2 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the vegetables in St. Dunstan's, asking: "Could you

by any chance tell me? Is the Liberian Consul------?"

But she knew and I left that street for another.

It was three o'clock and lunch at the Consulate was
just over. Three men, I could not distinguish their
nationality, overcrowded the tiny room which was
deeply buried in the huge new glittering office block.
The window-sill was lined with old telephone direc-
tories, school textbooks of chemistry. One man was
washing up lunch into a basin stuck in the top of a
waste-paper basket. Unidentifiable yellow threads
like bast floated in the greasy water. The man
poured a kettle of boiling water from a gas jet over a
plate which he held above the basket; then he wiped
the plate with a cloth. The table was littered with
bursting parcels of what looked like stones, and the
lift porter kept on putting his head in at the door
and flinging down more parcels on the floor. The
room was like a shabby caravan held up for a
moment in a smart bright street. One doubted
whether, returning in a few hours' time to the gleam-
ing mechanised block, one would still find it there; it
would almost certainly have moved on,

But everyone was very kind. It all came down to a
question of paying money; no one asked me why I
wanted to go, although I had been told by many
authorities on Africa that the Republic of Liberia
resented intruders. In the Consulate they had little
guttural family jokes among themselves, "Before the
war/* a large man said, "you didn't need passports.
Snch a fuss. Only to the Argentine," and he looked
across at the man who was making out my papers.
"J£ you wanted to get to the Argentine you even had