88 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

mattered to the black Government on the Coast if
we had disappeared and they could have done little
about it anyway. We couldn't even count as armed;
the automatic was hidden in the money-box, never
loaded, never seen; it would have been easy when we
were crossing one of the fibre bridges to stage an
accident; it would have been easy, less drastically,
simply to mislay the money-box or to lose us in the
bush.

But "poor fool", one could tell the Coast whites
were thiioking, "he just didn't know how he was being
done". But I wasn't 'done'; there wasn't an instance
of even the most petty theft, though in every village
the natives swarmed into the hut where all day my
tilings were lying about, soap (to them very precious),
razor, brushes. "You can have a boy for ten years/'
they'd say, "and he'll do you at the end of it/' and
laying down their empty glasses they'd go out into
the glaring street and down to the store to see whom
they could 'do' in the proper understood commercial
way that morning. "No affection," they'd say, "after
fifteen years* Not a scrap of real affection," expecting
always to get from these people more than what they
had paid for. They had paid for service and they
expected love thrown in.

I had hoped to reach the mission at five o'clock; but
fire o'clock brought us only to another hill, another
group of huts and stones, and the forest thick below.
The balls of cotton were laid outside the huts to dry
and a small tree ruffled a pale pink blossom against
the sky. Somebody pointed out the mission, a white
building which the low sun picked out of the forest,
^It was at least two hours away, and the journey be-