THE HOME FROM HOME

manager said, "somewhere near Bolahun."
Gogh was looking for gold as well as for d
He'had been out there for nine months. Hex
be at Bolahun or somewhere in the forest.
couldn't say more. The Paramount Chief was wait-
ing by the lorry; he was a small man in a robe of
native cloth with a cocky little woollen cap; we had
nothing to say to each other, we shook hands and
smiled, and then the lorry drove away.

The old engine boiled, and the metal of the foot-
board burnt through my shoes; the driver was bare-
footed. We drove wildly up- and down-hill for an
hour on a road like a farm track, but the impression
of reckless speed was deceptive, formed by the bumps,
the reeling landscape, the smell of petrol and die
heat; the lorry couldn't have gone more than twenty
miles an hour. Cars are still rare in that corner of
Sierra Leone, men scrambled up the banks, women
fled into the bush or crouched against the bank with
their faces hidden, as civilisation went terrifyingly
by them in a fume of evil smoke.

In Kailahun at the time when we arrived there
were only two white men, the District Commissioner
and a Scottish engineer who was building a bridge,
but a third man, a stranger, drifted in during the
evening in a singlet and dirty ducks, with a little
black beard and shaven monkish head. The Com-
missioner had arrived by the same train; he had been
down the line to Segbwana to investigate a Gorilla
Society murder. A child had been carried off and
killed, and a woman had sworn she had seen the
gorilla and that he wore trousers. A man confessed,
but none of the Commissioners believed that he was