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,
called him "The Dictator of Grand Bassa".
The road did not stretch as far as Tapee-Ta. After
an hour 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
hacking 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