HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 127

Europe; they have the same crude tourist stamp;
lozenges of bright crude colours on the heavy cloth.
And this is interesting when one considers that there
are no tourists in French Guinea, and few white men
at all in the far corner of the colony which touches
Liberia. The trade goods have to be carried through
hundreds of miles of forest to reach the kind of
public which enjoys the bogus gaudy article.

It was all against the proper White House
etiquette, I felt, but it was I who had to make the
move to end the interview, for I began to fear that
it would be dark before I reached Kpangblamai. I
was still following roughly the route which Sir Alfred
Sharpe took in his journey through Liberia in 1919.
All the way along this northern border the ground is
high, generally about sixteen hundred feet, and the
ground broken. Sir Alfred Sharpe wrote after his
journey that he had never been in any part of Africa
where the going was so bad, but at least it isn't
monotonous like the way through the central forest,
where there is no variation in the narrow paths, the
dull tangled greenery, where there is nothing to see
for hours on end but the carrier's feet and the tree-
roots. Here, between Kolahun and Kpangblamai,
there were hills to scramble over, the Mano River to
cross on a wide bridge of twisted creeper, the great
swallow-tailed butterflies swarming at the water-
courses, tiny winged primroses resting on the damp
sand and rising in clouds round our waists, and once
a little ferny, brackeny glade, warm and sweet like
an English summer.

These first few days of trekking had a beauty that
later one completely missed: everything was