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 Barley'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-