208 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

probably take us another five weeks to reach Shoe.
Should we have to wait long for a boat to Monrovia?
Perhaps a month, he said, leaning back in his wicker
chair, the blazing sun over the compound behind
giving his yellow handsome face a blurred black out-
line. It was a politic inaccuracy, because, as we learnt
later, there was a weekly launch. I suggested Grand
Bassa as an alternative and he encouraged the idea:
we could do it in ten days, he informed us, but that
was an exaggeration. He didn't know the road him-
self, it was used only by the Mandingo traders; im-
passable in the rains, it would be a very rough way
through the biggest bush, but ten days should see us
on the Coast.

The Commissioner had other reasons than patriot-
ism to distrust the white man. There was a Catholic
priest at Sanoquelleh, his headquarters, and the pre-
vious Commissioner had been married to a Catholic.
The priest had resented the difference between
Dunbar and his predecessor; Dunbar had stood
strictly to the letter of the law, allowing the priest no
privileges. The priest tried to get rid of him, writing
letters to the President in Monrovia; and the heat: and
desolation worked on both men. The priest saw his
chance when one of the men working on the roads
fell side. He took him into the mission and the man
died there. Immediately the priest wrote a letter
accusing Dunbar of having starved his workers and
beaten one to the point of death. Dunbar acted with
admirable promptitude; he arrived at the mission
with a squad of soldiers before the man was buried
and carried both the body and the priest over the
eighteen miles to Ga&ta, where he asked the