THE LAST LAP 361

another white man there; the sea in front instead of
bush; there might be beer to drink. I hadn't realised
until I began to walk again how down-and-out I was.
No amount of Epsom salts had any effect on me;
I used to take a handful morning and night in hot
tea, but I might have been taking sugar* I felt sick
and tired before I had walked a step and now there
was no hammock I could use. Six days, they had
said at Ganta, would bring us from Tapee to Grand
Bassa, but now at Tapee they said that the journey
would take a week at the very least, perhaps ten days,
I could no longer count time in such long periods:
even four days might have been eternity for all my
mind was capable of conceiving it. Not until I could
say "to-morrow" would I believe that we were really
drawing nearer to the Coast. My brain felt as sick
as my body. The responsibility of the journey had
been mine, the choice of route, the care of the men,
and now my mind had almost ceased to function. I
simply couldn't believe that we should ever reach
Grand Bassa, that I had ever led a life different from
this life.

To reach our next stop, Zigi's Town, I found diffi-
cult enough. It was nearly nine hours' solid trek from
Tapee, going down all the while into a damper closer
heat, and the first few miles of path were flooded
waist-high. Our guide, whom the Commissioner of
Grand Bassa had lent to lead us to the door of the P«Z.
store on Bassa beach, proved useless from the start.
Dressed in a ragged blue uniform, a rifle over his
shoulder which wouldn't have fired even if he'd had
the rounds, with all his belongings in a little tin pail,
he dropped behind at the first village we reached* He