50 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

business out at that hour; but Daddy saw her. "Hi,"
he said, sticking his head out from the other side of
the car, "come here." She came up to the car; she was
far too pretty to be scared; her bare breasts were
small and firm and pointed; she had the neat rounded
thighs of a cat. "Tell him/' Daddy said, "who am
I?" She grinned at him. She wasn't scared by any
game a man could play. "You know who I am?"
Daddy said. She leant right into the car and grinned
and nodded. "Daddy," she said. He slapped her face
in a friendly way and drove off. He seemed to think
he'd proved something. "Have you thought of the
leeches?" he said. "They'll drop on you from the
trees." We stopped outside our hotel; the wooden
floors, the stairs, were alive with ants. Daddy said,
"I've got to do something for you, I can't just let you
go like this," drooping over the wheel with sleep.

At dawn a madman began to go groaning down
the street; I had heard him at intervals all day; I
slipped out from under my mosquito net to watch
him trail Ms rags through the grey early morning;
he moved his head from side to side, groaning in-
humanly like a man without a tongue. There were
no vultures to be seen so early, the tin roofs were
bare; do vultures nest? and the bats had gone, the
fruit bats which streamed out across the town at
seven o'clock.

Strange to say, Daddy remembered next morning
that he had promised something. He turned up early
at the hotel and said he had the boys outside wait-
ing. I didn't know what to say to them; they stared
bade at me from the bottom of the hotel steps waiting
for orders; Amedoo, grey-faced and expressionless,