266 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

That day was the last short trek on the way to the
Coast. There was no longer any talk of 'too far'. The
carriers longed as much as I did to escape from the
bush and reach the sea, and as for my poor servants,
they were dog-tired. Their nerves were on edge and
one evening Amedoo and the head carrier came to
blows in front of me over a dish of dirty meat scraps.
It was February the twenty-seventh when we left
Bassa Town, and we had been walking since February
the third. An eight-hour march brought us to Gyon,
but it did not seem to bring us any closer to Grand
Bassa. That remained, according to rumour, a week
away. It still seemed impossible to me that we should
ever reach it. My fever did not return after Bassa
Town, but my temperature remained a long way
below normal.

The vitality of both of us reached the lowest ebb
that day and the next. We had to be very careful
all the time not to quarrel. We only saw each other
for an hour or two at the end of the day, but even
then it was not easy to avoid subjects on which we
might disagree. The range of such subjects, indeed,
had become almost as wide as life itself. At first it
was enough to avoid politics of any kind, but now we
were capable of quarrelling over the merits of tea.
The only thing was to remain silent, but there was
always danger that silence might strike one of us as
sullenness. My nerves were the worst affected and it
was to my cousin's credit that we never let our irrita-
tion with each other out into words.

Gyon was an empty inhospitable place of square
dirty huts painted on the outside with white splashes
on^a kind of liver-brown mud. Some association in a