IO6 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

lounging round the bars off Leicester Square, beating
the piano in dance orchestras. His chin was very
gently moulded, his hair fitted his head like a skull-
cap; he was more Grecian than African, early Grecian
before the decadence. He wore an elephant-hide
bracelet and a silver ring.

The goat-herd came and danced, stamping and
flinging out his arms, and one by one the men came
out of the dark on to the verandah, into the lamp-
light, hurling themselves this way and that, sending
the shadows flying from their arms and legs. Their
faces were strange but soon they were to become
familiar, for these" were the labourers whom Vande,
my newly-appointed headman, had found for me, to
carry fifty-pound weights for four weeks on end, for
three shillings a week and their food. It sounded to
a stranger next door to slave labour, but these were
not slaves stamping up and down with a controlled
wildness and an unconscious grace. There was Amah,
my second headman, a tall sullen humourless Man-
dingo with a shaven head in a long blue and white
robe; there was Babu, a Buzie man like Gissi with the
same delicate cultured features, the features of a tribe
sensitive to art and fear, weavers of exquisite cloth,
in touch more than any tribe with the supernatural,
makers of lightning, poisoners; Fadai, a gentle-
mannered boy from Sierra Leone with soft sad eyes,
infected with yaws; there was one-eyed shaven shifty
Vande Two.

They didn't speak a word as they swayed and
stamped; each improvised, dancing alone with no
reference to the others; it was only the music and
the shadows which lent them unity. I was to see