MISSION STATION * 2OJ

the floor raised to escape the ants. At one end was a
dispensary, and just outside was the open hospital
building, long wooden benches under a roof of
thatch. The forest came up at the back, like a small
private wood. Ganta scared me: there was a smell of
chemicals, of sickness and death about the place.
Quite suddenly we had dropped down from the high-
lands, and the air had changed. It was heavy and
damp. There were palms about and a sense of
drenched ground, flies and ordure. I would never
have believed that a climate could so completely
change in the course of a day's march. It had an
immediate effect on the health: all energy left me:
that night it was difficult to walk as far as the mission
house for dinner; my stomach quite suddenly ceased
to function.

I remember a rather grim dinner. Dr. Harley had
been out all day and was tired and ready to fall
asleep where he sat; it was the dead boy's birthday.
When he heard that I had walked from the Sierra
Leone border without using a hammock, he said I
was mad to do it; he had just sent a man—Dr. D.—
home dead who had made the comparatively short
trek from Monrovia on his feet. Nobody could walk
long distances in this climate without danger. I tried
to turn the conversation to the bush societies, but he
sheered away from them. He said that Since, which
we had planned to reach, was at least four weeks
away. The pain I had been feeling for some days
now in my stomach seemed to get worse at the news.
I could have been happy enough settled in one place
for months, but the thought of four more weeks of
physical exertion, of rising before dawn and walkipg