2IO JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

because they believed. President King himself was
rumoured to have been a member of the Alligator
Society. When the League of Nations Commission
was appointed to inquire into Liberian conditions,
Mr. King and several members of his cabinet—so it
was believed in Monrovia—had sacrificed a goat
After the sacrifice, which should traditionally have
been a human one, a boatload of young Krus had
been drowned close to the beach at Monrovia, and
it was generally felt that the alligator was dissatisfied
with the goat.

It is a grim world, this of the societies, of the four
men who, Dr. Harley said, came to Ganta a year or
two back from the north looking for a victim. Every-
one in Ganta knew they were there, with their ritual
need of the heart, the palms of the hands, the skin
of the forehead, but no one knew who they were.
The Frontier Force were active, searching for
strangers. Presently the fear passed. The Manos
round Ganta knew what the men were seeking, for
they have their own cannibalistic societies, and
though I had said nothing of this to my boys and
there were no Manos among the carriers, Laminah
and Amedoo knew all about it. Laminah said to me
one day, "These people bad, they chop men/* and
they were happy to leave the Manos behind. This is
the territory the United States map marks so vaguely
and excitingly as "Cannibal".

The Terrapin Society of the women and the Snake
Society of the men, of course, are not peculiar to the
Manos. There is the ordinary snake society, a kind
of post-graduate course in handling snakes, in curing
their bites and dancing the snake dance, and the