278 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

went that way unless they carried guns. The beach
is the most dangerous road in all Liberia to travellers,
because its people have been touched by civilisation,
have learnt to steal and lie and kill.

They drifted away out of the courtyard one by one,
with nothing to do, conscious of their native clothes
among the trousered Bassa. They didn't take the
warning to get*clear away out of town with their
money, for that night I lay in bed listening to the
drunken singing and shouts of Vande and Amah
under the wall. Cane juice was the only cheap thing
in Grand Bassa, and I could tell the difference
between their drunkenness now and the happy sleepy
mellow state the palm wine had put them in. This
was crude spirit and a crude coastal drunkenness.

The Seedy Level

One was back, or, if you will, one had advanced
again, to the seedy level. This journey, if it had done
nothing else, had reinforced a sense of disappoint-
ment with what man had made out of the primitive,
what he had made out of childhood. Oh, one wanted
to protest, one doesn't believe, of course, in 'the
visionary gleam', in the trailing glory, but there was
something in that early terror and the bareness of
one's needs, a harp strumming behind a hut, a witch
on the nursery landing, a handful of kola nuts, a
masked dancer, the poisoned flowers. The sense of
taste was finer, the sense of pleasure keener, the sense
of terror deeper and purer. It isn't a gain to have
turned the witch or the masked secret dancer, the
se&se of supernatural evil, into the small human