86 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Bande territory, were circular with a pointed thatched
roof overhanging the parti-coloured mud walls, white-
washed halfway up. There was one door and some-
times a window; in the middle of the floor were the
ashes of a fire which would be lit again at sunset
from a communal ember and fill the single room with
smoke; the fumes kept out mosquitoes, kept out, to
some extent, the fleas and bugs and cockroaches, but
not the rats. They were all much alike, these villages,
built on a hill-top on several levels like medieval
towns; the path one had followed through the bush
would drop steeply to a stream where the villagers
came to wash their clothes and bathe, then rise
abruptly up a wide beaten track out of the shade to a
silhouette of pointed huts against the midday glare.
The ground in the villages was scarred by the dry
beds of streams, In the centre was the palaver-house
and at the limit of the village the blacksmith's forge,
both open huts without walls.

But though nearly all the villages at which I stayed
had these common properties—a hill, a stream,
palaver-house and forge, the burning ember carried
round at dark, the cows and goats standing between
the huts, the little grove of banana-trees like clusters
of tall green feathers gathering dust-—not one was
quite the same. However tired I became of the seven-
hour trek through the untidy and unbeautiful forest,
I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the
night: the sense of a small courageous community
barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in
by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness
filled with evil spirits—love was an arm round the
t a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little