68 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

"Those things are so noisy," he complained. "They
keep one awake at night."

"Surely it's only the light that brings them in," I
said.

"Oh," he said, "I always leave a light burning at
night," and his eyes followed the beetles up and down
the bare room. Somebody was playing something;
the sound came all the way from the village: a kind
of harp playing without melody, an endless repetition
of notes.

He said, "I'm sorry you are off to-morrow." He
said it so often that one couldn't doubt him, even
though in the next breath he would explain that he
wasn't lonely, that he liked the life.

I had sent off a messenger that morning with a
letter to the Father Superior at the mission at
Bolahun. The act of sending a letter by messenger a
day's journey ahead into another country was
pleasantly mediaeval. One paid the messenger
nothing when he left; he met one somewhere on die
road on his return journey, the road a foot-wide path
through thick forest, crossed and recrossed by other
paths. But the messengers never went astray; they
were as reliable as the English Post Office. Once, when
the message was urgent, I sent a man by night, giving
him a £01 of paraffin for his lamp, and with a dagger
hanging over his shoulder he ran out into the dark
bush, the letter .stuck in a deft stick.

It was January the twenty-sixth when we left for
the Republic (snow in London, yellow fever in Free*
town, inist over the burnt grasses at Kailahun). There
was a road for another fifteen miles towards the
border; I had ordered two lorries to call for myself