INTO BUZEE COUNTRY IJ5

duce his brother, a fourth lieutenant in the Liberian
Frontier Force, through whose village we would pass
next day. He was a young simple brutal man in a
fur cap with a small metal Liberian flag on it. They
had obviously come for whisky and I gave it them;
it sent the chief back to his hut for the rest of the
day.

He was quite right; there was nothing else to do
but drink. The difficulty was to get drunk; the spirit
ran out in sweat almost as quickly as one drank it.
The race between the night and drunkenness became
furious as darkness fell. For I still feared the rats:
I wanted something to make me sleep; but drink was
quite useless for that purpose and most of the night I
lay awake listening to the vermin cascading down the
walls, racing over the boxes. I had already learnt
that one could not touch the earthen floor wi£h naked
feet without catching jiggers under the nails; now I
learned that at night anything left outside a case
would be eaten—by cockroaches or rats. They would
eat anything: shirts, stockings, hair-brushes, the laces
in one's shoes.

Rats

Rats indeed take some getting used to. There are
said to be as many rats as human beings even in
England in the large towns, but the life they lead is
subterranean. Unless you go down into the sewers
or haunt the huge rubbish dumps which lie beyond
the waste building lots under a thin fume of smoke,
you are unlikely to meet a rat. It needs an effort of
imagination in Piccadilly Circus to realise that for