304 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

When Freedom raised her glowing form on

Montserrado's verdant height,
She set within the dome of Night
'Midst lowering skies and thunderstorm
The star of Liberty!
And seizing from the waking Morn
Its burnished shield of golden flame
She lifted it in her proud name
And roused a people long forlorn
To nobler destiny.

It was no worse than most patriotic songs from
older countries. To a stranger, I think, coming from
a European colony, Monrovia and coastal Liberia
would be genuinely impressive. He would find a
simplicity, a pathos about the place which would
redeem it from the complete seediness of a colony
like Sierra Leone: planted without resources on this
unhealthy strip of land they have held out; if they
have brought with them the corruption of American
politics, they have nurtured at the same time a senti-
ment, a patriotism, even a starveling culture. It is
something, after all, to have a President who writes
verses, however bad, and music, however banal. I
could not be quite fair to them, coming as I did from
an interior where there was a greater simplicity, an
older more natural culture, and traditions of honesty
and hospitality. After a trek of more than three
hundred miles through dense deserted forest, after
the little villages and the communal ember, the great
silver anklets, the masked devil swaying between the
huts, it was less easy to appreciate this civilisation of
the coast. It seemed to me that they, almost as much