But though nearly all the villages at which I stayed had these common properties-a hill, stream, palaver-house and forge, the burning ember carried round at dark, the cows and goats standing between the huts, the little grove of banana-trees like clusters of tall green feathers gathering dust-not one was quite the same. However tired I became of the seven-hour trek through the untidy and unbeautiful forest, I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the night: the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits-love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where die rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature. Love, it has been said, was invented in Europe by the troubadours, but it existed here without the trappings of civilisation. They were tender towards their children (I seldom heard a crying child, unless at the sight of a white face, and never saw one beaten), they were tender towards each other in a gentle muffled way; they didn’t scream or ‘rag’; they never revealed the rasped nerves of the European poor in shrill speech or sudden blows. One was aware the whole time of a standard of courtesy to which it was one’s responsibility to conform.
And these were the people one had been told by the twisters, the commercial agents, on the Coast that one couldn’t trust. ‘A black will always do you down’. It was no good protesting later that one had not come across a single example of dishonesty from the boys, from the carriers, from the natives in the interior: only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one would not have found, or at least dared to assume was there, in Europe. It astonished me that I was able to travel through an unpoliced country with twenty-five men who knew that my moneybox contained what to them was a fortune in silver. We were not in British or French territory now: it wouldn’t have mattered to the black Government on the Coast if we had disappeared and they could have done little about it anyway. We couldn’t even count as armed; the automatic was hidden in the moneybox, never loaded, never seen; it would have been easy when we were crossing one of the fibre bridges to stage an accident; it would have been easy, less drastically, simply to mislay the moneybox or to lose us in the bush.
But “poor fool”, one could tell the Coast whites were thinking, “he just didn’t know how he was being done”. But I wasn’t ‘done’; there wasn’t an instance of even the most petty theft, though in every village the natives swarmed into the hut where all day my tilings were lying about, soap (to them very precious), razor, brushes. “You can have a boy for ten years,” they’d say, “and he’ll do you at the end of it,” and laying down their empty glasses they’d go out into the glaring street and down to the store to see whom they could ‘do’ in the proper understood commercial way that morning. “No affection,” they’d say, “after fifteen yearslittle Not a scrap of real affection,” expecting always to get from these people more than what they had paid for. They had paid for service and they expected love thrown in.
I had hoped to reach the mission at five o’clock; but five o’clock brought us only to another hill, another group of huts and stones, and the forest thick below. The balls of cotton were laid outside the huts to dry and a small tree ruffled a pale pink blossom against the sky. Somebody pointed out the mission, a white building which the low sun picked out of the forest. It was at least two hours away, and the journey became more than ever a race against the dark, which the dark nearly won. It came down on us just as we left the forest and wound through the banana plantation at the foot of Mosambolahun, and it was quite dark and cold as we passed between the huts, the old cook flitting ahead in his long white Mohammedan robe, carrying a trussed chicken. All the fires had been lit in the huts and the smoke blew across the narrow paths stinging the eye; but the little flames were like home; they were the African equivalent of the lights behind red blinds in English villages. There must have been nearly two hundred huts on Mosambolahun, packed together on a thimble of rock,- and it stood apart in its remote pagan dirt from the neat Christianised garden village of Bolahun in the cleared plain below. A wide flattened path ran down across the plain to Bolahun and a swaying hammock came up it and a little noisy group of men. The hammock stopped at my side and an old, old man in a robe of native cloth with a long white beard put out a hand. It was the chief of Mosambolahun; ninety years old he quivered and shook and smiled while his people chattered round him. He couldn’t speak any English, but a boy with a gun whom I found at my side told me that the chief was on his way home from Tailahun, where a brother chief had died. He was swept away again by his impatient hammock-bearers, waving his dried old hand, smiling gently, curiously, quizzically. He was the explanation, I later learnt, of Mosambolahun’s dirt; he “was a puppet of the younger men, without authority. He had about two hundred wives, but they would sell him the same wife over and over again; he was too old to keep count. He knew that he was too old, he wanted to retire for a younger man, but it didn’t suit his lawless village to lose their puppet. When he became importunate they told him they had made him a bishop, and that pleased and quieted him.
It was a two-mile walk up to the mission through the village of Bolahun, through the deep barking of the frogs. The mission belonged to the Order of the Holy Cross, a monastic order of the American Episcopal Church. I dumped my loads outside the long bungalow and waited for the priests to come out from Benediction. I could hear the low murmur of Latin inside; in the darkness only the white eyeballs of my carriers were visible, where they squatted silent on the verandah; everyone was too tired to talk. But the sound of the Latin represented a better civilisation than the tin shacks of the English port, better than anything I had seen in Sierra Leone; and when the priests came out and one led the way to the rest-house, his white robe stirring in the cold hill wind, I was for the first time unashamed by the comparison between white and black. There was something in this corner of a republic said to be a byword for corruption and slavery that at least wasn’t commercial. One couldn’t put it higher than this : that the little group of priests and nuns had a standard of gentleness and honesty equal to the native standard. Whether what they brought with them in the shape of a crucified God was superior to the local fetish worship had to be the subject of future speculation.
That night, as the filter dripped and dripped in the rest-house living-room, after the carriers had been paid off and the case of whisky opened, I went outside to find the sick C.’s partner, Van Gogh. For the prospector’s tent was just outside and a hurricane lamp was burning. “Van Gogh,” the priest had said, “you’ll like Van Gogh,” and seeing a syphon standing on the boxes by the tent, I thought that I would invite him to bring his soda over for a drink. I raised the flap and there Van Gogh was, lying wrapped in blankets on his camp-bed; I thought he was asleep, but when he turned his head I saw that he was sweating; the pale golden stubble of his chin was drenched in sweat. Five hours before he had gone down with fever, and all that night the German doctor attached to the mission sat up with him. He was bad, very bad; he had spent a lifetime in the tropics, but nine months in the Republic had got him down. Next day they took him to the little mission hospital in our hammock; the boys from his gold-camp in the Gola forest came and packed up his tent and goods and carried him down, sick and swaying under the blazing sun.