174 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

shield the unfortunate passenger, who would wake in
the dead of night, in black darkness, to find two or
three large cockroaches clinging to his lips."

This, as I grew more tired and my health a little
failed, seemed to be what I would chiefly remember
as Africa: cockroaches eating our clothes, rats on the
floor, dust in the throat, jiggers under the nails, ants
fastening on the flesh. But in retrospect even the
cockroaches seem only the badge of an unconquered
virginity, "never sacked, turned, nor wrought." In
Sierra Leone, in the bright electric Hill Station, one
was conscious under the fans beside the iced drinks
of how the land had been subdued; but even in the
capital town of Liberia one was aware only of a
settlement, a very chancy settlement that might be
wiped out at any time by yellow fever. White and
black, they were living here for a short while on the
surface of the land, but Africa had the last say, and
it said it in the form of rats and ants, of the forest
swallowing up the little pits the Dutch prospectors
had made and abandoned. There is not so much
virginity in the world that one can afford not to love
it when one finds it.

CHAPTER FOUR

BLACK MONTPARNASSE
The Carriers' Strike

NEXT morning we entered France: so the colony was
known among the natives of the Republic. One of