THE HOME FROM HOME 43

handed a letter from His Majesty's Charge d'Affaires
in Monrovia, the capital of the Republic, saying that
he had announced my visit to the Secretary of the
Interior, and the Secretary had informed all the Dis-
trict Commissioners in the Western Province. "Any
courtesies shown these persons by the Commissioners
and Chiefs with whom they contact will be very
highly appreciated, and it is incumbent that you leave
no screws unturned to make their trip a pleasant one/'
The phrase about the screws had a slightly sinister
ring, but this fairylike activity had been no part of
my plan. If there was anything to hide in the Re-
public I wanted to surprise it. Luckily the Secretary
of the Interior had suggested a route for me to follow,
and it would be quite easy for me to avoid it, to avoid
indeed the Western Province, after a few days,
altogether.

It would have been easier if I had been able to
obtain maps. But the Republic is almost entirely
covered by forest, and has never been properly
mapped, mapped that is to say even to the rough
extent of the French colonies which lie on two
sides of it. I could find only two large-scale maps for
sale. One, issued by the British General Staff, quite
openly confesses ignorance; there is a large white
space covering the greater part of the Republic, with
a few dotted lines indicating the conjectured course
of rivers (incorrectly, I usually found) and a fringe
of names along the boundary. These names have
been curiously chosen: most of them are quite un-
known to anyone in the Republic; they must have
belonged to obscure villages now abandoned. The
other map is issued by the United States War Depart-