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.
There 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 pIace 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 Monrovia, 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.
And then luck changed. It was as if fate had been merely curious to see how the worst would affect us. Suddenly the carriers arrived with Vande grinning and happy and proud in the rear. Somehow he had persuaded them to cross the river in this pitch darkness, and there they were with the beds and nets and food and filter, sinking to the ground by the hut too tired to grumble. So after all one was protected, protected from the flies which stayed awake all night, from the mosquitoes, the cockroaches and the rats, by one’s net But it wasn’t easy to sleep. Outside, the carriers sat round the lamps and had their chop and I heard vitality come slowly back to them and Alfred’s voice sowing dissension. When their lamp went out the rats came. They came all together, falling heavily down the wall like water. All night they gambolled among the boxes, and the cows snuffled round the wall and made water noisily. A jigger burrowing under one of my nails burned like a match flame. By half-past five the village was awake again.
INTO BUZIE COUNTRY
The Horrible Village
I WASN’T surprised when the carriers struck work next morning and demanded a day’s rest. I sent for the chief and Mark interpreted. The chief said Nicoboozu was seven hours off; he was lying or Mark was lying. But I had stood out against the carriers once before and had been proved wrong. Now they didn’t believe me: they believed I was driving them hard on purpose, and so I granted their demand promptly to try to win their confidence again. But it took me more than one day to do that. They were like children who have caught a grown-up lying to them. It wasn’t a place I would have chosen to rest in. It was a really horrible village. The only thing to do in it was to get drunk. I noted in my diary, “A woman goes round scraping up the cow and goat dung with her hands, children with skin disease, whelping bitches and little puppies with curly tails and bat ears nosing among the food Souri is cooking for us in the dust outside a hut, skinny chickens everywhere, dust getting into the throat. Roofs touching. Indelible pencil all over the hands. Damp pages. Lot of trouble with the carriers. A long walk to get away from the village to relieve oneself.”
It would have been stuffy anyway in the narrow space between the huts, but all day a crowd of villagers crushed out what little air there was. They had never before had a chance of examining white people closely. I couldn’t take out a handkerchief without a craning of heads, nor raise a pencil without a pressing forward of watchers who didn’t want to miss a thing. This intent unamused stare got on the nerves. And they were so ugly, so diseased. The thought of disease began to weigh on my mind; I seemed to swallow it in the dust which soon inflamed my throat; I couldn’t forget where the dust had come from, from the dung and the bitches and the sores on the feet.
Only a few of the women broke the monotonous ugliness of the place. The adults had been beautifully and elaborately cut in bush school; the patterns were like metal plaques spread from the breasts to the navel; and there was one small girl in a turban with slanting Oriental eyes and small neat breasts who did appeal to a European sexual taste even in her dirt. To their eyes she was probably less attractive than the village beauty who gazed at herself all day in a little scrap of cracked mirror, a girl with swelling buttocks and smeared and whitened breasts which hung in flat pouches to her waist. It was curious how seldom they did appeal : perhaps sexual vitality was lowered by the heat and the marches, but it was partly, I think, their lack of sexual selfconsciousness They weren’t, until we came near to the Coast and ‘civilisation’, interested in the sex of their visitors, but only in their colour or their clothes. The nakedness, too, was monotonous; it brought home how few people, and for how short a period of their lives, one can see naked with any pleasure.
There was something shifty and mean about Duogobmai, even apart from its dirt. It was the only place, until I got into Bassa country where the coastal civilisation had corrupted the natives, in which I found nothing to admire. The chief was a Mohammedan, but no sooner had I produced a bottle of my whisky than he arrived with a present of palm wine and some eggs, all of which were bad. I gave him half a tumblerful of neat whisky and he tossed it down as if it were lemonade, then rolled away towards his hut. An agreeable and depraved old man with thin white hair twisted into tiny pigtails brought two eggs; he was the oldest man in Duogobmai, the owner of the hut; and he explained through Mark that he didn’t want a dash. He sat down close by, his reward was a ringside seat, and watched the show : the white man writing, drinking, coughing, wiping the sweat from his face. Presently I gave him a swig of whisky; it went immediately to his head. One moment his lip was on the glass, the next he was swaying and giggling in senile tipsiness. He tried to smoke a cigarette, but the smoke got in his eyes. He was like a withered plant one has tried to revive with spirit; it begins immediately to open and flutter its petals, but a moment later the spirit has run its course and it is more dead than ever. In littlehe middle of lunch the chief arrived again to introduce his brother, a fourth lieutenant in the Liberian Frontier Force, through whose village we would pass next day. He was a young simple brutal man in a fur cap with a small metal Liberian flag on it. They had obviously come for whisky and I gave it them; it sent the chief back to his hut for the rest of the day.