INTO BUZDE COUNTRY 153

where, dust getting into the throat. Roofs touching.
Indelible pencil all over the hands. Damp pages. Lot
of trouble with the carriers. A long walk to get away
from the village to relieve oneself."

It would have been stuffy anyway in the narrow
space between the huts, but all day a crowd of
villagers crushed out what little air there was. They
had never before had a chance of examining white
people closely. I couldn't take out a handkerchief
without a craning of heads, nor raise a pencil without
a pressing forward of watchers who didn't want to
miss a thing. This intent unamused stare got on the
nerves. And they were so ugly, so diseased. The
thought of disease began to weigh on my mind; I
seemed to swallow it in the dust which soon inflamed
my throat; I couldn't forget where the dust had come
from, from the dung and the bitches and the sores
on the feet.

Only a few of the women broke the monotonous
ugliness of the place. The adults had been beautifully
and elaborately cut in bush school; the patterns were
like metal plaques spread from the breasts to the
navel; and there was one small girl in a turban with
slanting Oriental eyes and small neat breasts who did
appeal to a European sexual taste even in her dirt.
To their eyes she was probably less attractive than
the village beauty who gazed at herself all day in a
little scrap of cracked mirror, a girl with swelling
buttocks and smeared and whitened breasts which
hung in flat pouches to her waist. It was curious
how seldom they did appeal: perhaps sexual vitality
was lowered by the heat and the inarches, but it was
partly, I think, their lack of sexual self-consciousness