312 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

dwell on that rim of land which is known all the
world over as the Coast, the one and only coast. They
are not, after all, so far from the central darkness:
Miss Kilvane listening to the ghost of Joanna just as
the circle of blacks in Tailahun listened to the enig-
matic speech of Landow; the Catholic priest saying,
"And now the Immaculate Conception" as the bus
drove through the market, the tangle of stalls and
overhead wires, the neo-Gothic hotels under the black
overhead Midland fog. This may explain the deep
appeal of the seedy. It is nearer the beginning; like
Monrovia its building has begun wrong, but at least
it has only begun; it hasn't reached so far away as the
smart, the new, the chic, the cerebral.

It isn't that one wants .to stay in Africa: I have no
yearning for a mindless sensuality, even if it were to
be found there: it is only that when one has appre-
ciated such a beginning, its terrors as well as its
placidity, the power as well as the gentleness, the pity
for what we have done with ourselves is driven more
forcibly home.

While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the King my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.

After the blinding sunlight on the sand beyond the
bar, after the long push of the Atlantic sea, the lights
of Dover burning at four in the morning, a cold April
mist coming out from shore with the tender. A child
was crying in a tenement not far from the Lord
Warden, the wail of a child too young to speak, too