BLACK MONTPARNASSE 191

guinea-worm makes its way through any sore in the
foot, going up as far as the knee. When the foot is
afterwards put in water the worm spews its eggs into
the water through the sore. The only way to deal
with it in the absence of a doctor is to find its end
like a thread of cotton and wind it out in a long un-
broken length round a match-stick. If the worm
breaks, the leg may fester.

It was little wonder, then, that the senses were
dulled and registered only acute boredom. I suppose
there was some beauty in the forest, but the eye
had long ceased to be aesthetic The great swallow-
tailed butterflies which rose in clouds round our
waists at the stream sides seemed no more worth
watching than the black ants which fastened on the
flesh.

Perhaps the Liberian forest is peculiar in Africa
for the quality of deadness, for other writers more
often complain in their parts of Africa of the noise
and savagery of the jungle. M. Celine is an example.
"The forest is only waiting for this signal [the sunset]
to start to shake, whistle and moan in all its depths,
like some huge, barbarous, unlighted railway
station, . . ." How we would have welcomed the
moans and whistles of that station. You can grow
intimate with almost any living thing, transfer to it
your own emotion of tenderness, nostalgia, regret, so
that often of a relationship one remembers the scene
with the most affection. A particular line of hedge
in a Midland county, a drift of leaves in a particular
wood: it is only human to imagine that we receive
back from these the feeling someone left with them.
But no one had ever transferred to this forest any

G*