102	JOUKJNEY 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 Kong. He
heard that the young people were living in the town
with their baby. He was a forbearing man and again
he sent to them to demand that the fine be paid,
When the young man refused, the chief, who was
a member of the Lightning Society, made artificial
lightning which struck the hut, killed the man and
the woman, but left the baby, who lay in the bed
between them, unharmed. This story is believed by
everyone in Liberia, white and black. I heard it from
several sources, and it never varied. The old chief I
did not see, because he was away at Voinjema meet-
ing the President.
A Liberian District Commissioner is stationed at
Zigita: the compound lies up the slope of a hill
above the town, above the long field of thatched and
pointed huts like stooks of bound bean-stalks. The
town chief, who brought to my hut in the 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 chief
well under this thumb, there was a higher, though
more secret, authority than the Commissioner's: the
Big Bush Devil, in Dr. Westermann's phrase the
Grand Master of a Bush Society, whom it is death or
blindness for an uninitiated native so much as to see
'and who must be distinguished from the devils we