THE LAST LAP 269

would come no farther and demanded his pay, but
the thought of the long trek alone through strange
tribes daunted him.

The Detective of Darndo

That day was another long trek, nearly eight hours
of it. Our guide slipped behind at the first village we
reached; and I could feel every root and stone
through my gym shoes. The carriers whom we had
taken on at Bassa Town and who had asked to come
with us failed half-way and I couldn't use my ham-
mock at all. It was typical of the Bassa tribe to
promise and then to fail. I developed a bitter dislike
of the very appearance of Bassa men, the large well-
covered bodies, the round heads, the soft eflEeminate
eyes. The Coast had corrupted them, had made
them liars, swindlers, lazy, weak, completely unde-
pendable. But it was from the Bassa tribe, and from
the Vais, whose territory, too, touched the decadent
seaboard, that the governing class recruits new mem-
bers. To the criticism that the native has no hand in
the administration, the Americo-Liberian will point
to Bassa and Vai men in the Government depart-
ments, Bassa and Vai Commissioners and derks. *

I shall call the next village we stayed in Darndo,
It sounded like Darndo, and it is marked on no map.
I reached it with one or two carriers a long way ahead
of the others. In a small square hut with a verandah
draped with the Liberian flag, a number of elderly

* It is the pride of the Vai people that they have the only
"written language in Africa, but the Bassa are imitating them,
and I found a piece of their script stuck, perhaps as a charm,
in the roof of my hut. *