BLACK MONTPARNASSE 189

I was determined it should be at least fifteen miles
towards the vanishing Ganta. Examining my diary
I find the first expression of a weariness which was
more mental than physical. Ganta, which I had
thought was two days away from Zorzor, seemed to
be receding. I had long given up thinking in terms of
hours, but I still clung to time in the sense of darkness
and daylight, not admitting yet that to be happy in
Africa one must cease to count even the days and
weeks and months.

The chief at Galaye told me that Ganta was still
three days away, and only after Ganta would we
begin to head south. Every march took us farther
from the coast.

It was not that the villages were ever dull to me,
and only here in French Guinea were their simplicity
and hospitality a little tarnished by the touch of
white rule, but the rising in the dark, the hurried
breakfast, the seven hours of tramping along narrow
paths through the hot-house forest with no view to
either side and only occasional glimpses of sky above,
this routine became almost unbearable. I was usually
alone with a carrier or a guide who couldn't speak
English, for Mark and Amedoo could not keep my
pace, and I had to try in vain to occupy the mind, to
think of things to think about. I would calculate:
I can think of this place or that person for so many
hundred steps, and I would have a sense of triumph
when the thought lasted me for a few dozen steps
further than I had hoped. But usually it was the
other way; the image or the idea lost interest a long
while before I had taken the hundred paces. And this
succession of thoughts had to be kept up for six or