142 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

if it came to a show-down, to refuse to pay them
or would we go tamely back with them to
Bolahun?

The bush got thicker; the paths narrower. It was
difficult to keep one's feet among the roots. My cousin
and the carriers were out of sight and hearing.
Nothing seemed to live but the snakes and birds, and
they were invisible, and the ants. It was a country
made for ants. Their great yellow tenements, twelve
feet high, broke through the bush, enchained the
villages. Their swarms drove across the paths, like
Carthaginian armies; the route on either side was
lined with sentries; one could imagine the heaving at
tiny ropes, the cracking of infinitesimal whips. Some-
times near water there were other ants, guerilla ants
this time who whipped at one singly through the air
and fastened their pincers in the skin: stockings
couldn't keep them out: their nip was like the cut of
a knife. These, one sometimes felt, were the real
owners and rulers of the bush, not the men in the
villages one passed every two or three hours above
their scanty streams, ringed with a little plantation
of kola trees, the leaves turned upwards in great ugly
yellow bowls like brass epergnes; not certainly the
few white men who had passed this way and left in
a little cleared space beside the path an abandoned
gold-working: a deep hole the size of a coffin, a few
decaying wooden struts above a well of stagnant
water, the ivy already creeping up. This was the
ruling passion of most white men in this dead bush,
a passion just as secret, needing as much evasion, kept
perhaps with as much fear, as the secrets of the bush
„ houses which stood away from the path behind a row