INTO BUZIE COUNTRY 173

I could see the carriers* doubts growing; they were
thinking that again I was going to force them into
too long a trek. So I told them that we would go
next day to Jbaiay and there discover the road to
Bamakama; if it was too far we would spend the night
at Jbaiay. They assented to the plan with suspicious
alacrity. . . .

There were no rats that night: only cockroaches,
ready to eat anything available. They lay there, while
the light was on, flattened like large blood blisters
against the wall, but when it was extinguished they
flashed faster than lizards on the hunt. Sir Harry
Johnston, who knew only the coast districts of
Liberia, never penetrating, I believe, much farther
inland than his rubber plantation at Mount Barclay
outside Monrovia, speaks of these cockroaches as
"obviously harboured and bred in the heaps of refuse
which accumulate" in the Americo-Liberian settle-
ments. But really they can be found everywhere in
the Republic. "These insects," he wrote, "do not
hesitate at night to attack human beings who are
asleep. They creep to the corners of the mouth of
the sleeping person to suck the saliva. They eat the
toe-nails down to the quick, and above all, they gnaw
at any sore place or ulcer on the skin. . . . Dr.
Buttikofer relates that he only saved his body from
attack at one time by placing bowls of rice and sugar
in his bedroom as a counter-attraction. . . . The
present writer has been attacked in a somewhat
similar way, but on board dirty and uncomfortable
steamers on the West Coast a good many years ago.
[n the bunks of these steamers cockroaches swarmed,
and there were of course no mosquito curtains to