246 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

compound at Tapee-Ta, and though the dictator of
Grand Bassa was satisfied with our passports, which
certainly did not include permission to pass through
Central Liberia, the financier might have fared worse.
That prison, next door to our own bungalow, com-
bined behind its thatch and whitewashed walls and
tiny port-holes the sense of darkness and airlessness,
and the kind of mindless brutality which sometimes
vents itself in this country in the torture of a cat (the
head warder was a moron and a cripple). Each port-
hole, the size of a man's head, represented a cell The
prisoners within, men and women, were tied by ropes
to a stick which was laid crosswise against the port-
hole outside. There were two or three men who were
driven out to work each morning, two skinny old
women who carried in the food and water, their ropes
coiled round their waists, an old man who was
allowed to lie outside on a mat tied to one of the posts
which supported the thatch. In a dark cavernous
entrance, where the whitewash stopped, a few
warders used to lounge all through the day shouting
and squabbling and sometimes diving, club in hand,
into one of the tiny cells. The old prisoner was a
half-wit; I saw one of the warders beating him with
his club to make him move to the tin basin in which
he had to wash, but he didn't seem to feel the blows,
Life to him was narrowed into a few very simple, very
pale sensations, of warmth on his mat in the sun and
cold in his cell, for Tapee-Ta at night was very cold,
One of the old women had been in prison a month
waiting trial. She was accused of having made light^
ning in her village, and there was a pathetic
impotence in her daily purgatory under the stagger