

for blood. But they all said, “We cannot kill King
without killing Davis.’” The Colonel flashed his
gold teeth at me, deprecatingly. “Of course-”

“Of course,” I said.

I approached the subject of the Kru war by way of
the Colonel’s other military exploits. I felt that after
the British Consul’s report he might feel shy of the
subject, but I always over-estimated the Colonel’s shy¬
ness. When I expressed my admiration for the way
in which he had disarmed the tribes, the Colonel
took up the subject with enthusiasm. As far as I
could make out the operation had turned on a cup
of Ovaltine rather than on rifles or machine-guns, for
he was a sweet-tempered man: butter wouldn’t have
melted between the gold teeth. One tribe had sent
out armed men to ambush him, but he had learnt
their plans from his spies, had taken a different path
and entered the town while it was quite empty except
for women and old men. From the report on the Kru
war I should have expected Colonel Davis to have
set fire to the town while his men raped the women:
but no: he called for the oldest man, made him sit
down, gave him a glass of Ovaltine (with the barest
glance at the opposite verandah, where my whisky
and glasses were laid out, the Colonel remarked, “I
always have a glass of Ovaltine at the end of a day’s
trek”), made friends with him, and had him send
messages out to the warriors to return in peace. “Of
course,” the Colonel said, “I made him understand
that he and the other old men would have to remain
as my guests until the arms were handed over . . .”

The character of the Colonel eluded me. Lord
Cecil in the House of Lords had called him'a

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

ajo

‘buccaneer’, but that was perhaps pardonable
exaggeration. He was obviously a man of great
ability; his disarming of the tribes testified to it, and
that he had courage as well as brag the whole Kru
story showed. I had not only his own word for it:
the fact emerged even from the unfriendly report of
the British Consul. He had come down into Chief
Nunley's district as the President’s special agent,
under a guard of soldiers, to collect long overdue
taxes. He knew well the man he had to deal with
and he knew the risk he was running when he agreed
to meet him at a palaver in the village. It had been
agreed that neither should bring armed men, but
when Davis arrived at the palaver-house with bis
clerk he found Nimley and his leading men sitting
there fully armed. Even then, Davis thought, all
would have gone well had not the Commander of the
Frontier Force, Major Grant, who had taken a stroll
round the village, rushed into the hut, interrupted
the palaver, and cried out that Nimley had armed
men concealed in the banana plantations. Davis com¬
manded him to stay where he was, but Grant, crying
out that he was responsible to the President for
Davis’s safety, ran from the hut to summon his
soldiers.

Davis’s later opinion was that Grant was in the pay
of the Krus, for his action had the immediate effect
of endangering Davis’s life. Nimley left the hut and
his warriors swarmed round the Colonel. Naturally
he made the most of the situation to me, as he leant
there over the Tapee verandah with one eye on tbfe
drinks. (“I said to my clerk, Take the papers. They
vTon’t harm you. Walk slowly up to the camp aril-

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA

*J1

stop the soldiers from coming here/ I stood with my
back to the wall and they flourished their spears in
my face. My clerk said, ‘Colonel, I will not leave you.
I will die here with you/ I said to him, ‘There is
no point in dying. Obey orders/ ”) But the facts
were undisputed. He had been a prisoner and he had
escaped. He said that when his clerk had gone, he
left the wall and walked very slowly to the door. They
made gestures of stabbing, but no one would stab
first. Then an old man appeared with a great staff
and beat them back and cleared a way for Davis
through the village. “Afterwards Nimley killed the
old man.”

His cook- appeared on the verandah behind us and
said that dinner was served, but the Colonel wouldn't
let me go: he had an audience for a story which had
probably become rather stale on the Coast.

“That night I was sitting on my verandah, as it
might be to-night; it was ten o'clock, and there, just
where the sentry is, I saw a big warrior dressed in
war paint with little bells tied under his knees. He
came up and said, ‘Who’s the big man around here?’
I said, ‘I guess I’m the biggest man here. What do
you want?’ He said, ‘Chief Nimley send me to tell
you he’s coming up here at five o’clock in the morn¬
ing to collect his tax money/ So I said, ‘You tell
Chief Nimley that I’ll be waiting for him/

“And at eleven o’clock I looked up and there was
another warrior, a small man, all in war paint. He
came up to the verandah and said, ‘Are you the big
man here?’ ‘Waal,’ I said, ‘I guess you won’t find
anyone bigger around this place. What do you
want?’ He said, ‘Chief Nimley send me to tell yqu

252 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

that at five o’clock he come to see if he’s a man or you
are a man.’ So I said, ‘You go back to Chief Nimley
and tell him if he comes up here at five o’clock, I’ll
show him which is the man.’

“And at midnight I looked up and there was a little
piccaninny in Boy Scout uniform, but all dressed in
war paint. He came up to the verandah and he said,
‘Where’s the big man?’ So I said, ‘Are you a Boy
Scout?’ and he said. Yes’. I said, ‘Who’s your
National Director of Boy Scouts?’ He said, ‘Colonel
Elwood Davis.’ I said, ‘Where’s Colonel Davis now?’
and he stud, ‘In Monrovia.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m Colonel
Davis. Now what do you mean by appearing before
your National Director of Boy Scouts in war paint?’
So he got kind of shy and said, ‘Chief Nimley told
me to come up here.’ I said, ‘You go back to Chief
Nimley and say I wouldn’t let a Boy Scout deliver
a message like that.’ ”

That seemed to be the end of the story. I said,
“And did Chief Nimley come?”

“Oh no,” Colonel Davis said, “he just made light¬
ning. But there were a lot of Buzie men in the camp,
members of the Lightning Society, and they laid out
their medicines and the lightning hit the trees on
the beach and didn’t do any harm.”

He brought up the subject of the British Consul’s
report himself. He said what had gone most to his
heart in a very unfair document was the story that
six children had been burnt alive. There was no one
who loved children more than he did. He had
piccaninnies of his own, and I had only to ask Ms
wife, his second wife, whether every night he didn’t
r$ad them stories before they went to bed. His

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA

*53

enemies in Monrovia, who were jealous of his
position, had pretended to believe in these atrocities,
and even his mother, back in America, had read
about them; but she knew him better, she’d dandled
him on her knee, and she didn’t believe. Colonel
Davis said, “If you want to know the truth of that
story--”

Apparently one evening he had heard children cry¬
ing and had sent soldiers from the camp who found
two babies in the swamps. They had been hidden
there when Nimley’s tribe took to the bush. The
next day he sent more soldiers to search the
neighbourhood, and they brought in four more
children. He was a mother to those children. He had
made the soldiers wash them, had given up his own
porridge and the last of his own vaseline; then next
day he had sent men to capture a few women to look
after them. These were the very children he had
been accused of having burnt alive.

His cook again appeared and said that chop was
getting cold. Davis snapped at him, but he had no
control over his servants. He was very smart, very
astute, but I think it was this which was wrong with
him. He came over to my verandah and drank
whisky and told us all about his first marriage to a
teetotaller and how he had cured her by guile of her
prejudice, and his servant kept on popping up at
intervals to remind him of chop, while Davis stub¬
bornly sat on, just to show who was master.

It is the simplest explanation of the facts contained
in Blue Book, cmd. 4614: the woman just delivered
of twins shot in her bed and her children burnt;
children cut down with cutlasses; the heads and

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

254

limbs of victims carried on poles; for otherwise
Colonel Davis has to be pictured as a monster, and
a monster one simply couldn’t believe him to be as
he flashed his gold teeth over the whisky, a bit
doggish, a bit charmingly and consciously shy and
small boy in the maimer of the black singer Hutch.

He came across again the next evening for whisky
and nearly finished all we had. It was a bitterly cold
night, and a heavy storm came up: there could be
no doubt that the rains were on us. After an hour
or two the Colonel grew sentimental, leaning back
in his chair with a wistful misunderstood air; and
it became difficult to believe that he had even so
much as witnessed the atrocities. “I was on a liner
once,” the Colonel said, “and I remember the Captain
calling me up to the bridge after dinner. He made
a remark I have never forgotten. He pointed to a
boat that was going by and said it reminded him of
three books that were in the library down below:
Ships that Pass in the Night —can you guess the
others?”

We couldn’t.

“Well, the Captain pointed down at the deck where
the other passengers were and said to me. There,
Davis: The People We Meet?; and then he turned
to me and said, “But more important still, Davis, The
Friends We Love/”

I filled the dictator’s glass. “It was a beautiful
thought,” he said, looking away.

I worked the. conversation back to Liberia and
politics. Colonel Davis was North American by
birth, but he was a Liberian patriot. “As the poet
^grote. Colonel Davis said, “ ‘Is there a man with

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA

255

soul so dead. Who never has said, I love my own,
my own country ?’ 99 I asked him about Mr. Barclay
and his chances, and whether Mr. Faulkner would be
opposing him as well as Mr. King. No, he said, Mr.
Faulkner had retired from politics. He had seen Mr.
Faulkner in the Post Office just before leaving Mon¬
rovia and Faulkner had told him that he was neither
supporting nor opposing either candidate. “So I said
to him, ‘Mr. Faulkner, there is a parable in the Bible.
A disciple came to Christ and said, ‘One in the next
village is casting out devils in Beelzebub’s name/ and
Christ said, ‘Who is not with me is against me/ ”
My ignorance of Monrovia contributed to the drama
of the political scene: I couldn’t tell that the Post
Office was a loft in a wooden shed to which one
climbed by a ladder.

Victorian Sunday

I woke next morning with a bad cold after spend¬
ing the night under two blankets with a sweater over
my pyjamas. A letter was waiting for me at breakfast
from die Quartermaster:

Dear Friend Mr. Green: Good morning . Fm
about to ask a favour of you this morning which I
hope you will be able to grant . If you heme any
Brandy kindly send me a little or anything else if
Brandy is out. Some would be very appreciated
by me. Fm feeling very, very cold this a.m . you
know hope you both well. With best wishes for
health. Your friend Wordsworth. Q.M.

N. B.—Fll bring my sisters to pay a visit to you

256 JOURNEY WTTHOUT MAPS

and cousin this p.m. as they like you for their
friends.

I sent him a glass of whisky and asked for a coco¬
nut and some palm nuts which the cook needed for
lard. Presently back came a coconut and a bottle of
palm oil and a note:

Dear Friend: Too many thanks for such a kind
treat this a.m. it was highly appreciated. 1 shall
always regard you as my friend. . . .

The place was very still: it was Sunday and a heavy
Victorian peace settled over Tapee. Even native
dances were forbidden. The prisoners were driven
out to wash tied together by ropes, and a gramophone
from the bungalow where two D.C.s were staying
played hymn-tunes across the hot empty compound:
Hark, the herald angels sing and Nearer, my God,
to Thee. But after a while these gave place to dance
music and American hot songs. I went for a walk;
I was feeling ill and homesick; the Coast seemed as
far away as ever. I felt crazy to be here in the middle
of Liberia when everything I knew intimately was
European. It was like a bad dream. I couldn’t
remember why I had come. I wanted to be away at
once, but I simply hadn’t the strength, and Dr.
Harley’s warning against walking any distance in
the West African climate weighed on my mind. I
had to have these days of rest, and so did the boys.
Mark was dead tired, and even the nerves of Amedoo
and Laminah were strained. I tried to comfort
myself with the thought that it was only six days to
Grand Bassa and if Colonel Davis were to be believed

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA

*57

we should not have to wait longer than a week at
that miserable little port before a boat passed.

While I was having a bath in preparation for a
long siesta the Quartermaster arrived. He wanted to
buy a bottle of whisky for his brother and his brother
had sent five shillings. I said I had none left, or at
any rate only just enough to see me to the Coast.
Then at two-thirty by my watch, when I had just
fallen asleep, he came again with a note from the
D.C. inviting me to dinner at two o’clock. I had
eaten a large lunch already, but I went, taking with
me half a bottle of whisky very diluted.

I was reminded of one of those curious thick crude
groups by Samuel Butler. One had slipped back sixty
years in time to a Victorian Sunday dinner. The
only thing lacking was the wife; she helped to serve
the dinn er. There at the end of the table sat Papa,
yellow-faced Wordsworth in his heavy side-whiskers
dressed in a thick dark Sunday suit with a gold
watch-chain across his stomach and a gold seal
dangling from it. On the walls were faded Victorian
photographs of family groups, whiskers and bustles
and parasols, in Oxford frames. All except myself
and Colonel Davis, who sat at the other end of the
table and carved the goose, were in Sunday clothes:
an old negro who had withered inside his clothes like
a dried nut in its shell and who was one of the Judges
of Assize, the native Commissioner from Grand Bassa
and another Commissioner who was very shy and
scared of Colonel Davis and whom I suspected of
having played the hymns. The Commissioner of
Grand Bassa, I suppose, was responsible for the hot
music.

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

358

Conversation was halting: the weather, devils and
secret societies, the small talk of Liberia. Colond
Davis was a firm believer in the power of the light-
ning societies. He had visited towns where the
members had performed in his honour. They would
tell him that lightning would be made at a certain
hour, and at that hour out of a cloudless sky along
all the hills for miles around it would begin to play,
Mr. Justice Page capped the story with a few legal
decisions of his own on the subject of lightning-
makers, but Colonel Davis was determined to raise
the conversation to a high social level: to food. He
had toured Europe with Mr. King and he remem¬
bered very well the caviare.

Colonel Davis explained to the dark blank faces,
“Caviare is the black eggs of little fishes.” He turned
to me, “Of course, in England now, you no longer
get the Russian cigarette.” I said I really didn’t
know: I thought I’d seen them in tobacconists’.
“Not real ones,” Colonel Davis said, “they are very
rare indeed. A season or two ago in Monrovia they
formed a course in themselves at dinner parties.”

“Where did the course come?” I asked.

“After the fish and before the salad,” Colonel Davis
said, while the Co mmi ssioner from Grand Bassa leant
forward and drank in every syllable describing the
gilded life of the capital. “The lights were lowered “
he paused impressively, “and one cigarette would he
served to each guest.” The judge nodded; he came
from Monrovia as well.

I remember saying to Colonel Davis how surprise®
I was not to have seen a single mosquito. He, t0£§|
he said, had not seen one since the last rains; he was*

THE DICTATOR OF GRAND BASSA 359

suffering a little from prickly heat, but Liberia was
really the healthiest place in Africa.

He was always inclined to over-state his case, as
when he told me that in the Kru war no women had
been killed, only one woman accidentally wounded,
while the British Consul’s report spoke of seventy-
two women and children dead. Now he remarked
that there had never been any yellow fever in
Liberia; the manager of the British bank who had
died of it in Monrovia (his death was one of the
reasons why the British Bank of West Africa with¬
drew altogether from Liberia) had brought the infec¬
tion with him from Lagos. All the other dpatVic
could be traced to inoculation. There was less
malaria, he went on, in Liberia than in any other
part of the West Coast: I had seen myself, he said,
that there were no mosquitoes. But providence gave
Colonel Davis a raw deal in this case because, when
evening came and we were waiting for him to join
us over our whisky, the Quartermaster brought news
that he was down with a bad attack of fever.

So the Quartermaster entertained us our last
evening in Tapee-Ta, sitting moonily opposite with
his great seal’s eyes begging, begging all the time for
friendship. He had taken an immediate fancy to me,
he said, when he saw me come out of the French path
by Ganta; he had felt then that we would be friends.
He would write to me and I would write to him. It
was lonely in Tapee: he was used to the life of the
capital; in Monrovia it was so gay, the dancing and
the cafes on the beach. By the time we arrived the
Season would be over, but it would still be gay, so
much to do and see, dancing by moonlight. . . . His

z6o

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

great lustrous romantic eyes never left me. He said,
because his mind was full of love and friendship,
dancing and the moon, “You’ve come from Buzie
country. They have wonderful medicines there.
There is a medicine for venereal disease. You tie a
rope round your waist. I have never tried it.” He
said wistfully, “I guess you white people aren’t
troubled with venereal disease.” He brooded a long
time on our departure. He wished he was coming
too, but he would always be my friend. He would
have letters from me. That night when I was making
my way out of the compound into the forest he inter¬
cepted me. He said he hoped I wouldn’t mind his
stopping me, but there was a very good closet behind
the Colonel’s bungalow with a wooden seat. It was
more suitable for me than the bush, he said, but I
couldn’t help remembering that he had not yet tried
the Buzie medicine and I went inexorably on into the
forest. He got up very early next morning to see us
go, and the last I remember of Tapee was his warm
damp romantic handshake in the grey deserted
compound.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE LAST LAP

A Touch of Fever

I had never imagined that Grand Bassa would one
day become my ideal of a place to sleep and rest in.
Bet now it seemed like heaven. There would be

another white man there; the sea in front instead of
bush; there might be beer to drink. I hadn’t realised
until I began to walk again how down-and-out I was.
No amount of Epsom salts had any effect on me;
I used to take a handful morning and night in hot
tea, but I might have been taking sugar. I felt sick
and tired before I had walked a step and now there
was no hammock I could use. Six days, they had
said at Ganta, would bring us from Tapee to Grand
Bassa, hut now at Tapee they said that the journey
would take a week at the very least, perhaps ten days.
I could no longer count time in such long periods:
even four days might have been eternity for all my
mind was capable of conceiving it. Not until I could
say “to-morrow” would I believe that we were really
drawing nearer to the Coast. My brain felt as sick
as my body. The responsibility of the journey had
been mine, the choice of route, the care of the men,
and now my mind had almost ceased to function. I
simply couldn’t believe that we should ever reach
Grand Bassa, that I had ever led a life different from
this life.

To reach our next stop, Zigi’s Town, I found diffi¬
cult enough. It was nearly nine hours’ solid trek from
Tapee, going down all the while into a damper closer
heat, and the first few miles of path were flooded
waist-high. Our guide, whom the Commissioner of
Grand Bassa had lent to lead us to the door of the P.Z.
store on Bassa beach, proved useless from the start.
Dressed in a ragged blue uniform, a rifle over his
shoulder which wouldn’t have fired even if he d had
the rounds, with all his belongings in a little tin pail,
he dropped behind at the first village we reached. He

Jt6a JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

was called Tommie and he had a brazen boyish
charm. He knew the way, but he had no intention of
walking at our rate. He started each day well, but
after half an hour he would slip aside into the bush
and not catch up again until the midday halt By
that time he was usually a little drunk. Because he
wore a uniform he could rob any village he passed of
palm wine, fruit and vegetables.

I remember nothing of the trek to Zigi’s Town and
very little of the succeeding days. I was so exhausted
that I couldn’t write more than a few lines in my
diary; I hope never to be so tired again. I retain an
impression of continuous forest, occasional bills
emerging above the bush so that we could catch a
glimpse on either side of the great whalebacked
forests driving to the sea. Outside Zigi’s Town there
was a stream trickling down the slope and a few ducks
with a curiously English air about them. I remember
trying to sit down, but immediately having to deal
with the town chief over food for the carriers, trying
to sit down again and rising to look for threepenny-
bits the cook needed for buying a chicken, trying to
sit down and being forced up again to dress a carrier’s
sores. I couldn’t stand any more of it; I swallowed
two tablespoonfuls of Epsom in a cup of strong tea
(we had finished our tinned milk long ago) and left
my cousin to deal with anything else that turned up.
My temperature was high. I swallowed twenty grains
of quinine with a glass of whisky, took off my clothes,
wrapped myself in blankets under the mosquito-net
and tried to sleep.

A thunderstorm came up. It was the third stonn
wp’d had in a few days; there wasn’t any time to lose

THE LAST LAP

263

if we were to reach the Coast, and I lay in the dark as
scared as I have ever been. There were no rats, at
any rate, but I caught a jigger under my toe when I
crawled out to dry myself. I was sweating as if I had
influenza; I couldn’t keep dry for more than fifteen
seconds. The hurricane lamp I left burning low on
an up-ended chop box and beside it an old whisky
bottle full of warm filtered water. I kept remember¬
ing Van Gogh at Bolahun burnt out with fever. He
said you had to lie up for at least a week: there wasn’t
any danger in malaria if you lay up long enough; but
I couldn’t bear the thought of staying a week here,
another seven days away from Grand Bassa. Malaria
or not, I’d got to go on next day and I was afraid.

The fever would not let me sleep at all, but by the
early morning it was sweated out of me. My tempera¬
ture was a long way below normal, but the worst bore¬
dom of the trek for the time being was over. I hg^
made a discovery during the night which interested
me. I had discovered in myself a passionate interest
in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter
of course, that death was desirable.

It seemed that night an important discovery. It
was like a conversion, and I had never experienced a
conversion before. (I had not been converted to a
religious faith. I had been convinced by specific argu¬
ments in the probability of its creed.) If the experi¬
ence had not been so new to me, it would have
seemed less important, I should have known that
conversions don’t last, or if they last at all it is only
as a little sediment at the bottom of the brain. Per¬
haps the sediment has value, the memory of a con¬
version may have some force in an emergency; I rqay

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

264

be able to strengthen myself with the intellects
idea that once in Zigi’s Town I had been complete!]
convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere
act of living.

The Edge of ( Civilisation ’

It was supposed to be a seven-hour trek from Zigi’s
Town to Bassa Town, the first stop inside Bassa terri¬
tory. I was doubtful if I could make it without some
help from a hammock, so I took on two extra carriers
and my men hacked a pole to take the place of the
one I had discarded. I was feeling very weak, but I
hadn’t enough carriers to let myself be carried all
the way, so I walked the first two hours and then had
ten minutes in the hammock and walked again. I
didn’t like being carried. A two-man hammock puts
a great strain on the carriers and my men were
already tired by the long trek. One heard the ham¬
mock strings grinding on the pole and saw the shoul¬
der muscles strain under the weight. It was too close
to using men as animals for me to be happy.

The villages we passed were all deserted except for
a few women. An elephant had been killed some¬
where in the bush, I suppose with the poisoned spears
the natives in these parts shoot from ancient guns,
and all the men for miles around had gathered to
strip its flesh. To our surprise we arrived, in less than
four hours, at Bassa Town. I was glad, save that it
made the Coast seem farther away than ever. We
were two days now from Tapee, but the young native
sub-Cominissioner here still spoke of Grand Bassa as
seyen days away. He was the only man in the place,

THE LAST LAP 265

a new village built of square low huts; all the others
were off after the elephant, so I was a little afraid of
what my carriers might do in a town deserted of its
menfolk.

But I couldn’t be bothered. As soon as I’d eaten
some lunch I went to bed and sweated again between
the blankets, for the fever had returned. The huts
were too low for me to stand upright, and instead of
rats there were huge spiders everywhere. I had just
enough energy to note depressingly in my diary:
“Last tin of biscuits, last tin of butter, last piece of
bread.” It was astonishing tow important these
luxuries had become; there were ten biscuits each, we
separated them in the tin and rationed them each in
our own way, but the butter proved to be rancid and
had to be used for cooking.

I noted, too, a sign that we were meeting the edge
of civilisation pushing up from the Coast. A young
girl hung around all day posturing with her thighs
and hips, suggestively, like a tart. Naked to the waist,
she was conscious of her nakedness; she knew that
breasts had a significance to the white man they
didn’t have to the native. There couldn’t be any
doubt that she had known whites before. There
were other signs too: the scarcity of food and the high
price of rice. It would be higher still, the sub-Com-
missioner said, when we got nearer to Grand Bassa.
He wanted me to buy a couple of hampers in Bassa
Town and so save perhaps sixpence on each hamper.
There are limitations to native mathematics, and
Laminah could never understand why I refused, why
it would cost more to save a shilling on rice and
employ two extra men to carry it.

a66

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

That day was the last short trek on the way to the
Coast. There was no longer any talk of 'too far’. The
carriers longed as much as I did to escape from the
bush and reach the sea, and as for my poor servants,
they were dog-tired. Their nerves were on edge and
one evening Amedoo and the head carrier ramp t0
blows in front of me over a dish of dirty meat scraps.
It was February the twenty-seventh when we left
Bassa Town, and we had been walking since February
the third. An eight-hour march brought us to Gyon,
but it did not seem to bring us any closer to Grand
Bassa. That remained, according to rumour, a week
away. It still seemed impossible to me that we should
ever reach it. My fever did not return after Bassa
Town, but my temperature remained a long way
below normal.

The vitality of both of us reached the lowest ebb
that day and the next. We had to be very careful
all the time not to quarrel. We only saw each other
for an hour or two at the end of the day, but even
then it was not easy to avoid subjects on which we
might disagree. The range of such subjects, indeed,
had become almost as wide as life itself. At first it
was enough to avoid politics of any kind, but now we
were capable of quarrelling over the merits of tea.
The only thing was to remain silent, but there was
always danger that silence might strike one of us as
sullenness. My nerves were the worst affected and it
was to my cousin’s credit that we never let our irrita¬
tion with each other out into words.

Gyon was an empty inhospitable place of square
dirty huts painted on the outside with white splashes
on^a kind of liver-brown mud. Some association in a

THE LAST LAP

267

tired brain with the plague-marked houses in Stuart
London made me think the place unhealthy, and it
was one of the curious results of complete exhaustion
that the mind couldn’t separate fantasy from reality.
The place was only empty because all the men were
away on their farms except the headman, who would
do as little for us as he could, but to this day I find it
hard to realise that the village was not emptied by
disease.

We had to sit on our boxes for more than three
hours before the men returned and we could find huts
for ourselves. As for my servants, I could find nothing
for them; they had to sleep in the open cookhouse
round their fire, and they got little sleep, for they
were afraid of wild beasts, particularly of elephants
and leopards. We were in leopard country, every
road into Tapee had been guarded by a trap, wooden
boxes in which a kid could be tied with a drop-door
weighted with bundles of shells.

There was no longer enough whisky for sun¬
downers and we rationed the last half-bottle in tea-
spoonfulls, which we drank in our tea. As we ate
our supper some kind of trial was being held by the
carriers in front of Amedoo as judge. They sat before
him in two long lines and each witness in turn stated
his with the gestures and intonations of accom¬
plished orators. It was still going on when I went to
bed at eight, and I learned the next day from Mark
that the trial was not over till midnight.

I never properly knew what it was all about, but
early next morning Kolieva, who had once been my
favourite hammock-man with Babu, came to me as I
sat in the village kitchen waiting for breakfast and

2 68 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

wondering whether I could stand another long trek
(my shoes had given way, the soles had worn evenly
down until they were as thin as tissue-paper, and then
they simply disappeared. I had only left a pair of
gym shoes with crepe soles). I couldn’t understand
what he said to me; the other carriers clustered
round; it was obvious that a Court of Appeal was
supposed to be sitting. Amedoo explained, but I’m
not sure that I understood him correctly.

One of the carriers who was called Bukkai had left
something behind at the spot where we stopped for
Jimi-h . It had been taken by Fadai, the thin eman¬
ated boy with lovely eyes and venereal disease who
called himself a British subject because he had been
bom in Sierra Leone. When Bukkai accused Fadai
of the theft and threatened to bring the case to trial,
Fadai was quite ready to return whatever it was (I
think it was a needle and cotton) rather than make
trouble, but Kolieva, taking him down to the stream
below the village, had extorted money from him by
thr eats and by promising to bear false witness on his
behalf. The trial took place, but Kolieva remained
silent and Fadai told the whole story. Then Kolieva
became the accused, and to bear false witness in their
eyes was a more serious offence than to steal. He was
found guilty and fined four shillings by Amedoo, a
very Targe sum representing nearly ten days’ wages.
As I was uncertain whether I understood the facts,
and as I knew how reliable Amedoo was and the
sentence seemed popular, I said, “I agree,” and
because Kolieva would have argued it, the absurd
imperial phrase, which never failed to silence them,
Palaver finished”; At first Kolieva declared that he

THE LAST LAP

269

would come no farther and demanded his pay, but
the thought of the long trek alone through strange
tribes daunted him. 6

The Detective of Darndo

That day was another long trek, nearly eight hours
of it. Our guide slipped behind at the first village we
reached; and I could feel every root and stone
through my gym shoes. The carriers whom we had
taken on at Bassa Town and who had askf-d to come
with us failed half-way and I couldn’t use my ham¬
mock at all. It was typical of the Bassa tribe to
promise and then to fail. I developed a hitter Hisliy*
of the very appearance of Bassa men, the large well-
covered bodies, the round heads, the soft effeminate
eyes. The Coast had corrupted them, had made
them liars, swindlers, lazy, weak, completely unde¬
pendable. But it was from the Bassa tribe, and from
the Vais, whose territory, too, touched the decadent
seaboard, that the governing class recruits new mem¬
bers. To the criticism that the native has no hand in
the ad min istration, the Amerieo-Liberian will point
to Bassa and Vai men in the Government depart¬
ments, Bassa and Vai Commissioners and clerks. *

I shall call the next village we stayed in Darndo,
It sounded like Darndo, and it is marked on no map.

I reached it with one or two carriers a long way ahead
of the others. In a small square hut with a verandah
draped with the Liberian flag, a number of elderly

* It is the pride of the Vai people that they have the only
■written language in Africa, but the Bassa are imitating them,
pd I found a piece of their script stuck, perhaps as a charm,
in the roof of my hut. •

2 y 0 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

natives were sitting with a half-caste. He was dressed
in dirty pyjamas, he had a yellow face, a few decay¬
ing teeth, a glass eye; he was one of the ugliest men
I met in Liberia, but there is no one there for whom
I feel now a greater affection. He gave me a chair,
he brought me the first fresh fruit I had seen for
weeks, large hitter oranges and limes; he arranged a
hut for me, and he expected no return.

He was an absurd and a heroic figure. He said to
me, “You are a missionary, of course?” and when I
said “No,” he fixed me with his one eye, while the
other raked the glaring afternoon sky above the dirty
huts. He said, “I believe you to be a member of the
Royal Family.” I asked him why he believed that
“Ah,” he said, “it is my business. You see I am a
detective.” But he had run completely out of paper;
there was none to be got nearer than the Coast; and
when I gave him a dozen pages out of my notebook,
he was embarrassingly grateful. I thought he was
going to weep from his single eye, and he disappeared
at once into his hut to write a report that a member
of the British Royal Family was wandering through
the interior of the Republic.

But I have said he was heroic. Like Mr. Nelson he
was a tax-gatherer. He belonged to the Coast, to the
caffes of Mr. Wordsworth’s dreams, and here he was
stuck away in a tiny village of a strange tribe. like
Mr. Nelson he was unpaid, he had to live on what the
natives gave him, but unlike Mr. Nelson he gave
something in return. They trusted him and he
defended them as far as he could, with what vitality
was left in his fever-drained body, from the exactions
of. the uniformed messengers who streamed back and;

THE LAST LAP

271

forth between Tapee and the Coast. It nee ded
courage and it needed tact

I think his kindness saved us both that day from
complete collapse, that and the news he gave us that
there was a road for twelve miles out of Grand Bassa
to a place called Harlingsville and that a Dutch com¬
pany in the port possessed a motor lorry, for that
might easily shorten the distance by a day. With the
dark another storm came up, rumbling over the hills
between us and Tapee. A miserable man dragged
himself over to my hut across the coffee beans which
were lying in the dust to dry. He asked me whether
I was a doctor and I said that I had a few medicines,
but when he told me it was gonorrhoea he suffered
from, I had to admit that nothing I had with me
would help him. The information took a long time
to penetrate. The sight of a white man had made
him hope; he just stood there waiting for the magic
pill, the magic ointment, then moved dispiritedly
away to sit in his own hut and wait for another
miracle.

That night I couldn’t eat my food, I felt sick as
well as exhausted, and a new fear had been put in
my mind by Souri, the cook, who, when he had seen
me eating the half-caste’s oranges, had taken them
away from me. He said these bitter oranges were not
fit to eat, they would make a white man ill, and I
remembered how I had been warned against over-ripe
fruit by Dr. Harley at Ganta, so that now the fear of
dysentery was added to the fear of fever as I lay awake
too tired to sleep and the rain came down in a solid
wall of water over Darndo.

I didn’t believe that I should be able to walk a step

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

37a

next day, and so I asked the detective to get me six
extra carriers. By that means I thought I should be
able to use the hammock continuously next day with¬
out tiring my own men, who had the long trek
behind them. But in the morning I felt better and
rather than delay while men were fetched from the
farm accepted two carriers only, one a typical Bassa,
tall, boasting, fleshy, with the usual false boyish
sullenness. The detective was very proud of him,
calling him Samson and boasting of his strength, but
long before King Peter’s Town Samson was the last
carrier, holding up the whole train, grumbling at the
weight of his load.

We were aiming at King Peter’s Town and Grand
Bassa was still something to be hardly hoped for, in
the vague future, when suddenly at lunch-time from
a friendly village chief I heard that it was close, that
with the help of the lorry from Harlingsville it was
only one day’s march from King Peter’s Town. The
news spread to the boys, to the carriers. We sat and
grinned at each other, blacks and whites, closer in
this happiness than we had been all through the trek;
in our relief of spirit there was no longer any need to
control the temper, one could curse and quarrel as
well as laugh, and to the carriers’ joy I broke out at
the hated Tommie with a flow of obscenity I hadn’t
known was at my command. This was the greatest
happiness of all: to feel that restraint was no longer
necessary. Rashly I told the boys about the lorry that
I would get to meet us at Harlingsville and soon every
carrier knew of it; they had never seen a car, hut they
knew what it meant, twelve blessed miles without
loads, without effort.

THE LAST LAP

m

It was a seven and a half hours’ trek to King Peter’s
Town and a shabby village at the end of it, but we
were happier than we had been since we left Bolahun.
I scribbled a note in pencil to the manager of the
P,Z. store announcing our arrival and asking him to
send the lorry up to the end of the road to meet us,
and not even the warnings of the three extra Bassa
carriers I hired for the next day that Harlingsville
was “too far, too far,” that it was a twelve-hour trek,
depressed me. I pretended for the sake of my own
men to disbelieve them, but secredy I put my watch
back a couple of hours, determined that even if it
were a twelve-hour trek, we should yet do it and sleep
in Grand Bassa. The messenger stuck the note into a
cleft stick and with some of our last oil in his lamp
set off to walk to Grand Bassa all night through the
forest. I remember a whisde blowing among the
shabby huts as Tommie marshalled a few ragged
uniformed messengers with rifles as useless as his own
before a flagstaff in the centre of the village and the
Liberian flag waved up and down again while
Tommie tried to make his awkward squad stand at
the ‘present’. But they laughed at him and some¬
one stole his whisde, and all that evening Tommie
went glowering up and down the village looking
for it.

Grand Bassa

We rose at four-fifteen, but the new carriers and
Tommie delayed us and we did not leave King Peter’s
Town till six. I wasn’t quite so cheerful then, the
Bassa men persisted that it was twelve hours jo

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

274

Harlingsville, five hours first to a Seventh Day
Adventist mission, where they wanted us to spend the
night. But. the smash-and-grab raid was nearly over;
it was only later that I could separate the physical
tiredness which was caused by the long fast trek from
the actual circumstances of the primitive life; I
thought then that it was the interior I was weary of,
when it was only the march, the forest, the in¬
adequate resources of-my own brain. I wasn’t going
to waste another day in the interior if we had to walk
the clock round to avoid it. As it might be a very
long trek I avoided using the hammock until the very
end, though if it hadn’t been for the strain on the
carriers, there would have been an almost unalloyed
delight in the swinging motion and the long stare
upwards, the sight of the blue cracks moving through
the great fan of leaves between the tapering grey
boles, the sense of being carried south with no more
exertion, back to the life I began to think I cared for
more than I had known.

To my relief the Bassa men proved, as usual, to be
liars. The first of us reached the mission after only
three and a half hours. It was a Saturday and a bell
was ringing for church in a cluster of white buildings
on a hill-top. The missionary came down to the path
and brought us in, a German living there with his
wife, trying to convert the Bassa tribe to a belief in
the millennium and the sacred distinction between
the Sabbath and the Sunday. They fed us on real
German ginger cake and gave us iced grape juice to
drink, and talked about wireless sets in throaty
English, and the touch of iced drink on the lips was
lil^e the end of everything, so that already I began

THE LAST LAP

2 75

to look back on Kpangblamai and Nicoboozu as
something gone out of my life for ever. Grand Bassa,
they said, was only eight hours away and Harlings-
ville six hours, but when I mentioned the lorry that
I hoped would meet us there, they had bad news.
There was only one car in Grand Bassa and that had
broken down some months before, and they doubted
whether it had been repaired. I wished then that I
had not told my servants and the carriers of the lorry.
The thought that when I got them to Harlingsville
they would still be faced with another two hours’ trek
worried me as much as the growing suspicion that
another eight hours of walking would be too much
for me.

We came out of the forest altogether a few hours
later on to a broad grassy path across long rolling
downs, which seemed to indicate the sea was near.
We had been in the forest now almost uninter¬
ruptedly since the day we crossed the border on the
other side of Liberia. It was like breathing again
to leave it. At every crest now we hoped to see the
Atlantic. After lunch Tommie overtook us, tipsy and
singing some unintelligible song the carriers took up
and handed down their line till it faded over the
crests. That encouraged me, for if Harlingsville was
far off, our guide would have stayed behind to drink
and rob. More aijd more people came up the path
from the direction of the sea, and of each Tommie
asked if there was a car in Harlingsville, but they all
said there was no car. We passed an unfinished
concrete bridge marking where the road had once
reached, for this road had gone backward. Then a
few seedy houses appeared, definitely houses now and

276 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

not huts, with a first floor and tin roofs but without
glass in the windows, with the air of old-fashioned
chicken coops magnified to take men. Through a
window I saw a group of half-castes playing cards
round a bottle of cane juice. It was the familiar
Africa of the films, of semi-Parisian revues and
Leicester Square. Sometimes there were chickens or
a goat or an allotment. This was civilisation; we had
seen it last in Freetown.

And then at three o’clock unexpectedly we were
in Harlingsville, the wooden houses rising to two
floors, with outside staircases, a smell of human
ordure drawn up by the sun, a Post Office marked in
chalk letters, men and women in trousers and shirts
leaning over fences, and as the path bent, there at
the beginning of a wider road a motor-lorry stood.
I wanted to laugh and shout and cry; it was the end,
the end of the worst boredom I had ever experienced,
the worst fear and the worst exhaustion. If I had not
been so tired (it was March the second, we had been
walking for exactly four weeks and covered about
three hundred and fifty miles), civilisation might not
have seemed quite so desirable in comparison with
what I was leaving: the complete simplicity on the
edge of subsistence, the little groves of rice-birds, the
graves of the chiefs, the tiny fires at sundown, the
torchlight, the devils and the dancing. But civilisa¬
tion, for the moment, I was ready to swallow whole,
even the tin roofs, the stinking lurching lorry from
which the natives on the way from market in Grand
Bassa drew back with the same dread as their fellows
had shown on the road to Kailahun, hiding their faces
against the banks as the monstrosity ground by. The

THE LAST LAP

277

journey had begun and ended in a lorry in the stink
of petrol.

Civilisation, of course, even at the Grand Bassa
level, offered a little more than that; it offered iced
beer in the home of the P.Z. manager over the store
which was just closing down from want of trade, fresh
Liberian beef of unbelievable toughness, a straggling
row of wooden houses ending on the clean wide beach
with the surf breaking beyond, for the surf had saved
Grand Bassa, like all other Liberian trading stations,
from quays and docks; it offered a selection of hideous
churches, one of which woke me early next morning
with the sound of what must have been a gramo¬
phone record, repeating over and over again, “Come
to church. Come to church. Come to church.”

It offered, too, a wooden police station with a little
group of uniformed figures avidly watching my
carriers collect in the courtyard of the store to be paid
off. In a way I was glad to see the last of them, but
as I listened to the manager warning them to be gone
as quickly as possible from Grand Bassa, for the
police would be after their money, I felt sorry for
the end of something which was unlikely ever to
happen again. One was never likely to live for long
in a company so simple and uncorrupted; they had
none of them before seen so many stores, the sea, a
motor-lorry; their eyes were full of excitement and
wonder at Grand Bassa, and they didn't even know
the way back. Nobody here could tell them, and
when Vande suggested that they might make their
way along the beach to Monrovia and there get in
touch again with the Holy Cross Mission, the
manager warned them that none of his own mgn

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

278

went that way unless they carried guns. The beach
is the most dangerous road in all Liberia to travellers,
because its people have been touched by civilisation,
have learnt to steal and lie and kill.

They drifted away out of the courtyard one by one,
with nothing to do, conscious of their native clothes
among the trousered Bassa. They didn’t take the
warning to get clear away out of town with their
money, for that night I lay in bed listening to the
drunken singing and shouts of Vande and Amah
under the wall. Cane juice was the only cheap thing
in Grand Bassa, and I could tell the difference
between their drunkenness now and the happy sleepy
mellow state the palm wine had put them in. This
was crude spirit and a crude coastal drunkenness.

The Seedy Level

One was back, or, if you will, one had advanced
again, to the seedy level. This journey, if it had done
nothing else, had reinforced a sense of disappoint¬
ment with what man had made out of the primitive,
what he had made out of childhood. Oh, one wanted
to protest, one doesn’t believe, of course, in ‘the
visionary gleam’, in the trailing glory, but there was
something in that early terror and the bareness of
one’s needs, a harp strumming behind a hut, a witch
on the nursery landing, a handful of kola nuts, a
masked dancer, the poisoned flowers. The sense of
taste was finer, the sense of pleasure keener, the sense
of terror deeper and purer. It isn’t a gain to have
turned the witch or the masked secret dancer, the
sense of supernatural evil, into the small human

THE LAST LAP

279

viciousness of the thin distinguished military grey
head in Kensington Gardens with the soft lips and
the eye which dwelt with dull lustre on girls and boys
of a certain age.

He was an Old Etonian. He had an estate in the
Highlands. He said, “Do they cane at your school?”
looking out over the wide flat grass, the nursemaids
and the children, with furtive alertness. He said,
“You must come up and stay with me in Scotland.
Do you know of any girls’ school where they still—

you know-” He began to make confidences, and

then, suddenly taking a grip of the poor sliding brain,
he rose and moved away with stiff military back, the
Old Etonian tie, the iron-grey hair, a bachelor belong¬
ing to the right clubs, over the green plain among
the nursemaids and the babies wetting their
napkins.

I could hear a policeman talking to Vande under
the wall, and suddenly I remembered (though I told
myself still that I was dead sick of Africa) the devil’s
servant at Zigita waving away the lightning and the
rain with an elephant-hair fan, the empty silent town
after the drums had beaten the devil’s warning.
There was cruelty enough in the interior, but had
we done wisely exchanging the supernatural cruelty
for our own?

I was looking out of the window of the day nursery
when the aeroplane fell. I could see it crash out of
sight on to the playing fields at the top of the hill.
The airman had dived, playing the fool before his
younger brother and the other boys, he had mis¬
calculated the height and struck the ground and was
dead before he reached hospital. His small brother

280

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

never looked, never waited to hear if he were alive,
but walked steadily away down the hill to the school
and shut himself tearlessly in a lavatory. Someone
went and found him there, there were no locks on
any lavatory doors, nowhere where you could be
alone.

Major Grant said, “And in a cupboard they keep
birches. . . .”

The lorries drove up and down the day of the
General Strike loaded with armed men. The cafe
had been turned into a dressing station and a squad
of Garde Mobile moved down the wide boulevard
that runs from Combat to Menilmontant searching
everyone on the pavement for arms. The whole of
Paris was packed with troops; every corner, every
high building sheltered a troop, they clustered along
the walls in their blue steel helmets like wood-
lice. The road of the Revolution from Vincennes to
the Place de la Concorde was lined with guns and
cavalry. No breaking out here, no return to some¬
thing earlier, something communal, something
primitive.

More police were coming up to get their pickings
beneath the wall. Vande and Amah were being
persuaded towards the wooden station. I thought of
Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long
gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai; I remembered
they had never had the goat to guard them from the
elephants. It wouldn’t have been any use now. We
were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and
I thought rebelliously: I am glad, for here is iced
beer and a wireless set which will pick up the Empire
programme from Daventry, and after all it is-home,

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

28l

in the sense that we have been taught to know home,
where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer
pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have
built.

CHAPTER FIVE

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA
A Boatload of Politicians

My host woke me early to say that if I cared to catch
it a Liberian motor-launch was leaving that morning
for Monrovia. If I missed it, I might have to wait a
week for a Dutch cargo-boat, but he advised me all
the same to stay.

The boat was making its maiden voyage down the
coast from Cape Palmas to Monrovia. It cannot have
been more than thirty feet long, not that I was able
to pace it when we scrambled on board from the surf
boat, for it was packed—packed with black poli¬
ticians. There were a hundred and fifty of them on
board, and if the owner of the boat had not been
with us we should not have been allowed to embark.
They shouted that there was no room, that we should
sink the boat, they implored the captain not to let us
on board, they were scared, for most of them had
never been at sea before and the previous evening
they had run on a rock and narrowly escaped off
Sinoe. The launch tilted with their fear, first one
way, then the other. But the owner got us on boai^l,

K*

282 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

he even found us enough room to set up chairs and
sit down, though we couldn’t, once settled there, stir
a foot.

The launch, the owner told me, had been bought
second-hand for £ 18 and repaired for £25. It hadn’t
even got marine engines. He had installed two
second-hand automobile engines, a Dodge and a
Studebaker, and except for the rock off Sinoe, it had
done well. We slid farther away from the yellow
sandy strip of Africa, from the fringe of dark green
forest behind the tin shacks of Grand Bassa. The
captain, a great fat Rru man in a wide-brimmed hat
and a singlet, stood in a little glass shelter and
shouted orders down a telephone to the engine-room
just beneath his feet, the sun came blindingly up over
the thin Japanese cotton awning, a black Methodist
minister went to sleep on my shoulder, and the poli¬
ticians temporarily ceased arguing about the election
and began to argue with the captain.

“Say, captain,” they protested in their formless
nasal American negro voices, “you don’t wanta use
both engines yet. You gotta put out farther before
you use both engines,” and the captain argued with
them and presently gave way. He couldn’t issue any
order without setting the passengers arguing with
him.

It was sixty miles to Monrovia and the launch took
seven and a half hours, lurching with incredible slow¬
ness across the flat scorching African sea with the
rocking motion of the hundred and fifty politicians.
It was an Opposition boat and the presence of a white
man on board seemed to the politicians to have deep
significance. Before we reached Monrovia everv

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 283

delegate was convinced that England was behind
them. There was to be a Convention in Monrovia
of the Unit True Whig Party to elect a Presidential
Candidate to oppose President Barclay and the True
Whig Party. All is fair during a Liberian election
and the Government agent at Cape Palmas had tried
to arrest the owner of the boat and hold it up till
the Convention was over. Some of the delegates were
supporters of a Mr. Cooper, some of ex-President
King, so though they all belonged to the same party,
they had plenty to argue about, and the arguments
got fiercer after midday, after the tin basins of cassava
roots had been handed round (for mpafs -were in¬
cluded in the tariff) and the bottles of cane juice. The
cane juice in the midday heat worked quickly; almost
immediately half the hundred and fifty politicians
were roaring drunk. They couldn’t do anything
about it, because if they moved more than a foot the
boat heeled over, and once there was a panic on
board at a loud crash which reminded tV>pm 0 f the
rock they had hit the night before. Some tried to
stand up and others shouted to them to be still as the
boat heeled towards the glassy sea and the captain
was heard shouting that he would put any man who
moved in irons. I couldn’t move because the
Methodist minister was asleep on my shoulder, and
the panic soon subsided. We hadn’t hit a rock, some¬
body had passed out under the cane juice and his
head had hit the deck.

The owner of the boat said to me, “These men:
they are quiet and gentle now, but you wait till they
get ashore. They are thirsting for blood. They would
rather kill Barclay than see him elected.”

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

^04

An old man without any teeth suddenly said, “Do
you know in Monrovia they have a map of the whole
of Liberia? I am going to go and see it. It is in the
possession of a family called Anderson. They have
had it for years. Everyone who goes to Monrovia
goes to see the map. Sinoe is marked on it, and Grand
Bassa and Cape Palmas.” Then a lot of people tried
to trap me into saying whether I was financing Mr.
Cooper or Mr. King. I might have made history that
day, for I am sure if I had said I was financing Mr.
Cooper, no one would have voted for Mr. King. And
all the while behind the frieze of black heads, five
hundred yards away, the yellow African beach slid
unchangingly by without a sign of human occupa¬
tion. Somebody was fishing from the end of the boat
and with tiresome regularity catching a large fish.
It might have been the same fish, just as it might
have been the same patch of sand, but every time the
captain left the wheel, trod over the sprawl of limbs
into the bow and presently announced in a loud com¬
manding voice, as if he were ordering somebody to
be clamped into irons, “A fish!” and entered the fact
in a log-book. There would be a momentary break
in the babble until a voice began again, “Mishter
Cooper ish ish a young man.” “Ex—Presh—Pres—
Presh, Mishter King has exshper, experish . . .”

The Nonconformist minister hadn't drunk any¬
thing. He woke up suddenly and without removing
his head from my shoulder said, “We shall never go
straight in Liberia until we let God into our conven¬
tions. We must let God choose.”

I said, “I agree, of course, but how will you know
which candidate God wants to choose?”

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 285

He said, “God made pencils, but man made india-
rubber.”

The old man without any teeth said, “That’s a
true word.”

The minister said, “They’ll give us cards when we
go to the convention and we shall have to put a mark
against a name. But pencil can be rubbed out with
indiarubber. If we want God to have a chance in
this convention we must take our pencils and push
the point right through one of the names, tear it
right out, then they won’t be able to do anything
with indiarubber.”

By the late afternoon nearly everyone was asleep;
but they woke when the promontory that shelters
Monrovia came in sight: the German consulate and
just above the beach the long white front of the
British Legation. Everyone began to tidy themselves
for the capital, put on waistcoats and ties, and there,
after a brief panic as we heeled over the bar, was a
little jetty and a reception committee of smart
politicians cheering and waving and embracing each
other with excitement.

I never got quite away from my fellow-passengers.
For every day I spent in Monrovia some seedy
individual would pluck at my sleeve among the
wooden shacks of the waterside, and drawing me on
one side would remind me that we had travelled
together, pointing out to me, as the financier of the
Opposition party, that he had left his affairs in Cape
Palmas or Sinoe in bad order and was finding the
capital city very expensive. Most of the Opposition,
indeed, had to be sent home at the expense of the
President.

286

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Monrovia

To the casual visitor, at any rate, Monrovia is a
more pleasant town than Freetown. Freetown is like
an old trading port that has been left to rot along
the beach; it is a spectacle of decay. But Monrovia
is like a beginning; true, a beginning which has come
to little beyond the two wide grassy main streets
intersecting each other and lined with broken-paned
houses all of wood and of one storey except for the
brick churches, one little brick villa belonging to
the Secretary of the Treasury, the three-storeyed
Executive Mansion where the President lives, the
State Department opposite, and the unfinished stone
house of ex-President King. An asphalt drive, “for
motor traffic only,” goes down to the water-front, but
there are very few motors and all pedestrians use it.
Along the waterside are the shops, the big wooden
stores of the English P.Z., of the German and Dutch
companies where you can buy gin as cheap as nine-
pence a bottle, and the small huts of the Syrians, the
wooden shed of the Post Office with a rickety ladder
on the outside. There are telephone poles along the
main street and out by the one motor road towards
Mount Barclay and the Firestone Rubber Planta¬
tions, but the telephone service no longer exists. The
residential street runs gently uphill towards a waste
of scorched rock and sand, the road to the English
Legation and the lighthouse, and here and there
among the rocks are planted the beg innin gs of stone
houses, sometimes only the foundation laid, some¬
times several storeys, so that these unfinished build¬
ups have the appearance of houses gutted by fire.

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 2 8 *J

They are the only form of investment Liberia
provides for though prospectuses have been issued
for the Bank of Liberia Ltd., with a capital of
1,000,000 dollars divided into 200,000 shares, nobody
has subscribed; as early as 1923 the Legislature
granted the bank the exclusive right of issuing bank¬
notes and coins, but Liberia still depends for its
currency on the British. The only Liberian coins in
circulation are heavy copper pennies. So from ex-
President King downwards anyone with any money
to spare not invested in the Firestone Bank (the
British Bank has left Liberia) puts it into building,
but the buildings are very seldom finished. The
foundations and the first storey usually exhaust the
owner’s capital, though sometimes years later a few
more stones are added to the follies dotting the rough
slopes near the sea. 6

It is easy to m ake fun of this black capital city;
of the Secretary of State who, when a white man
expressed his amazement that he should occupy such
a position at so young an age as thirty-four, replied,
“Pitt was a Prime Minister at thirty”; of a town
where almost every other man is a lawyer and every
man a politician. “There is no body of men,”
Thomas Paine wrote, “more jealous of their privileges
than the Commons: because they sell them,” and
one cannot doubt that this motive forms a part of
Liberian patriotism. The native in the interior, if

he comes in close contact with a Government agent,
has every reason to deplore “the mighty calamity of
Government.” But there is a pathos about these

stunted settlements along the. coast, the grassy streets,
the follies on the rocky hillside, the pathos of a black

a88

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

people planted down, without money or a home, on
a coast of yellow fever and malaria to make what they
can of an Africa from which their famili es have been
tom centuries before. No one can pretend they have
made much of their country, Colonel Davis’s conduct
of the Kru campaign is only one example of the
horrors of their history, but to me it seems remark¬
able that they have retained their independence at
all: a kind of patriotism has emerged from the graft
and the privation.

England and France in the last century robbed
them of territory; America has done worse, for she
has lent them money. Without any resources of their
own, except what they could squeeze out of the un¬
friendly natives in an undeveloped interior, they
have had to borrow again and again. Each fresh loan
has only paid off the previous indebtedness and left
them with a smaller surplus and an inflated interest.
They have tried to build roads before, as they are
trying to build them now, and I had seen outside
Grand Bassa how previous roads had gone backward,
not forward. They once had a telephone system, but
now they have only the leaning poles by the roadside.
They had bought machines, but they hadn’t had the
money to work them, and driving out to the rubber
plantations one passed the old dredges rusting in the
scrub. I couldn’t wonder at their inani tion in the
soaking heat. I remember that one day, going out
to Mount Barclay, we passed a motor-lorry broken
down on the road with one wheel off; there were the
remains of a camp fire and the crew were sleeping in
the bush. It was only twenty miles from Monrovia,
byt as I went out next day to visit ex-President King

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 289

the lorry and the crew were still camping there wait¬
ing for something to happen.

Nor can you wonder at their hatred and suspicion
of the white man. The last loan and the last con¬
cession to the Firestone Company of Ohio all but
surrendered their sovereignty to a commercial com¬
pany with no interests in Liberia but rubber and
dividends. The Liberian has quite rightly been con¬
demned for his abuse of power in the interior, but
the native can hardly expect a much higher standard
of treatment from a commercial company without
any responsibility to world opinion. It was a quite
unconstitutional concession, in return for a loan, of
1,000,000 acres of Liberian territory on a lease of
ninety-nine years. In 1935 only 60,000 acres were
under cultivation: 45,000 acres outside Monrovia and
15,000 at Cape Palmas, but the concession remains
an impediment to any form of development.

It was imagined, one may charitably suppose, that
Firestone’s would bring more than money into the
country, that they would proride employment and
stimulate trade. The year of my visit they were
employing 6,000 natives supplied by the chiefs, no
one could really tell whether that labour was
voluntary or forced, but if the million acres should
ever be cultivated and the employment figures rise
in proportion, voluntary labour will certainly not
supply the demand, and there is a great moral distinc¬
tion between the usual form of forced labour in
Africa, which at least pretends to be for the good of
the community, and forced labour for the good of

shareholders. , ,

The wages paid, though it must be admitted tijat

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

39O

they compared favourably with some of the British
Government’s rates in Sierra Leone, were not likely
to bring prosperity to the Liberian tribes. The wages
of tappers ran from eightpence to a shilling and a
penny a day, of clearers from sevenpence to a shilling.
Out of this they had to buy. their own food, but not
to the benefit of local trade. They must buy at the
Firestone stores and Firestone’s imported their own
rice, so that it had to be sold at a rate one and six¬
pence in the hundredweight dearer than it could be
bought in Monrovian stores, and the rate in Mon-
rovian stores was already much dearer than anywhere
else in Liberia.

Little wonder, then, if in the past the Liberian
Legislature had chosen to look on the white man as
somebody to be squeezed in return, and nobody can
say they have not shown imagination in their
methods. At one time a German shipping agent was
the chief sufferer. His chauffeur killed a dog and the
next day was arrested at the suit of the owner. The
German agent was brought into court, and the owner
in evidence said that last year her bitch, which she
valued at ten dollars, had had five puppies which had
fetched ten dollars each: that in a week or two she
would have borne five more puppies, which she would
have sold for the same figure. The court fined the
German sixty dollars.

On another occasion the same agent was fetched
out of bed by the police to meet a claim for damages
suffered by a Liberian woman who was travelling in
an Italian steamer for which the German line acted.
She had been scratched by a monkey belonging to
another passenger while the steamer was in Spanish

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

291

territorial waters. The doctor had put iodine on the
scratch and no harm was done, but the woman men¬
tioned the incident in a letter to her husband and
he brought an action against the only person who
could be reached, the German agent. The court
awarded him 30,000 dollars. This was going too far
and after a protest by the representatives of England,
France and Germany, the Supreme Court found that
the action lay outside the scope of the Liberian courts.

The Exiles

A curious international life was led by the few
whites in the little shabby capital. Apart from the
Firestone employees, who lived outside in European
comfort on the plantation, there were not more than
three dozen whites in Monrovia; there were Poles,
Germans, Dutch, Americans, Italians, a Hungaria n,
French, and English; two of them were doctors,
others were storekeepers, gold smugglers, shipping
agents, and consuls. There was some comfort to be
found at the legations; and though there was not
such a thing as a water-closet in Monrovia, nearly
everyone had an ice-box, for in the little dingy town
there was little to do but drink, drink and wait for
the fortnightly mail-boat which might bring frozen
meat but was unlikely to bring a passenger.

These men and women were more exiled than the
English in Freetown; they had less comfort and far
less amusement; there was no golf course and the surf
was far too dangerous for bathing. Once a week they
played a little tennis at the British Legation or had
a game of billiards, and once a week, too, the ol^er

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

292

men of the white colony shot with a pistol at bottles
perched above the beach at the edge of the British
Legation ground. That custom had been going on
for years, every Saturday evening until the light
was too bad to see. One advantage their isolation
had: it killed snobbery. Charge d’Affaires and shop
assistant, Consul-General’s wife and storekeeper’s
wife were equal in Monrovia. It was the democracy
of men and women wrecked together on a deserted
coast, and to the casual visitor social life there
seemed more human and kindly than in an English
colony, in spite of the scandals and the tiny com¬
mercial and diplomatic intrigues and the fever,
always the fever. I was only in Monrovia for ten days
during the most healthy season of the year, but eight
of the tiny population of whites went down with
fever while I was there.

One couldn’t expect them to do anything else but
drink, beginning after breakfast with beer at each
other’s houses and ending with whisky at four in the
morning. But what was worst was the iced crime de
menthe. It was served everywhere automatically
after lunch and dinner: it would have been thought
eccentric not to like the sweet nauseating stufE, as it
would have been thought curious not to enjoy at sun¬
down, in the damp heat of the evening, while the
backs of the hands and the armpits sweated all the
time, the heavy cloying Tokay the Hungarian doctor
kept. They had every reason to drink; you couldn’t
read much in a climate which rotted your books; you
couldn’t even deceive yourself that you were there
for some good, ruling the natives, for it was the
natives in this case who ruled you and presented, so

POSTSCRIPT m MONROVIA

m

far as the Cabinet Ministers were concerned, a
depressing example of sobriety and attention to
business; you couldn’t womanise, for the range was
too embarrassingly limited; there were no games to
play, no strangers regularly bringing the gossip of
one’s own country; there was no ambition, for
Liberia, whether to the diplomat or to the store¬
keeper, was about the deadest of all ends; there was
really nothing but drink and the wireless, and of the
two the drink was preferable.

But, nevertheless, all the English had wireless: at
six o’clock they would turn on the Empire Pro¬
gramme from Daventry, but even that limited and
depressing choice of entertainment was inaudible;
the West Coast defeated any instrument; and as a
background to every drink and to all conversation
the powerful instruments would wheeze and groan
and whistle until eleven o’clock. This was the nearest
they got to Home, this piercing din over the Atlantic.
By eleven o’clock one was too drunk to mind, anyway.

As for the intrigues which brought a little liveli¬
ness into the hot damp day, a little activity, a small
sense of importance, there were two while I was there.
A gentleman with a great financial reputation had
arrived in Monrovia to try to obtain for a big British
trust the concession for all gold and precious minerals
that might be found in the interior and to drive out
such small lonely prospectors as Van Gogh. It was a
confirmation of the story I had heard in Bo. He had
arrived at the right moment, within two months of
the Presidential election, when money was urgently
needed, and he was prepared to spend £30,000 on
easing the concession through. The only danger* was

294 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

that he might be backing the wrong horse, but in a
Liberian election this risk is small; no one really
doubted that Mr. Barclay would be re-elected. Un¬
fortunately within a few days of his arrival the
financial expert was taken ill before he had been able
to interview the President, and nothing would
persuade the Liberian Ministers but that this was an
astute move to lower the price. They were the soul
of stiff politeness, but it was obvious that they in¬
tended to show that they could bargain too.

The other intrigue was diplomatic and concerned
the Royal Jubilee. The Secretary of State had been
for a very long while trying to persuade the British
Charge d’Affaires to go to church and hear the
sermons of the Minister for Education. There was
nothing political in his motives, he was an earnest
humourless young man, he just thought that it would
do anyone good to go to church, and the services at
this church were almost identical with those of the
Church of England. But his reforming zeal gave the
British representative a chance to perform a diplo¬
matic coup. He told the Secretary of State that not
only would he come to church, but he would
guarantee the presence of every British subject and
probably of the other foreign representatives as well if
on the particular Sunday the Minister for Education
included in the prayers some reference to the Royal
Jubilee. The Secretary of State, I think, was a little
taken aback: he asked for time to consult the
Minister of Education, but alas! I did not stay long
enough in Monrovia to hear whether the bargain was
struck.

One could hardly wonder that the more excitable

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

2 95

representatives in the international colony craved for
a faster life. They were living on the barren edge of
the country; not one of them had been more than
a few days’ trek into the interior, they had the most
meagre and mistaken ideas of the native tribes; nor
would any longer journeys or a more profound know¬
ledge of Liberian conditions have been welcome to
the Government, who had seen what damage a roving
foreigner could do them in the British Blue Book
based on a Vice-Consurs journey down the Kru coast.
There was an occasion, many years ago, when the
British residents raised the English flag in Monrovia,
trying to re-enact on a miniature scale the Outlander
revolt in Johannesburg, but the result failed as
ignominiously as the Jameson Raid. I do not think
there was any imperial ambition among the store¬
keepers of Monrovia, or among the foreign repre¬
sentatives, nor had they much to complain about
from the Government. There was less discrimina¬
tion against the white than there was against the
black in most white colonies, and I think a fair
observer would have been astonished at the modera¬
tion of the black rulers. What the whites suffered,
they suffered with the whole population from the lack
of drainage, medical services, communications, and
the desire to intervene was an expression of boredom
rather than of imperialism. The man, perhaps, most
to be pitied was the American financial adviser, an
elderly man who had seen successful service in Arabia
and the Philippines, but whom Liberia had defeated.
For since the President had declared a moratorium,
he had been without any work. Two Poles were the
active unofficial advisers, and the American lived on

296 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

in Monrovia at a reduced salary with nothing to do
but shoot at bottles and hit billiard balls.

A flare-up of nervous irritation occurred a short
while before my visit. The chauffeur of the French
Consul had committed some offence, and an ignorant
policeman who knew nothing about diplomatic
immunities followed the servant into the Consulate
and tried to arrest him. The Consul threw the man
out, put on his diplomatic uniform and went down
to the State building to demand from the Secretary
of State an official apology from the Government. The
Minister, young earnest Mr. Simpson, was quite pre¬
pared to apologise himself, but he refused to apologise
on behalf of the Government. The whole affair would
have been comic if it had not been a little tragic,
for it showed to what absurdity, to what frayed
nerves, the scorching damp, the bare exile, the shoot¬
ing of bottles on Saturday evenings, the whistling
loudspeakers lead. The French Consul went up the
hill to the wireless station, which is riln by a French
company, and sent a message to a French gunboat
he knew was passing down the coast. The gunboat
anchored off Monrovia, the captain came ashore in a
surf boat and the two solemn uniformed Frenchmen
returned to Mr. Simpson’s office. The captain laid
his sword on Mr. Simpson’s desk and said it would
remain there until the Consul received an apology
from the Government. The apology was given, the
gunboat steamed away. I don’t know what happened
to the policeman.

Quite outside this strained, dreary and yet kindly
life, at the end of several hours’ rough driving from
the o capital, live the Firestone men in houses con-

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

297

taining shower baths and running water and electric
light, with a wireless station, tennis courts and a
bathing pool, and a new neat hospital in the middle
of plantations which smell all the day through of
latex, as it drips into little cups tied beneath incisions
in the trunks. They, more than the English or the
French, are the official Enemy, and no story of
whipping post, smuggled arms or burnt villages is
too wild to be circulated and believed among
Liberians of both parties.

Politics

We arrived in Monrovia when the political cam¬
paign was getting under way; those politicians
embracing each other on the jetty were only a fore¬
taste of the excitement. For the curious thing about
a Liberian election campaign, which goes on for
more than two months if there’s enough money in
hand, is that, although the result is always a fore¬
gone conclusion, everyone behaves as if the votes and
the speeches and the pamphlets matter. The Govern¬
ment prints the ballot papers, the Government owns
both the newspapers, the Government polices the
polling booths, but no one assumes beforehand that
the Government will win, or if it is the turn of the
Opposition, the Opposition. A curious fiction is kept
up even among the foreign representatives. There
are excited conversations at dinner parties; bets are
always on the point of being laid. But the fiction,
of course, stops short of losing money. Perhaps to an
American, who is used to his state elections, the
conditions seem less odd.

298 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

At this election, though, there may have been a
very slight uncertainty just because the President was
t akin g it so seriously and instead of surrendering his
office was ensuring, by his plebiscite, that he would
hold it for more than the length of three turns. There
were rumours that the Cabinet was split, that Mr.
Gabriel Dennis, the Secretary of the Treasury, who
had distinguished himself by the sharp eye he kept
on the funds of the Republic, was going to be
jettisoned by his colleagues, and there was the un¬
usual factor, too, that the President in power had as
his opponent a former President who had shown his
astuteness in manipulating the political marhinA
(For years the Presidential opponent had been Mr.
Faulkner, the head of the People’s Party and of the
Monrovian ice factory, who had no experience in the
finer shades of political manipulation. Indeed, ex-
President King won the first round. For when Mr.
Faulkner finally retired from the contest and his sup¬
porters joined the Unit True Whig Party, otherwise
known as the dissident 'Whigs, half a dozen members
of the People’s Party kept together long enough to
hold a convention to nominate Mr. Kin g. As Mr.
King was also nominated by the Unit True Whig
Party, by Liberian law he would be able to have a
representative of each party at every polling booth,
while the Government would only have one, a very
important point.

It will be seen that Liberian politics are com¬
plicated, Corruption does not make for simplicity
as might be supposed. It may be all a question of
cash and printing presses and armed police, but
thjngs have to be done with an air. Crudity as far

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

2 99

as possible is avoided. For example, Mr. King could
not be the only candidate at the convention of the
Unit True Whig Party; at some expense supporters
for Mr. Cooper had to be brought to the convention,
even though it was known beforehand that Mr. King
would be nominated. I received on the morning of
the convention a programme issued by the organisers,
signed by Mr. Doughba Carmo Caranda, the General
Secretary, and attested by Mr. Abayomi Kamga, the
national chairman (the names indicated the policy
of the party, Liberia for the Liberians, everyone had
been busy finding themselves native names to con¬
trast with the Dunbars, Barclays, Simpsons, Dennises
of the Government). The proceedings, I read, were
to end with a procession to the house of the
nominated candidate, but rather ingenuously the
route of the procession was given, by the Masonic
Hall, up Broad Street, on to Front Street, “to the
residence of the candidate.” It was Mr. King who
had a house in Front Street, not Mr. Cooper, so that
the programme took some of the edge off the excite¬
ment. Bather damping, too, was the non-arrival of
most of the delegates, for the second launch was not
so successful as the one in which we travelled and
stuck on a sandbank outside Monrovia. The conven¬
tion was to open with prayer at two-thirty, but when
we arrived at three-thirty they were still waiting for
the marooned delegates. Afterwards things got
rather rushed, for when we arrived back at five the
convention was over. The brass band was trying to
get out of the ground and head the procession, but
the mob was too great, and our Legation car helped
to block the road. Several delegates hissed feebly at

3 00 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the little flag on the hood and a fat perspiring black
pushed his head in at the window and asked furiously
whether we did not know that this was a national
occasion. There was a reek of cane juice and a
few people looked nearly drunk enough to throw
stones.

Meanwhile the President had staged another de¬
monstration in front of his house: native dancers
from the water-side slum of Kru Town rushed up anc
down before the Executive Mansion waving knives
They looked like Red Indians in their feathered head
dresses, and their spirited performance robbed the
convention of a great many spectators. Later, when
the blare of brass warned Monrovia that the proces¬
sion was on its way, a rival procession was formed
hastily outside the offices of state with large banners
inscribed “Barclay the Hero of Liberia” and a rather
enigmatic statement: “We want no King. We want
no car. We want no money for our vote. Barclay is
the Man ”. For some time I thought it was inevitable
that the processions would meet in tiny Monrovia,
but I had under-estimated the ingenuity of their
leaders. Drunk as everyone was by this time, they
were not drunk enough to risk a fight. The Kru
dancers and their friends swarmed into the Executive
Mansion and were given free drinks, to the disgust of
the President’s True Whig supporters, who had re¬
ceived nothing but the dictator’s thanks from a bal¬
cony at his formal nomination.

The Opposition procession meanwhile trampled
into the front garden of Mr. King’s house, his wooden
house in Front Street, not the large uncompleted
stene palace in Broad Street. It was quite dark by

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

301

that time, but a few paraffin lamps indoors cast a
pale light on the eyeballs of the crowd. Mr. King,
who had been ill, spoke a few words from a balcony,
but there was too much cheering and drinking going
on all over the town for one to hear more than a few
phrases: “national independence”, “hand of friend¬
ship”, “foremost part among the nations”. The voice
was tired and mechanical: it occurred to me that the
fiction might be a sad one to the principal, who must
go through all the right posturings without any hope
at all. No one knew better than Mr. King that a
President is never defeated by votes.

I visited Mr. King a few days later at his farmhouse
outside Monrovia. With an old blue bargee’s cap on
the back of his head and a cigar in his mouth, he put
up an excellent imitation of the old simple statesman
in retirement. There was no doubt that he was a sick
man. We both drank a good deal of gin while he
went over and over the events of his downfall. From
his obscure comer of West Africa he had managed to
attract quite a lot of notice with the shipping of
forced labour to Fernando Po and the pawning of
children. He had feathered his nest nicely: he had
his own little plantation of rubber trees he was wait¬
ing for Firestone to buy; he had his two and a half
houses. But he hadn’t really any hope of a return;
he was quite ready, he said, if he was elected to accept
the League of Nations plan of assistance, tie Ms
finances to European advisers, put wMte Commis¬
sioners in charge of the interior, give away Liberian
sovereignty altogether, but he knew quite well he
wasn’t going to be elected. All the rumours of Fire¬
stone money, all the speeches meant nothing at all.

302

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

He was complying with a custom; one could see that
he would be glad to go back to bed. He had had
finer fling than most Liberian Presidents: banquet
m Sierra Leone, royal salutes from the gunboat |?2
harbour, a reception at Buckingham Palace a
at the tables at Monte Carlo. He stood with’his S
round his pretty wife’s shoulders on his stoep wlflZ
photographed him, a black Cincinnatus back on his

A Cabinet Minister

The Secretary of the Treasury belonged to a newer
more scrupulous Liberia just coming into existence’
He, too had travelled to Geneva and the United
States. Plump, well-dressed, with soft sad spectacled
eyes he had a dignity upknown to the Creole of an
English colony. There were no prefects to laugh at
f °\ h . G lai JS hed at himself, softly, without emphasis

nnH^f T £S > f ° r Carin S for other tbdngf than
?W 8 ' ** S ° “7 of *e crap^

bonp-hTv Mr 'if Klng u^ ad bUllt himself houses and
ught himself a rubber plantation; all the Secretary

had bought was a little speed-boat in which to play
swamps^ M0nr0vian delta amon S the mangLI

q ^ ed m a httle brick villa on grassy Broad
Street; he was a bachelor; and when he gave us tea
it was served by young clerks from the Treasury
Department. He had dressed himself for the occasZ
(there was to be a little music) in an open-necked shirt
Si a . Wf^nstic tie. He was like a black Mr.
Pickwick With a touch of Shelley. After tea we went

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

303

into the music room, a little cramped mid-Victorian
parlour with family groups on the walls, the Venus
of Milo, hideous coloured plaster casts of Tyrolean
boys in sentimental attitudes, and paraffin lamps on
high occasional tables. He played some songs the
President had composed; the piano, of course, in that
climate was out of tune. They were rather noisy,
breathless songs, of which the President had written
the words as well as the music; romantic love and
piety: “Ave Maria” and “I sent my love a red, red
rose, and she returned me a white.” Then he played
the President's setting of “I arise from dreams of
thee”. His friend the President, he said sadly, twirling
on his stool, had once written much music and
poetry: now—the Secretary of the Treasury sighed at
the way in which politics encroached. He said,
“Perhaps you know this song,” and while the clerks
from the Treasury went round lighting the paraffin
lamps and turning the shades so that the glow fell in
a friendly way on the Tyrolean children caressing
their dogs or listening to stories at their mother's
knees, he began to sing: “Whate'er befall I still recall
that sun-lit mountain side.” It was aestheticism at the
lowest level if you will, but it was genuine aestheticism.
The pathos of it was that this was the best material
coastal Liberia could offer to a sensitive gentle mind:
the music of Mr. Edwin Barclay, the plaster casts. The
Maid of the Mountains, the paraffin lamps, a senti¬
mental song called Trees, and the President's patriotic
verses which he now beat out upon the piano: The
Lone Star Forever .

304

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

When Freedom raised her glowing form on
Montserrado’s verdant height,

She set within the dome of Night
’Midst lowering skies and thunderstorm
The star of Liberty!

And seizing from the waking Morn
Its burnished shield of golden flame
She lifted it in her proud name
And roused a people long forlorn
To nobler destiny.

It was no worse than most patriotic songs from
older countries. To a stranger, I think, coming from
a European colony, Monrovia and coastal Liberia
would be genuinely impressive. He would find a
simplicity, a pathos about the place which would
redeem it from the complete seediness of a colony
like Sierra Leone: planted without resources on this
unhealthy strip of land they have held out; if they
have brought with them the corruption of American
politics, they have nurtured at the same time a senti¬
ment, a patriotism, even a starveling culture. It is
something, after all, to have a President who writes
verses, however bad, and music, however banal. I
could not be quite fair to them, coming as I did from
an interior where there was a greater simplicity, an
older more natural culture, and traditions of honesty
and hospitality. After a trek of more than three
hundred miles through dense deserted forest, after
the little villages and the communal ember, the great
silver anklets, the masked devil swaying between the
huts, it was less easy to appreciate this civilisation of
the coast. It seemed to me that they, almost as much

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

^ 305

as oneself, had lost touch with the true primitive
source. It was not their fault. Two hundred years of
American servitude separated them from Africa; gave-
them their politics: their education at Liberia
College: their Press: gave them this:

The Press

WORDS BUILDING
MOTHER

First Prize Four Shillings

Second Prize Two Shillings

First Entry Sixpence. Additional Entry 3D.
Closes March 2. Results March 9.

Use the letters in Mother to spell as many words
as you can. The competitor who sends in the
largest number of words entitles to the First
Prize and the Second Prize goes to the Compe¬
titor who sends in the next largest number of
words. Address all Communications to the
Editor.

“The Unit True Whig Party now comes forward
claiming to have the financial backing of Firestone
to defeat the Administration. This claim is wild
enough, base enough and false enough to form a suit¬
able crown for its four years of strenuous efforts to
fool the people and overthrow the Republic. But it
has reckoned without its host. This is the time too
many when the pitcher goes to the well and is broken.

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

306

The last straw that breaks the camel’s back. Or more
appropriately the closing of the stable door after the
horse has escaped.”

“My appeal is directed to the young people of
Liberia, and particularly to the young people of the
Kru tribe, and it is an appeal for us to prepare our¬
selves for world leadership.”

“Coming home to ourselves, we ask the question,
what has Liberia contributed, and is contributing
towards world advancement and improvement?
What are we doing individually to make the world
better, and Liberia safe for democracy?”

“With such a situation confronting the patriotic
citizens of the country, and as loyal True Whigs, the
question remains, what shall we do to be saved? It
is highly gratifying to tell you boldly from genuine
personal and otherwise reports received from Cape
Palmas to Cape Mount we have the day for Kin g,
Watch out and see us victoriously rise.”

“The Congo Progressive Association met in semi¬
annual conclave at the residence of Hon. Abayomi
Kamga last week, and while there feasted and talked
liberally. The feast ended in a clean sweep, and the
talk in a muddle. Thus in this first coup nothing
was added to the Unit. But if it keeps on springing
such surprises upon unsuspecting guests, even that
which it seemefh to have will be taken away from it,
and itself cast out as being unprofitable.”

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 307

Floreat Collegium Liberia
By R . T. D.

When Church was o’er, the line was formed as
before.

In caps, gowns, hoods, black and white, we did
implore

The sympathy of the noblest and all the poor
Who made us feel like still,

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

On Thursday noon, the Commencement was begun,
Methought I heard the sound of thundering gun.
Telling us the day is come, the night is gone—
The day was calm, serene and fine,

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

I heard the Band to sound, the Clay-Ashiand Band,
And busy though I was, I could no later stand,
For the sound was mighty and did peal through
the land.

It made me sing this sweet refrain,

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

The College sang a song and prayer was said,
Then the “Sal” rose, greeted us and nobly pled.
And he roused the silence of the heroic dead.

My heart did throb within and say:

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

Then followed the “Val”, the leader of the Class.
And with word transparent as a shining glass,

He gave us true mental food, yet not in brass*

308 journey without maps

He made us feel and wish within:

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

A song was sung; then rose the Speaker of the Day,
This humorous man did make us laugh and play;
His speech was fine; full of humour and delay.

He made us feel and wish within:

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

Unlike the Commencements of the previous days,
A thing was done that true credit wrought and
praise—

It was worthy prizes offered for the plays,

By the first Lady of the land:

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

Unlike the Commencements preceded this,

The degrees were conferred in ceremonious ways,
And all who saw this would truly praise for days
The efforts of the Acting Sage,

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

All hail! all hail!! hail the closing day of mirth,
That to us this day doth give a joyous birth
And make us prone heavenward and not to earth,
Lux in Tenebris > from thee is heard.

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

Farewell, farewell, to thee thou dying year of toil
Now is ease as then was labour for our soil.

In thee our time we nonetheless did spoil;

But laboured hard and wishing still,

Floreat Collegium Liberia .

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA

309

Welcome, welcome, thou season of rest and ease.
The year has brought thee from across the seas;
O bid fair, bid fair to us to make us please,

To sing this longing strain for aye,

Flo-re-at Col-le-gi-um Li-be-ria!

Return

But though it was this impression that followed me
on board the cargo steamer which had been wirelessed
to call off Monrovia for passengers, the memory, too,
of hundreds of children in the Catholic school bellow¬
ing out the National Anthem:

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

—one realised, going out by surf boat towards the bar,
that thin line of white which divided this world from
the other, the world of the smokestack, the siren that
called us impatiently on board, the officer on the cap¬
tain’s bridge who watched us through glasses, how
much less separated they really were from the true
primitive than we. It was at their back, it wasn’t
centuries away. If they had taken the wrong road,
they had only to retrace their steps a very little dis¬
tance in space and not in time. The little jetty moved
jerkily backwards, the river came into sight, the
silver mangrove branches straddling like the ribs of
old umbrellas on either side. Two hundred and §fty

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

310

miles up that stream still existed the exact spot, the
broken tree-trunk, the swarm of red ants where I had
waited for my lost companions. The half-built
Customs house, the waterside squalor of Kru Town,
the asphalt road up to grassy Broad Street, they
slipped behind with the sweep of the oars, but they
belonged to the same world as the huddled huts at
Duogobmai, the devil’s servant fanning away the
storm, the old woman who had made ligh tnin g trail¬
ing back to her prison with the rope round her waist
They were all gathered together behind the white
line of the bar no European steamer ever crossed.

How happy I had thought I should be, while I was
struggling down to Grand Bassa, back in my world.
The bar took the prow and lifted it out of the water,
one wave curled beneath us and broke along the
beach of Kru Town, the second line broke above us,
stinging the face, washing along the boards of the
wide shallow boat, and there we were beyond, looking
back at the bar and behind it Africa. A mammy
chair came rattling down from the tarred English
side. Of course I was happy, I told myself, opening
the bathroom door, examining again a real water-
closet, studying the menu at lunch, while out of the
port-hole Cape Mount slid away, Liberia slid away,
with Abyssinia the only part of Africa where white
men do not rule. One had been scared and sick and
one was well again, in the world to which one be¬
longed.

But what had astonished me about Africa was that
it had never been really strange. Gibraltar and
Tangier—those extended just parted hands—seemed
mojre than ever to represent an unnatural breach. The

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 3II

'heart of darkness’ was common to us both. Freud
has made us conscious as we have never been before
of those ancestral threads which still exist in our un¬
conscious minds to lead us back. The need, of course,
has always been felt, to go back and begin again.
Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Rimbaud, Conrad
represented only another method to Freud’s, a more
costly, less easy method, calling for physical as well as
mental strength. The writers, Rimbaud and Conrad,
were conscious of this purpose, but one is not certain
how far the explorers knew the nature of the fascina¬
tion which worked on them in the dirt, the disease,
the barbarity and the familiarity of Africa.

The captain leant over the rail, old and dissatisfied,
complaining of his men: "Boil the whole bloody lot
of the men in the ship together and you wouldn’t
make an ordinary seaman”; he was looking back—to
the age of sail; At Freetown guests came on board
and we drank ourselves free from Africa. An officer
came and eyed me like an enemy across the table in
the smoking-room. "I’d send my ticket to the Board

of Trade, my dear friend, and tell them to-I tell

you, my dear friend. . . The captain stuck his
fingers down his throat, brought up his drink and was
dead sober again, and the ship went out of harbour,
out of Africa. But their dissatisfaction was like a
navel-string that tied them to its coast.

For there are times when the nearest the European
has ever got to the interior, to the communal life
with its terror and its gentleness, seems to be the
Coast; Major Grant ringing up the brothel in Savile
Row, the Old Etonian in Kensington Gardens, the
Nottingham 'tart’ and the droshky-drivers of Riga

312 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

dwell on that rim of land which is known all the
world over as the Coast, the one and only coast. They
are not, after all, so far from the central darkness:
Miss Kilvane listening to the ghost of Joanna just as
the circle of blacks in Tailahun listened to the enig¬
matic speech of Landow; the Catholic priest saying,
“And now the Immaculate Conception” as the bus
drove through the market, the tangle of stalls and
overhead wires, the neo-Gothic hotels under the black
overhead Midland fog. This may explain the deep
appeal of the seedy. It is nearer the beginning; like
Monrovia its building has begun wrong, but at least
it has only begun; it hasn’t reached so far away as the
smart, the new, the chic, the cerebral.

It isn’t that one wants to stay in Africa: I have no
yearning for a mindless sensuality, even if it were to
be found there: it is only that when one has appre¬
ciated such a beginning, its terrors as well as its
placidity, the power as well as the gendeness, the pity
for what we have done with ourselves is driven more
forcibly home.

While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the King my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.

After the blinding sunlight on the sand beyond the
bar, after the long push of the Adantic sea, die lights
of Dover burning at four in the morning, a cold April
mist coming out from shore with the tender. A child
was crying in a tenement not far from the Lord
Warden, the wail of a child too young to speak, too

POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 313

young to have learnt what the dark may conceal in
the way of lust and murder, crying for no intelligible
reason but because it sdll possessed the ancestral fear,
the devil was dancing in its sleep. There, I thought,
standing in the cold empty Customs shed with a
couple of suitcases, a few pieces of silver jewellery, a
piece of script found in a Bassa hut, an old sword or
two, the only loot I had brought with me, was as far
back as one needed to go, was Africa: the innocence,
the virginity, the graves not opened yet for gold, the
mine not broken with sledges. ^ fc*'** £ %

SI ERR A

LEONE

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