286 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Monrovia

To the casual visitor, at any rate, Monrovia is a
more pleasant town than Freetown. Freetown is like
an old trading port that has been left to rot along
the beach; it is a spectacle of decay. But Monrovia
is like a beginning; true, a beginning which has come
to little beyond the two wide grassy main streets
intersecting each other and lined with broken-paned
houses all of wood and of one storey except for the
brick churches, one little brick villa belonging to
the Secretary of the Treasury, the three-storeyed
Executive Mansion where the President lives, the
State Department opposite, and the unfinished stone
house of ex-President King. An asphalt drive, "for
motor traffic only/' goes down to the water-front, but
there are very few motors and all pedestrians use it
Along the waterside are the shops, the big wooden
stores of the English P.Z., of the German and Dutch
companies where you can buy gin as cheap as nine-
pence a bottle, and the small huts of the Syrians, .the
wooden shed of the Post Office with a rickety ladder
on the outside. There are telephone poles along the
main street and out by the one motor road towards
Mount Barclay and the Firestone Rubber Planta-
tions, but the telephone service no longer exists. The
residential street runs gently uphill towards a waste
of scorched rock and sand, the road to the English
Legation and the lighthouse, and here and there
among the rocks are planted the beginnings of stone
houses, sometimes only the foundation laid, some-
times several storeys, so that these unfinished build-
ings have the appearance of houses gutted by fire.