276 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

not huts, with a first floor and tin roofs but without
glass in the windows, with the air of old-fashioned
chicken coops magnified to take men. Through a
window I saw a group of half-castes playing cards
round a bottle of cane juice. It was the familiar
Africa of the films, of semi-Parisian revues and
Leicester Square. Sometimes there were chickens or
a goat or an allotment. This was civilisation; we had
seen it last in Freetown.

And then at three o'clock unexpectedly we were
in Harlingsville, the wooden houses rising to two
floors, with outside staircases, a smell of human
ordure drawn up by the sun, a Post Office marked in
chalk letters, men and women in trousers and shirts
leaning over fences, and as the path bent, there at
the beginning of a wider road a motor-lorry stood.
I wanted to laugh and shout and cry; it was the end,
the end of the worst boredom I had ever experienced,
the worst fear and the worst exhaustion. If I had not
been so tired (it was March the second, we had been
walking for exactly four weeks and covered about
three hundred and fifty miles), civilisation might not
have seemed quite so desirable in comparison with
what I was leaving: the complete simplicity on the
edge of subsistence, the little groves of rice-birds, the
graves of the chiefs, the tiny fires at sundown, the
torchlight, the devils and the danping. But civilisa-
tion, for the moment, I was ready to swallow whole,
even the tin roofs, the stinking lurching lorry from
which the natives on the way from market in Grand
Bassa drew back with die same dread as their fellows
had shown on the road to Kailahun, hiding their faces
against the banks as the monstrosity ground by. The