104 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

down two irons and ran away again, and he cracked
his whip and raced and turned and spun. The
villagers stood in the background smiling discreetly;
it was a carnival, but it wasn't a carnival in the vulgar
sense of Nice and the Battle of Flowers; it wasn't
secular and skittish; like the dancing in the Spanish
cathedral at Easter, it had its religious value.

I remembered a Jack-in-the-Green I had seen when
I was four years old, quite covered except for his
face in leaves, wearing a kind of diving-suit of leaves
and twirling round and round at a country cross-
roads, far from any village, with only a little knot of
attendants and a few bicyclists to watch him. That as
late as the ninth century in England had religious
significance, the dance was part of the rites cele-
brating the death of winter and the return of spring,
and here in Liberia again and again one caught hints
of what it was we had developed from. It wasn't so
alien to us, this masked dance (in England too there
was a time when men dressed as animals and danced),
any more than the cross and the pagan emblems on
the grave were alien. One had the sensation of having
come home, for here one was finding associations with
a personal and a racial childhood, one was being
scared by the same old witches. They brought a
screaming child up to the devil and thrust him under
the devil's muzzle, under the dusty raffia mane; he
stiffened and screamed and tried to escape and the
devil mouthed him. The older generation were play-
ing the same old joke they had played for centuries,
of frightening the child with what had frightened
them, I went away but looking back I saw a young
girl dancing before Landow, dancing with the sad