132 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

sugar-loaf hat. It sank on to the ground and recited
its greetings on a low gushing note. It was a far more
accomplished dancer than Landow. To compare
Landow's wild rushes, matching the great crude
muzzle, with the simpering silly sinister gait of this
woman's devil was like comparing brutality with
cruelty. It may have been a tribal difference: no
Bande craftsman could have made this mask.
Landow's was a mask of childish fancy running in
the vein of nightmare: this was a work of conscious
art in the service of a belief.

After the dance the chiefs son, Peter Bonoh, said
that his father wished to show the visitors his town.
The whole length of Kpangblamai cannot have
exceeded a hundred and fifty yards, but before we
had seen all the activities of that small settlement, I
felt much as a member of the royal family must feel
after a tour of an industrial fair. I had been allowed
no rest after the march, the palm wine was lying
heavy in my stomach, there was no air on the baked
plateau, and I thought that I was going to faint before
I reached the end. Five weavers were at work, each
under his own little shelter of palm branches; a man
was cutting leather sheaths for daggers; and in the
smithy they were making blades, one man working
a great leather bellows, another beating out the white-
hot blade (I would have paid them more attention if
I had known then the importance of the smith, how
frequently he is the local devil and his word more
powerful than the chiefs). In front of another hut
two women were spinning a kind of top upon a plate,
working the thread out of a mass of cotton. In a
^little wooden enclosure a woman was boiling .the