INTO BUZIE COUNTRY	165
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 torn, his woollen cap with the red bobble. He
believed, one could not doubt it, that if we so much
as saw the devil through a window we would go blind.
The warning reached the carriers who were gathered
in the cookhouse, and suddenly all the voices were
turned low like lamp flames. One could hear the
silence welling up the hill from Zigita into the 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: "But if we go outside, do you really think
that anything . . . ?"
They watched me carefully, trying to make out if
I were serious. Mark was a Christian boy, he wouldn't
answer directly, he was ashamed of his fear, but he
said he thought we oughtn't to go. Amedoo broke in
excitedly with a story it was difficult to follow about
what had happened in 1923 at dinner one night at a
District Commissioner's in Sierra Leone: "The D.C.