74 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

and apart from the saving in wages I was able to
average more than twelve miles a day over a period
of four weeks.

The chief at Biedu gave me a chicken, I gave the

chief a shilling. Souri, the cook, tied the chicken's

legs together, Amedoo went down the line of loads

testing the weights, the German sat down on his ham-

mock chair, and "Off!" I said. I felt like a subaltern

facing my platoon for the first time. I couldn't really

believe that when I said "Off!" the twenty-five carriers

would be set in motion. I stood back and watched

them with an odd feeling of pleasure, an absurd sense

of pride, when like a long mechanical toy they were

set in motion and wavered and straightened and

strode out through the village on to a wide track

which narrowed soon into a path through the

elephant grass, into a tree-trunk over a stream, which

wound into woods and clearings and woods again,

and at kst after two hours broadened out into a wide

plateau which was the frontier; three or four huts,

a few riflemen in scarlet fezzes with a gold device,

the Liberian flag (a star and stripes), and a little man

with a black moustache and a yellow skin and a worn

topee who came out into the clearing and greeted me

with a shifty nervous jubilant air as much as to say:

we've got you here, "leave no screws unturned,",

plenty of tin for yours truly. He said, oh yes, he was

expecting me; he had been warned.

One couldn't help having, however unjustifiably, a
sense of the dramatic; the way forward through the
clearing was as broad as the primrose way, as open as
a trap; the way back was narrow, hidden, difficult,
to the English scene.