The railway journey began before eight and finished some time after five; the first stage of the journey ended at Bo; here the train and passengers stayed the night. At some point during the day one had emerged from the Colony into the Protectorate. The change was more than a matter of geography or administration, it was a change of manner. The Englishmen here didn’t talk about the bloody blacks’ nor did they patronise or laugh at them; they had to deal with the real native and not the Creole, and the real native was someone to love and admire. One didn’t have to condescend; one knew more about some things, but they knew more about others. And on the whole the things they knew were more important. One couldn’t make lightning like they could, one’s gun was only an improvement on their poisoned spear, and unless one was a doctor one had less chance of curing a snake-bite than they. The Englishmen here were of a finer, subtler type than on the Coast; they were patriots in the sense that they cared for something in their country other than its externals; they couldn’t build their English corner with a few tin roofs and peeling posters and drinks at the bar.
It might be thought that these men were more fortunate, that their ‘corner’, just because it was less material, demanded less effort to construct. But one cannot carry a country’s art in one’s head, and in the climate of West Africa books rot, pianos go out of tune, and even a gramophone record buckles.
Beside the line Sergeant Penny Carlyle, D.C.’s messenger, swagger-stick under arm, waited for us. Bare-legged and barefooted, with a cap like a Victorian messenger boy’s perched on one side, a row of medals on his tunic, he had the smartness and efficiency of an N.C.O. in the Guards. He marshalled his carriers, led the way to the rest-house, squashed a beetle under his toes, clicked his bare heels and dismissed. There were egrets everywhere, like thin snow-white ducks with yellow beaks. They provided, in their slender Oriental beauty, the final contrast to Freetown; there wasn’t a vulture to be seen, and suddenly, inexplicably, I felt happy in the rest-house, the square squat bungalow built on cement piles to keep out the white ants,, as the hurricane lamps were lit and the remains of the tough, dry, tasteless coast chicken were laid out There was a cockroach larger ‘. than a black-beetle in the bathroom, there were no mosquito rods with the camp beds, my medical outfit, which had cost me four pounds ten at Burroughs Wellcome, had been left behind, a native stood outside the rest-house all the evening complaining of something with folded hands; but I was happy; it was as if I had left something I distrusted behind.
On the lawn outside the headmaster’s house, beside a tree covered with wax blossoms like magnolia, we sat and drank gin and lime-juice; it was warm and quiet; they talked of the Republic. I carried an introduction to C, a young Dutchman who was said to be somewhere in the Republic looking for diamonds. The traffic superintendent had heard of him; C. had slipped over the frontier somewhere near Pendembu and rumours had come back that he had found the stones. He was alone, working for some small Dutch company outside the great Trust. But the Trust, so the story went, had been frightened by the rumours; if diamonds were mined on a large scale in the Republic, the Trust could no longer control the price. They had sent spies over to trace C, slipped them across from Sierra Leone, from French Guinea and from the Ivory Coast; they had to discover the truth; the price of diamonds and their own existence depended on it. It was a good story to hear there in the darklittlenear the borders of a country of which no one in Sierra Leone had been able to tell me anything. It was a good story because it didn’t go too far and tell too much, because it had not merely a plot but a subject; it cast a light in so many directions, the satiric, the social, the psychological; one only had to wait for one’s own experience to add colour and facts, though I was almost afraid to find C, lest the vivid outline should be marred by detail.
It was useless in Sierra Leone to ask for information about the Republic. No one had been across; any traffic there was came from the other side. President Kling, who had been forced to resign soon afterwards by the disclosures of the League of Nations Commission of Inquiry, had visited Sierra Leone a few years back. He was received with royal honours; there were banquets and receptions, guns were fired the royal number of rounds. What the President never knew was that he had been used as a dummy for the Prince of Wales, who visited the colony soon afterwards; the salutes had been rehearsed, the committees had tried out their arrangements on him. Later he came up to Bo on his way home. He had planned to go back by land from the boundary, escorted by his troops; it wasn’t safe for a President to make his way through the tribes he ruled without two hundred soldiers to guard him. There was a dinner in his honour; it went well to the end; there were the usual toasts; but when the President rose there was an interruption. The Colonel Commandant of the Republic’s Frontier Force was having a good time. “Sit down, Mr. President,” he said- “I want some more brandies and sodas.”
A few days later his host got tired of the President and had him escorted with proper ceremony to the border, but at the wrong place. The Frontier Force had marched to meet him at Foya and here he was at Kabawana. The Presidential party sat on the ground and waited and hoped; they were very frightened; the British platoon marched off and left them there.
Border Town
As it turned out I had no cause to fear a meeting with the diamond prospector. The story was left vague, unverified, suggestive. Six months in the Republic had been too much for Clittles health; he had gone home. This I learnt the next afternoon at Pendembu, at the small German store where I had been told to inquire for him. The train left Bo soon after nine and arrived in the late afternoon. AU my food was still in bond, but I bought tinned food at the P.Z. store in Bo. One could buy everything there, drinks and tinned foods and clothes and ironware and cures for gonorrhoea (P.Z. have branches all down the coast, even in the Republic; they are a Manchester firm, a kind of West African Selfridge, and in towns where there is no accommodation for white men, the P.Z. store can always be depended on for hospitality.)
At Pendembu another Court Messenger was waiting for ns, and a lorry to take us to Kailahun, to the Government Rest-house, but I called first at the Deutsche Kamerun Gesellschaft to inquire for C. “You’ll find his partner, Mr. Van Gogh,” the German manager said, “somewhere near Bolahun.” P Gogh was looking for gold as well as for diamonds He had been out there for nine months. He’ll be at Bolahun or somewhere in the forest. They couldn’t say more. The Paramount Chief was waiting by the lorry; he was a small man in a robe of native cloth with a cocky little woollen cap; we had nothing to say to each other, we shook hands and smiled, and then the lorry drove away.
The old engine boiled, and the metal of the footboard burnt through my shoes; the driver was barefooted. We drove wildly up-and downhill for an hour on a road like a farm track, but the impression of reckless speed was deceptive, formed by the bumps, the reeling landscape, the smell of petrol and die heat; the lorry couldn’t have gone more than twenty miles an hour. Cars are still rare in that corner of Sierra Leone, men scrambled up the banks, women fled into the bush or crouched against the bank with their faces hidden, as civilisation went terrifyingly by them in a fume of evil smoke.