OO JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

count. He knew that he was too old, he wanted to
retire for a younger man, but it didn't suit his lawless
village to lose their puppet. When he became impor-
tunate they told him they had made him a bishop,
and that pleased and quieted him.

It was a two-mile walk up to the mission through
the village of Bolahun, through the deep barking of
the frogs. The mission belonged to the Order of the
Holy Cross, a monastic order of the American Epis-
copal Church. I dumped my loads outside the long
bungalow and waited for the priests to come out from
Benediction. I could hear the low murmur of Latin
inside; in the darkness only the white eyeballs of my
carriers were visible, where they squatted silent on the
verandah; everyone was too tired to talk. But the
sound of the Latin represented a better civilisation
than the tin shacks of the English port, better than
anything I had seen in Sierra Leone; and when the
priests came out and one led the way to the rest-
house, his white robe stirring in the cold hill wind, I
was for the first time unashamed by the comparison
between white and black. There was something in
this corner of a republic said to be a byword for
corruption and slavery that at least wasn't commer-
cial. One couldn't put it higher than this: that the
little group of priests and nuns had a standard of
gentleness and honesty equal to the native standard.
Whether what they brought with them in the
shape of a crucified God was superior to the
local fetish worship had to be the subject of future
speculation*

That night, as the filter dripped and dripped in the
Jpare rest-house living-room, after the carriers had