INTO BUZIE COUNTRY 171

tered house stuffy with the smell of vermin, torn
mosquito-wire across the windows. She couldn't find
the keys and gazing through the windows I could see
stacks of missionary literature on wobbly tables and
files of broken filters against the peeling walls. "You
see, I'm all alone here," the American woman wailed,
trailing round the building looking for the keys, but
she checked herself, when she had taken another look
at my dirty shorts, my dirty face and unshaven skin,
and when a little later I insisted, "Are you really
quite alone?" she wouldn't answer the question,
scared, I suppose, for her goods and her honour.

If Duogobmai was the dirtiest place in the Republic,
Zorzor was the most desolate. It hadn't been left to
itself; the whites had intruded, had not advanced, had
simply stuck and withered there, leaving their pile of
papers, relics of a religious impulse, sentimental,
naive, destined to failure. Mrs. Croup's husband had
been drowned at Monrovia: the other man in the
mission had gone off his head, Mrs. Croup had been
alone now for six months. I heard her voice whining
away across the compound, as I hypocritically called
after her some expression of my pleasure at sleeping
in a house after the native huts, "Well, I guess we try
to keep it free of bugs."

But she was a kind woman, and her whine had its
excuse. I found next day that I was whining too. It
was the heat. One hadn't the energy to finish forming
words; the voice trailed out, like bad handwriting,
after the first syllable. She was kind, courageous, prac-
tical and a little bizarre. She sold me a cracked lamp
from the mission stores at a great deal more than its
value, and she kept a black baby in her house and ji