WESTERN LIBERIA 87

pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a
few stones in the centre of the village where the dead
chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like
yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in
a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This
never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the
extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their
terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed
the most courageous things in nature. Love, it has
been said, was invented in Europe by the trouba-
dours, but it existed here without the trappings of
civilisation. They were tender towards their children
(I seldom heard a crying child, unless at the sight of
a white face, and never saw one beaten), they were
tender towards each other in a gentle muffled way;
they didn't scream or 'rag'; they never revealed the
rasped nerves of the European poor in shrill speech
or sudden blows. One was aware the whole time of a
standard of courtesy to which it was one's responsi-
bility to conform.

And these were the people one had been told by
the twisters, the commercial agents, on the Coast that
one couldn't trust. 'A black will always do you down'.
It was no good protesting later that one had not come
across a single example of dishonesty from the boys,
from the carriers, from the natives in the interior:
only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one
would not have found, or at least dared to assume was
there, in Europe. It astonished me that I was able to
travel through an unpoliced country with twenty-five
men who knew that my money-box contained what
to them was a fortune in silver. We were not in
British or French territory now: it wouldn't have