The dancing went on for hours in a close hot circle before our hut. The moon was half full, and the increasing light worked on their spirits. This was one of the revelations of Africa, the deadness of what we think of as alive, the deadness of nature, the trees and shrubs and flowers, the vitality of what we think of as dead, the cold lunar craters. The carriers were aware of the moon with an intimacy from which we were excluded. At Galaye it was already moving in their blood, so that even Amedoo burst into the circle and danced with a sudden wild lapse from dignity. But the most grotesque of the dancers was a moron dwarf. They dropped him into the ring with a couple of piccaninnies of three years old who were as tall as he, and he swayed a great inflated head, like a blister a pin would burst, to the beat of the rattle, and then howled and wept to be released.
I lay in bed while the music went on and held Burton against the mosquito-net to let the lamplight shine feebly through on the page of cheap print. The cover was already going damp, as if the book had been left out in the dew. The word nigra caught my eye, as I listened to the feet stamping and the calls I couldn’t understand. I suddenly felt, reading the lines of Calpurnius Graecus, the irresistible tug of the familiar, a longing for flowers and dew and scent. It was hard to believe they existed in the same world and that there were emotions of tenderness and regret that couldn’t be expressed with a harp, a drum and a rattle, buttocks and black teats.
Te sine, vae misero mihi, lilia nigra videntur,
Pallentesque rosae, nec dulce rubens hyacinthus,
Nullos nec myrtus nec laurus spiral odores.
I put the light out and listened to the moonlit tumult, but when it ceased and the villagers crept into their huts and put up the doors, there was such a rush of rats down the walls that I switched on my torch and saw the shadows racing down. But I had left my door open and they didn’t stay. I had the night to myself.
The Dead Forest
The next day was the eleventh of the trek, and we turned back into the great forest with very little idea of where we should spend the next night, except that I was determined it should be at least fifteen miles towards the vanishing Ganta. Examining my diary I find the first expression of a weariness which was more mental than physical. Ganta, which I had thought was two days away from Zorzor, seemed to be receding. I had long given up thinking in terms of hours, but I still clung to time in the sense of darkness and daylight, not admitting yet that to be happy in Africa one must cease to count even the days and weeks and months.
The chief at Galaye told me that Ganta was still three days away, and only after Ganta would we begin to head south. Every march took us farther from the Coast.
It was not that the villages were ever dull to me, and only here in French Guinea were their simplicity and hospitality a little tarnished by the touch of white rule, but the rising in the dark, the hurried breakfast, the seven hours of tramping along narrow paths through the hot-house forest with no view to either side and only occasional glimpses of sky above, this routine became almost unbearable. I was usually alone with a carrier or a guide who couldn’t speak English, for Mark and Amedoo could not keep my pace, and I had to try in vain to occupy the mind, to think of things to think about. I would calculate: I can think of this place or that person for so many hundred steps, and I would have a sense of triumph when the thought lasted me for a few dozen steps further than I had hoped. But usually it was the other way; the image or the idea lost interest a long while before I had taken the hundred paces. And this succession of thoughts had to be kept up for six or seven hours on end. I remember for what a long time I was able to think of fruit salts, for far longer and with more longing than I thought of beer or iced drinks. I suppose my digestion was suffering from the tinned foods, rough rice, the dry tough African chickens, and about five eggs a day. For the only way to economize our tinned supplies, which threatened to run short, was to eat off the country, rice, eggs and chicken, for meal after meal.
If the forest had been full of dangerous life the day’s marches would have been more supportable. A few monkeys, a snake or two, the sound of heavy birds creaking invisibly overhead, and ants, ants everywhere, this was all the life in the dead forest. The word ‘forest’ to me had always conveyed a sense of wildness and beauty, of an active natural force, but this forest was simply a green wilderness, and not even so very green. We passed on twelve-inch paths through an endless back garden of tangled weeds; they didn’t seem to be growing round us so much as dying; there was no view, no change of scene, nothing to distract the eyes, and even if there had been, we couldn’t have enjoyed the sight, for the eyes had to be kept on the ground all the way, to avoid the roots and boulders. It was a relief, a distraction, when a stream broke the path. A carrier would horse one across, for it was dangerous to wet the feet in the tiniest shallow stream because of guinea-worm which the Mandingo traders had brought down from the Sahara. The smell of the carriers had long ceased to be noticeable: I suppose our own smell by that time was bad enough, for fear of the same worm prevented us bathing as the carriers did in the rivers. The guinea-worm makes its way through any sore in the foot, going up as far as the knee. When the foot is afterwards put in water the worm spews its eggs into the water through the sore. The only way to deal with it in the absence of a doctor is to find its end like a thread of cotton and wind it out in a long unbroken length round a match-stick. If the worm breaks, the leg may fester.
It was little wonder, then, that the senses were dulled and registered only acute boredom. I suppose there was some beauty in the forest, but the eye had long ceased to be aesthetic. The great swallow-tailed butterflies which rose in clouds round our waists at the stream sides seemed no more worth watching than the black ants which fastened on the flesh.
Perhaps the Liberian forest is peculiar in Africa for the quality of deadness, for other writers more often complain in their parts of Africa of the noise and savagery of the jungle. M. Céline is an example. ‘The forest is only waiting for this signal [the sunset] to start to shake, whistle and moan in all its depths, like some huge, barbarous, unlighted railway station. . . .’ How we would have welcomed the moans and whistles of that station. You can grow intimate with almost any living thing, transfer to it your own emotion of tenderness, nostalgia, regret, so that often of a relationship one remembers the scene with the most affection. A particular line of hedge in a Midland county, a drift of leaves in a particular wood: it is only human to imagine that we receive back from these the feeling someone left with them. But no one had ever transferred to this forest any human emotion at all. Like the shell of a house on a bankrupt housing estate it had never been lived in.
That poem of A. E. Housman’s which begins
Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.
had a curious fascination for me during those weeks; it was like a succession of pleasant sounds in a foreign language; it represented the huge difference between this Nature and what I had previously known, I used to reserve it as a last resort for when I could think of nothing else to think about and recite it very slowly to myself, wondering whether I had covered a hundred yards between the first and the last verse.
The poem had ceased to mean anything; it was impossible here to think of Nature in such terms of enchantment and nostalgia; it would have been like cherishing a dead weed in a pot, a sign of mental derangement.
And full of shade the pillared forest
Would murmur and be mine . . .
So Housman wrote, sharing the feeling of Wordsworth and many English Nature poets, that Nature was something alive which could be possessed as one possesses a friend or a lover, but this forest had never belonged in that way to anyone. Perhaps it was even wrong to think of it as dead, for it had never been alive.
But it was only fair, I
suppose, that the moments of extraordinary happiness, the sense that one was nearer than one had ever been to the racial source, to satisfying the desire for an instinctive way of life, the sense of release, as when in the course of psycho-analysis one uncovers by one’s own effort a root, a primal memory, should have been counterbalanced by the boredom of childhood too, that agonizing boredom of ‘apartness’ which came before one had learnt the fatal trick of transferring emotion, of flashing back enchantingly all day long one’s own image, a period when other people were as distinct from oneself as this Liberian forest. I sometimes wonder whether, if one had stayed longer, if one had not been driven out again by tiredness and fear, one might have relearned the way to live without transference, with a lost objectivity.
Rain in the Air
The chief from Galaye acted as our guide back from the plateau into the forest, wearing for the occasion a black tail coat and a green beret, with one of his men to follow him and carry his sword. At a large village, Pala, they told us that the next town was Bamou, a long way off; we should certainly not reach it until six, and we had started the march at seven. There was nowhere in between where we could sleep. The men were grumbling already as they arrived, and I could foresee a long series of angry complaints. But I wouldn’t consent to stay at Pala, (that would be to delay our arrival at Ganta too long), so I didn’t wait for all the carriers to arrive, to get together and rebel, but walked off with a guide, the hammock-men and Amedoo.
We went for more than three hours without passing a village, and the path was wide enough for the sun to scorch us incessantly; for lunch we had to make a clearing with swords in the bush itself to gain enough shade. But in the small village we reached at last I learnt to my relief of a town not more than an hour and a half away. The village chief was hospitable, bringing out gourds of palm wine for my carriers to drink, and I did not notice in time his unwillingness to offer his hand. Only after I had put out my own and he had reluctantly taken it did I see that it was covered with white sores. It may not have been leprosy, and in any case leprosy is only very slightly contagious, but it spoilt my food for me all that day.
I never knew the name of the place we reached. It cannot have been Bamou, for we must have left that path. It had a guest-house in a little enclosure just outside the town. The chief was sullen and inhospitable, he wouldn’t provide a cooked meal for the carriers, nor would he allow them to sleep in the town. He said they would cause trouble there. I bought rice from him at the highest rate I had yet paid and he left again with his headman and a little train of disapproving ancients.
The air was heavy with thunder. The carriers felt it as they lay about in the verandah. I sat listening to snatches of argument, until just before sunset, as the storm gathered and bore down out of the north-west, shouts and bugle-calls brought everyone to the fence. A procession was approaching the compound from the village. A man with an old sporting gun over his shoulder led the way, then a covered hammock borne by four men, attendants running on either side and one of them blowing blasts on a bugle. I thought it must be at least a French Commissioner and hoped that he would not ask to see my papers, for I had no visa which would allow us to pass through a French colony. But it wasn’t a French Commissioner who stepped out of his hammock and strutted to the gate with a dog at his heels and a riding whip hung at his wrist. He was a black with tight curled ringlets and black side-whiskers. He wore an old white topee, a Fair Isle jumper, breeches and braces and a belt, gaiters and little white kid boots. He stood swinging his whip, watching us as if we were curious caged animals, with superb arrogance. Somebody said he was the chief from Djiecke, the next town on the track to Ganta. He spoke neither English nor French, but when I asked him through Mandingo Amah how far it was to Djiecke, and told him that I intended to reach the town next day, the answer came, of course, ‘too far’. It seemed unlikely, for it was nearly sunset and he would hardly have planned to spend the night in the bush. When he had stared at us for long enough he swaggered back to his hammock and to the sound of one more heraldic blast was borne away swaying into the forest.
A heavy storm broke soon after dark: lightning like one prolonged flickering illumination. The carriers slept on the floor of the verandah. The sound of their breathing and snores was very companionable in the pounding electric night, and they kept away the rats. But the storm worried me. The dry season was supposed to last another month, but sometimes the rains came early. It would never do to be caught in the interior, for on the lower level below Ganta the ways in the wet season were impassable; Central Liberia between the villages became a swamp, and we had not yet even turned towards the south.
Café Bar
Suddenly in the inconsequent manner of Africa Ganta came close and we left French Guinea behind us. On the last day the colony proved more than ever French. Djiecke took us by surprise after only two hours’ march, a neat native school behind a gateway, Ecole de Djiecke, in a tidied park-like plain.
A small fussy black in a topee and European clothes and pince-nez came to meet our train from the school compound. He was very conceited, very inquisitive and we couldn’t understand each other’s French. When he learned that we were English he became deeply suspicious. He wanted to know where we had come from and when I said Sierra Leone he was convinced that I was lying. I think his geography was vague, for he couldn’t understand that we could have come from Sierra Leone by land. He wanted to know what canton we had just left, but I didn’t even know what a canton was. I thought it had something to do with Switzerland.
With every question he became more official, excited and conceited. I don’t know what impression of a foreign spy he gained from my vague manner. He said we must see the French District Commissioner, a day’s march away. He seemed to me dangerous; if he had authority in the town he might hold us up indefinitely. So I was polite, probably too polite, telling him that it was impossible, I must go straight on; for if this was Djiecke, Ganta was at last very close. I could see his little thin black body swelling under the drill, for he personified the power of France. He asked to see my passports and after a search in the baggage I found them and showed him the word ‘France’ in the list of countries for which the passport was available. I don’t think it quite satisfied him, he had more brains than I bargained for, but at that moment there was an interruption. We were standing close to the chief’s compound and a message came from him that we were to enter and rest, while chop was prepared for our men. If we had had a taste of French officialdom, now we were to taste French hospitality.
The chief had shed his oddly-assorted European clothes. He was dour and handsome in his native robe and his sideburns, squatting on the floor of his hut with his daughters and wives around him. The daughters were the prettiest women I had seen in Africa. They lay round and over him like kittens. The schoolmaster left us disapprovingly; there was a distinct atmosphere of sex and relaxation about the scene and it didn’t suit his pedagogic mind; but soon after a boy brought in a letter from him in French which one of the girls translated to her father. I think he may have asked the chief to detain us, for it became more and more difficult to get away. Not that I really in my heart wanted to go from the moment that the chief produced a bottle of French white wine, an enamel cup, and a tin of French cigarettes. It was like a dream: ever since we had entered French Guinea our minds had continually reverted to Dakar, to the cafés and the flowers and what seemed to us now the delicious freshness of the place where plague is endemic and the natives die of the want of will to live. I had sometimes tormented myself, washing out my mouth on the march with the warm filtered water – fruit had long since given out – with the thought of a bottle of wine.
And here it was. The chief sat grimly on the floor among his girls, with only the faintest suspicion of enjoyment about his mouth, and poured the warm sweet delicious wine into the enamel cup. He drank and passed it to me; I drank and passed it to my cousin. Back it went to the chief and was refilled. It didn’t take long for the thr
ee of us to empty the bottle. We were all a little drunk in no time; the heat of the hut, the confused tumble of half-clothed girls helped. As there was no sign of the promised chop for my men, I sent a boy out to fetch a bottle of whisky from my case. The chief had never tasted whisky before, but he had innate taste; he didn’t gulp down the neat spirit like the chief in Duogobmai. He sent a daughter for a pail of water and when the water was brought, he smelt it. It didn’t pass his inspection, he emptied it on the ground and sent her for more. Then he settled down to drink, became grimly merry without moving from the floor and forced the whisky on his favourite daughter, until she was drunk too. We grinned at each other and made friendly gestures.
The favourite daughter could speak a few words of English: her thigh under the tight cloth about her waist was like the soft furry rump of a kitten; she had lovely breasts: she was quite clean, much cleaner than we were. The chief wanted us to stay the night, and I began to wonder how far his hospitality might go. The girl was feeling a little sick with the whisky, but she never stopped smiling. I felt that she would be as unobtrusively and neatly sick as a cat and would afterwards be quite ready for more fun. A boy of about sixteen came in and knelt in front of his father. He pushed the whisky away; he wouldn’t drink it; and now he tried to stop his father drinking. He fetched a bottle and persuaded his father to put away every other drink for future use.
It became more and more like a blind in Paris; the wine, the bitter Gallic smoke, the increasing friendliness with someone you can’t speak to because you don’t know the language well enough. You’ve run across him in the Montparnasse bar and gone on exchanging drinks ever since: you speak English and he speaks French, and you don’t understand each other. There are a lot of girls about whom he seems to know and you’d vaguely like to sleep with, but you can’t be bothered because the wine’s good and you are beginning to feel a deep emotional friendship for the man on the other stool. He seems to know everyone: you don’t understand a thing, but you are happy.