Sir Alfred Sharpe passed through Pandemai, ‘an old war town’, in 1919, and was received with great hospitality by the local chief. Perhaps the black missionary had not then arrived: now the town seemed dead: the chief when he came, a sullen suppressed man who presented his dash of a chicken and a pail of rice as if they had been exacted from him by force. The missionary ruled him. When, thinking of the wasted chop and the trouble he had taken the night before, I prepared to dash him five shillings in return, the missionary caught my hand. He said he couldn’t allow it; there was no need to give the chief anything; I was the guest of the country. At last he allowed two shillings to pass to the chief, who stood by with a beaten smouldering air like an honest man who watches, without the power to intervene, two racketeers squabbling over his property.
The missionary calculated that Duogobmai was still six hours away. That was disquieting, for we had already marched for more than two hours, but nothing would induce me to stay. It wasn’t only the unfriendly chief and the bugs in the hut; I was still planning my journey by European time: the listlessness, the laissez-faire of Africa hadn’t caught me. I had planned to reach Duogobmai that night and to fail to reach it seemed to put back everything. I wasn’t confident enough to see the journey as more than a smash-and-grab raid into the primitive. . . . There was a dream of a witch I used to have almost every night when I was small. I would be walking along a dark passage to the nursery door. Just before the door there was a linen-cupboard and there the witch waited, like the devil in Kpangblamai, feminine, inhuman. In the nursery was safety, but I couldn’t pass. I would fling myself face downwards on the ground and the witch would jump. At last, after many years, I evaded her, running blindly by into sanctuary, and I never had the dream again. Now I seemed to be back in the dark passage: I had to see the witch, but I wasn’t prepared for a long or careful examination.
So I wouldn’t be delayed, and though the carriers grumbled and Alfred whispered again into my ear, ‘Too far. Better stay here. Too far,’ I insisted on going on. Rather recklessly I pledged myself that it wasn’t far to Duogobmai. I nursed the idea that a black always exaggerated, when the fact was they had so hazy an idea of time that they were just as likely to minimize. I said, ‘It’s only about five hours from here. I know. The white doctor at the Holy Cross told me.’
Only five hours, I thought, as the midday heat came nearer, striking up from the dry ground, catching the feet as much as did the roots of trees beating down on one’s helmet so that for moments at a time it was cooler to raise it and take the full sun on the skull. We were in the forest now, but it was still the edge where it flattened out towards the Mandingo plateau to the north: the dead dull edge of it which didn’t shelter sufficiently. A few birds moved overhead, out of sight, their wings creaking like unoiled doors. A monkey ran along a branch of a great grey cotton tree, which was buttressed on the ground like a tower. It flung itself into the air at the height of a cathedral spire, dropped fifty feet and out of sight behind the palms and ivy, the tangle of greenery. The boy with the harps leapt aside at a slither in the grass. That was all the life there was, except for the long sullen chain of carriers, dropping farther and farther behind. I wondered whether they would stay the journey; if they left us I hadn’t the money to reach the Coast. Would I have the nerve, I wondered, if it came to a showdown, to refuse to pay them or would we go tamely back with them to Bolahun?
The bush got thicker; the paths narrower. It was difficult to keep one’s feet among the roots. My cousin and the carriers were out of sight and hearing. Nothing seemed to live but the snakes and birds, and they were invisible, and the ants. It was a country made for ants. Their great yellow tenements, twelve feet high, broke through the bush, enchained the villages. Their swarms drove across the paths, like Carthaginian armies; the route on either side was lined with sentries; one could imagine the heaving at tiny ropes, the cracking of infinitesimal whips. Sometimes near water there were other ants, guerilla ants this time who whipped at one singly through the air and fastened their pincers in the skin: stockings couldn’t keep them out: their nip was like the cut of a knife. These, one sometimes felt, were the real owners and rulers of the bush, not the men in the villages one passed every two or three hours above their scanty streams, ringed with a little plantation of kola trees, the leaves turned upwards in great ugly yellow bowls like brass épergnes: not certainly the few white men who had passed this way and left in a little cleared space beside the path an abandoned gold-working: a deep hole the size of a coffin, a few decaying wooden struts above a well of stagnant water, the ivy already creeping up. This was the ruling passion of most white men in this dead bush, a passion just as secret, needing as much evasion, kept perhaps with as much fear, as the secrets of the bush houses which stood away from the path behind a row of stunted charred trees like funeral cypresses or a fence of woven palm leaves. A few banana trees at the edge of one village were fenced in: ‘the devil’s bananas’.
It was odd in this shabby lost bush to be told by one’s guide, pointing to a tiny path, that that was the ‘road’ to Voinjema. The carriers were still near their own country, and though the paths were sometimes as numerous and apparently as random as a child’s criss-cross scrawlings on a sheet of paper, Babu knew his way. He didn’t have to hesitate; to show the route to those who came behind he would close the wrong paths with sprays of leaves. These were the only road signs in the bush.
Under the vertical sun we reached another village, I and my two spare hammock-men and Amedoo. They led me to the palaver-house, the low thatched barn in the middle of the village where the old men were drowsing out their siesta. I sat down in a hammock which was slung on one side, and the old men ranged themselves opposite and blinked and scratched. It was too hot to talk. A woman lay in a patch of shade, on her face in the dust, and slept. The chickens scratched on the floor for the grains of rice which sometimes fell between the slats of the roof. A long time passed; I wanted to scratch too. I wasn’t bitten; it was a nervous reaction. The old men blinked and scratched their armpits and heads and thighs; they burrowed inside their loose robes to find a new spot to scratch. It was too hot to be really curious about anyone, though a few of the younger men of the village stooped under the thatch and sat down and stared and began to scratch. The delay irritated me. I wanted to eat my lunch and get away, but it was nearly an hour before the carriers began to stumble in, tired and stubborn, suspicious and complaining. Alfred went round among them, urging them to rebel, gathering evidence from the villagers as to how far Duogobmai was.
But I still persisted in believing that they were wrong. I was without experience. All the white men I had met in Sierra Leone had told me how blacks must be driven, how they lied and humbugged, and it was not unnatural that I should believe they were lying now, ‘trying it on’, like schoolboys who are testing a new master’s discipline. And as a weak master who knows his own weakness bluffs it out with a new form, unable to recognize who is truthful and who is not, alienating the honest by classing them with the dishonest, I became all the more stubborn. I ate my food very fast, so that the men might have only a short rest, I told Vande to make Alfred one of my cousin’s hammock-carriers so that he might be forced to work, I wouldn’t listen to their arguments.
Laminah said softly behind my chair, ‘Amedoo’s feet very bad.’
At least I had the good sense not to alienate my boys. I depended on them for any comfort that could be wrung out of the country; it was they who, however tired they were, saw first to putting up our beds and chairs, to preparing our food, to boiling water for the filter. I said, ‘If his foot’s really bad, we’ll stay.’
Laminah said, ‘Amedoo go on. He say he no humbug.’
‘It’ll be only three hours from here,’ I said. ‘Only three hours, the doctor said so.’ They didn’t believe me, but they went about among the carriers repeating what I said; they put up a good pretence of believing. It is one of the curious things about a black servant, the way in which
he includes loyalty in his service.
I am not praising him for that. One ought not to be able to buy loyalty. It enabled me to victimize my carriers. I walked straight off out of the village with my two spare men and left the carriers behind. I was paying them three shillings a week and that sum paid, not only for an eight-hour day or more of heavy carrying, but for their loyalty. The poor fools when I left them had the money-box, I was a foreigner, my servants were foreigners, they could have shared the money out and gone home. But I was almost certain, though I had known them only two days, that they would follow. I ought to have despised them, as I would have despised the little tame employee at home who puts his office first. But after a while I began to love them for it. Perhaps there is a difference. There was no trait of cowardice in their loyalty, no admission that the richer is the better man. They did sell their loyalty, but it was a frank sale: loyalty was worth so many bags of rice, so much palm oil. They didn’t pretend an affection they didn’t feel. Love was quite one-sided as it ought to be.
So they followed after me, though a long way behind. Three hours went by and there was no sign of Duogobmai. The worst midday heat wore off soon after four. Another village offered hospitality I wouldn’t take. Babu and Kolieva stayed and drank water outside one of the ragged huts, but I went stubbornly on to where the forest began again. A man followed me. He had a few words of English: he said we would never reach Duogobmai before dark. There was still another village between. But I went on: I couldn’t bear the thought of waiting; I had been walking now for more than eight hours, but I had gained my second wind. One of the two men dropped behind; I was alone with Babu and the harps; it was not only the heat that was fading out of the air, the ferocity of the light between the branches was tamed.
Suddenly Babu sat down by the side of the path and changed his vest. He smiled shyly, winningly; we were coming to a town; he had to clean himself, just as much as any season-ticket-holder who straightens his tie before he gets to the City. As the light went out the forest began to rustle; one wondered whether after all it was so dead as it had seemed. I couldn’t help remembering that the man in front was in the greater danger from a snake, but the man behind from a leopard, for leopards, one is told, always jump at the back. Another village lifted itself on the skyline at the green tunnel’s end: the sky was grey, the huts so black that quite suddenly one realized how close night was. It would have been wise to stay, but it was a tiny village, not more than thirty huts on a little cracked hill-top. The thatch was falling in, a few horrible tiny dogs with bat ears came barking out and three old women sat on the very edge of the hill, sorting out cotton seeds, dirty and scarred and naked, like disreputable Fates. The hill dropped straight below them. They were just on the margin of life. I didn’t believe there was rice enough in the place to feed my men.
Below the hill a wide river lay flat and heavy in the evening light. It was the Loffa, which flows down into the sea about thirty miles above Monrovia. None of these Liberian rivers have been traced from their source in the French Guinea hills to the sea; their upper course is represented in the British War Office map with dotted and inaccurate lines. They usually fall in rapids about fifty miles from the coast and so commercially are of little value, but even in these calm upper reaches they are not used at all by the natives of the Republic: the only canoes one sees are ferries, and these almost all on the French border. One would expect villages to cluster round these rivers, but actually they flow through the wildest and least inhabited part of the bush until within a few days’ trek of the Coast. The way over the Loffa that evening was by a great hammock bridge. It was a really lovely architectural sight, seventy yards of knotted creeper swinging down from an arboreal platform fifteen feet in the air and out and up ten yards above the Loffa to another tree on the opposite bank. The foothold was about a foot wide, but it was railed on either side with creepers to the height of a man’s shoulders. Sometimes the creepers had given way, and one had to stretch across the gaps while the whole bridge swung like a rope ladder.
Half-way across Mark was standing with a chicken in his hand. He was sick and tired and hungry. He could hardly stir another yard. But Amah, who had been carrying a load all day since they left more than twelve hours before, was quite fresh. He was waiting for Mark on the other side. He had taken off his robe and was naked except for his loin-cloth. He picked up the Revelation suitcase and swung it up to his head as if he were only beginning the day’s march. He was admirable when things went wrong; he sulked and grumbled only on a day of rest or after a short march. It amused him that I should have overtaken them, and he strode up the path from the Loffa laughing and chattering in Bande.
Duogobmai came in sight, a line of blackened huts at the top of a long red-clay slope. A strange pink light welled out of the air, touching the tall termite mounds which stood along the path. It seemed to have no source in the darkening sky, it gave the whole landscape, the ant-heaps and the red clay and the black huts of Duogobmai on the hill-top camp, a curious Martian air. Men ran out of the huts and looked down at us, climbing up out of the dusk and the forest.
It was quite dark when we came into the town and felt our way between the huts to find the chief’s. Duogobmai looked very old and very dirty. It was like a Tudor town in its cramped crowded way; the thatch of the huts touched, one had to stoop between them, and the narrow paths were blocked with creamy moonstruck cows like Jerseys with twisted horns standing in their turd among the hens and dogs and small fierce cats and goats.
The chief was a middle-aged man with thick lips and little cunning eyes who looked more Oriental than West African in his red fez. He sat in a hammock before his hut. I couldn’t tell whether he was friendly or not. He just sat there and listened to Amah speaking, to Amah asking for huts and food for thirty men. He was a slow thinker and he was startled by our sudden appearance. He hadn’t seen a white face for years. I still believed that this must be the Dagomai the doctor had directed me to, but no, the chief said, no white people had stayed here since they had begun to pay hut tax, and that was as far back as memory took him. In his slow way he was immensely tickled; it was as good as a circus. He sent some men to clean a hut.
It was quite dark: there was no moon. The blacks moved between the huts with smouldering torches, but the little cheerful embers lit only wretchedness and dirt. A few carriers tottered in and sank immediately to the ground beside their loads with their heads in their hands. There was no humbugging; they were completely exhausted. Amah led me to the hut which had been chosen for us: a small round hut with a native couch at one side, where there was just room for two beds. The chief’s lamp, the only one in the village, stood on the floor and the sweepers raised clouds of dust which rose and settled again: there was a burnt-out fire in the middle. Somebody put a box on the floor and I sat down to wait. I was anxious: I couldn’t imagine how my cousin and the carriers could get across the long hammock bridge in the dark, avoiding all the gaps where the creepers had given way. I sent Amah with the lamp down the hill to see if he could find them and sat in the dark and heard the first rustle of the rats above. I dropped into a doze, and nearly an hour later voices roused me, a lamp swaying between the huts, a sudden pack of worn-out men. Amedoo rushed like a whirlwind into the hut, lashing with his stick at the legs of the few blacks who sat there with me: he could never remember that he wasn’t any longer in the British Empire. He was worn out and in a despairing rage because half the carriers, he said, had stayed at the village the other side of the Loffa, refusing to cross the bridge in the dark. There were no beds, no mosquito nets, no lamps, no torches, no food, and worst of all in the blasting heat of the hut, no filter.
Old Souri, the cook, appeared in the doorway in his black fez and his white robe which had been torn in the forest. He had a chicken in one hand and a bare knife in the other. He said, ‘Where de cookhouse? Where de cookhouse?’ Nothing, no seedy village, no ten hours’ trek, could quench the old man’s ruling passion.
The
re was nothing to do but have our hammocks slung and lie all night in them fully dressed and wrapped in blankets to keep away mosquitoes. While Amedoo and Amah prepared the hut we stumbled out of the village to relieve ourselves. We had no light, we lost our way in the coil of little huts, it was a pitch-black night except for the quivering sparks of fireflies. We struck endless matches, making water in the dry pitted ground.
And suddenly I felt curiously happy and careless and relieved. One couldn’t, I was sure, get lower than Duogobmai. I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable. Only one thing worried me a little: it seemed likely after a night without nets we should both go down with fever when we were farthest from both Bolahun and Morovia, though luckily our quinine was on the right side of the Loffa.
There was no water to drink because there was no filter, and it was appallingly hot, lying covered by blankets over our clothes. My cousin was wise and bore the thirst, but in this village there was so much chance of disease that one wasn’t adding to it much, I thought, by drinking two dirty gourds of palm wine. Then I had to fall back on neat whisky. The hut was too short for the hammocks to be stretched at full length; we had to sit in the dark bolt upright waiting for the rats to come. There was a bat somewhere in the roof, and I had noticed before the lamp went out a few huge cockroaches flattened against the wall.