2O4	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 corner 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 litde house it seemed to us
by this time, for it was built of wood with a tin roof,
* Dr. Harley lias now completed more than 20 years at Ganta