WESTERN LIBERIA IOŁ

don't live me here again. I was -fearing to tell you
last night please Master, good master and good
servant. I am yours ever jriend Mark.

It proved always possible, however tired and vexed
and sick I felt, to gain a little of the old zest at
second-hand through Mark, for Mark had never seen
the sea nor a ship nor a brick house. It was the
greatest adventure he was ever likely to have and he
was still only a schoolboy. One could see in his avid
gaze at new people and new customs the dramatising
instinct at work: he was going to have stories to tell
when he got back to school.

Now on the verandah, with the dancers, appre-
hensions gathered. This was the last rest-house we
would occupy for a long while. It was to be native
huts after this. I remembered what the sisters had
said of the rats which swarmed in every native hut.
You couldn't, they said, keep them off your bed; the
mosquito net was useless; once a sister had woken to
find a rat sitting, on her pillow savouring the oil on
her hair. But you soon got used to rats, they said.
They were right, but I didn't believe them. I had
never got used to mice in the wainscot, I was afraid
of moths. It was an inherited fear, I shared my
mother's terror of birds, couldn't touch them,
couldn't bear the feel of their hearts beating in my
palm. I avoided them as I avoided ideas I didn't
like, the idea of eternal life and damnation. But in
Africa one couldn't avoid them any more than one
could avoid the supernatural. The method of psycho-
analysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which
he is repressing: a long journey backwards without