202 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

stable air, as if the next rains wouldn't wash them
away.

As our caravan came out on to the road from the
river path and the leopard traps, a group of yellow-
faced Liberians in European clothes, more like
Italians than Africans, turned to watch us. One of
them, the only dark-skinned one, took off his topee.
Later in Tapee-Ta I was to get to know him better,
and those soft sad lustrous seeking-a-friend eyes of
his. He was called Wordsworth. He watched us
yearningly as we toiled up the bare scorched road
towards the Methodist mission. Already he was in-
tent on joining that odd assortment of 'characters'
(the Grants and the Kilvanes) one collects through
life, vivid grotesques, people so simple that they
alway have the same side turned to one, damned by
their unself-consciousness to be material for the novel-
ist, to supply the minor characters, to be endlessly
caricatured, to make in their multiplicity one's world,