I0 JOUHNEY WITHOUT MAPS

clay squatting in a hole, the wooden-toothed devil
swaying his raffia skirts between the huts seem like
the images in a dream to stand for something of
importance to myself.

To-day our world seems peculiarly susceptible to
brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the
pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who
have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they
have begun living again at a level below the cerebral.
We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a
revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs
between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely
than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea.
It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever
at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness,
to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration
have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to
discover if one can from what we have come, to recall
at which point we went astray.

Via Liverpool

But none the less I was a little scared at the prospect
of going back by way of Africa alone; I feel very
grateful to my cousin, who was willing to accompany
me, to share the journey, for which no maps were
to be bought, from its start in the restaurant car of
the 6.5 from Euston, as we sat before the little pieces
of damp white fish. A headline told me that there
was another due in a trunk murder case; a man on
the dole had killed himself; while along the line the
smaller stations were dashed out like so many torches
plunged in water.