WESTERN LIBERIA 93

rough trekking was forced to take notice, and the
President was on his way, at this very time, to Kola-
hun to listen to the chiefs' complaints.

One had to remember that background to Benedic-
tion in the little ugly tin-roofed church. The raised
monstrance was not a powerful political symbol:
"Come to me all ye who are heavy laden and I will
give you commercial privileges and will whisper for
you in the ear of a Minister of State." It offered, like
early Christianity, stripes from the man in power
and one knows not what secret oppression from the
priests of the fetish. There were not many at Bene-
diction : Christianity here was still the revolutionary
force, appealing to the young rather than the old, and
the young were on holiday. A tiny piccaninny wear-
ing nothing but a short transparent shirt scratched
and prayed, lifting his shirt above his shoulders to
scratch his loins better; a one-armed boy knelt below
a hideous varnished picture. (He had fallen from a
palm-tree gathering nuts, had broken his arm, and
feeling its limp uselessness had taken a knife and cut
it off at the elbow.)

A Chiefs Funeral

A few days after our arrival Amedoo fell ill. All
through the night I heard his racking cough, and in
the morning the German doctor examined him and
found one lung affected. He lay on the doctor's couch
dumb with terror, but he agreed to go into the
hospital; he was frightened, but he was still the per-
fect servant. His illness introduced me to Mark.
Mark was a Christian schoolboy; he came down from

D*