MISSION STATION 211

secret society which does actually worship a python,
to which one baby should be sacrificed each year by
the fully initiated. This was a common terror once:
we came across the memory of what I suppose was a
related cult at the sacred waterfall beyond Ganta;
now only in Liberia, where the secret societies are so
immune from interference, do cases of child murder
or disappearance occur with any frequency.

Dr. Harley was particularly pleased with having
discovered the nature of one devil, the most sacred
in the women's eyes, whom it is death for a woman to
see. He found it was not an individual at all, but a
circle of young warriors who had entered bush school
at the same time as the chiefs son. The women were
warned by drums that the great devil was out, and
the young men danced fully armed beating the
ground with staffs.

Among all these devils, Dr. Harley said, there was
one supreme devil, whose fiat ran the length of the
Coast and who had the power to stop war between
tribe and tribe. He could appear simultaneously in
places far apart: he was known by his distinctive
mask and robes. These were probably stored in every
place of importance along the Coast, above the
palaver-house or in the blacksmith's hut. For the
blacksmith of Mosambolahun, it appeared, was not
peculiar in being the local devil. Dr. Harley was in-
clined to believe that the craft of blacksmith was
always linked with the status of devil.

It is a curiously Kafka-like situation: headmasters
who wear masks and turn out to be the local black-
smith . . . One reaches the village at the foot of
the Schloss, to discover that almost anyone may \&