66 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

they needed with them in a country where oranges
are fifteen a penny, chickens sixpence each, and
wages, if you go deep enough, three shillings a week;
where you can feed thirty men, as I found, on thirty
shillings a week.

That afternoon we went for a walk into French
Guinea with the engineer. The border is the Moa
River, about twice the width of the Thames at West-
minster. We crossed in a dug-out canoe, standing
and balancing with the roll. It was quite easy, only
a little frightening because there were alligators in
the Moa, The curious thing about these boundaries,
a line of river in a waste of bush, no passports, no
Customs, no barriers to wandering tribesmen, is that
they are as distinct as a European boundary; stepping
out of the canoe one was in a different country. Even
nature had changed; instead of forest and a rough
winding road down which a car could, with some
difficulty, go, a narrow path ran straight forward for
mile after mile through tall treeless elephant grass.
Along the hot wrinkled surface lay die skins of
snakes. Natives came stooping up the path, bowed
tinder green hammocks of palm nuts; they looked
like grasshoppers in a Silly Symphony. We walked
for an hour and a half without coming to a village
and at last turned back to Sierra Leone. The engineer
said the path went straight down to the coast by
Konakry, and again one felt the happy sense of being
free; one had only to follow a path far enough and
one could cross a continent. Sweating in the hot dry
day and growing cool again, one found it hard to
believe that this part of Africa should have so un-
healthy a reputation; j3ne forgot C.'s sickness and the