CIVILISED MAN" 235

"All Hail, Liberia, Hail!"

I woke at five. In my dream someone had been
reciting Milton's Ode on the Morning of Chrisfs
Nativity. The version belonged entirely to sleep, but
it seemed to me more moving than any poetry I
had ever heard before. Two lines, "Angels bright
Bathed in white light", brought tears to my eyes,
and for a long while after I woke I believed them to
be beautiful and even to have been written by Milton.
The darkness was thinning behind the pointed huts.
The smell of goats blew in on the damp misty wind.
It was Victor Prosser, I suppose, who was responsible,
who had brought the idea of God and heavenly
hierarchies, of crystal spheres and light insufferable,
into the empty pagan land.

I said good-bye to the chief and Mr. Nelson. When
I gave the chief a present of money he was taken
aback, he wasn't used to payment and automatically
held it out to the tax-gatherer, and automatically
Mr. Nelson's hand moved towards it. Then he
remembered he was observed and turned the move-
ment into a jest, a hollow jest unshared by the
drained malarious eyes.

Victor Prosser had gone ahead with my cousin.
There were a lot of things he wanted to learn before
he reached Toweh-Ta. Was it true that Queen
Elizabeth was a Protestant, and Mary Queen of Scots
a Catholic like himself? Where did the Thames rise?
Was London on the Tiber as well as the Thames?
Were Sweden and Switzerland the same country?
He asked what London was like, and my cousin chose
to tell Mm of the underground trains, but it wasn't