He was quite right; there was nothing else to do but drink. The difficulty was to get drunk; the spirit ran out in sweat almost as quickly as one drank it. The race between the night and drunkenness became furious as darkness fell. For I still feared the rats: I wanted something to make me sleep; but drink was quite useless for that purpose and most of the night I lay awake listening to the vermin cascading down the walls, racing over the boxes. I had already learnt that one could not touch the earthen floor with naked feet without catching jiggers under the nails; now I learned that at night anything left outside a case would be eaten-by cockroaches or rats. They would eat anything : shirts, stockings, hair-brushes, the laces in one’s shoes.
Rats
Rats indeed take some getting used to. There are said to be as many rats as human beings even in England in the large towns, but the life they lead is subterranean. Unless you go down into the sewers or haunt the huge rubbish dumps which lie beyond the waste building lots under a thin fume of smoke, you are unlikely to meet a rat. It needs an effort of imagination in Piccadilly Circus to realise that for every passing person, there is a rat in the tunnels underneath.
They are shy creatures; even while I slept among them, and heard them round me all night, I never saw one until I arrived in Ganta, where they were bolder and didn’t wait till dark. Flash a torch : they always avoided its beam; leave a lamp burning : and they played just as furiously in the shadow outside the range of light.little
I remembered the first live rat I ever saw. I had returned with my brother from a revue in Paris to a famous hotel on the left bank near the Luxembourg. It was about one o’clock in the morning; my brother went upstairs first; and lolloping behind him, like a small rabbit, went a rat. I could hardly believe my eyes as I followed them; it didn’t go with the dapper lounge, the wealthy international guests. But I wasn’t drunk; I could see quite distinctly the rough brown fur at its neck. I suppose one of the million or two rats in Paris was reconnoitring. Its appearance had a premeditated sinister air. I thought of the first Uhlans appearing at the end of a Belgian country road.
Perhaps town rats are bolder. In Freetown in 1942 I would lie awake under my mosquito-net and watch them scamper across my dressing table and swing upon my black-out curtains.
The next rat I saw was dead. I had taken a cottage in Gloucestershire and the country scared me. Something used to make a noise in the thatch every night, and I thought of rats: I knew the villagers went ratting along the hedge at the bottom of my garden. The rat-catcher, a rat-like man himself in old army breeches who was said by cruel village rumour to have allowed his first wife to starve, came with his ferrets; they scrambled along the thatch, rearing at the chimney stack like tiny polar bears; one of them couldn’t keep his footing and continually fell off until he had to be put back in the bag. There weren’t any rats, the catcher said, and refused payment. He had a pride in his profession and would only be paid by results, at the rate of a shilling a rat. But that night there was a knock on the door. A village woman stood in the door and held out a dead rat, jumping with fleas. She said, “I thought maybe you might like to see a rat. We’ve caught twenty down the hedge,” dangling the body under my lamp.
It is not, after all, unreasonable to fear a rat. The fear of moths, of birds and bats-this may be nerves; but the fear of the rat is rational. To quote Mr. Hans Zinsser, “It carries diseases of man and animals-plague, typhus, trichinella spiralis, rat-bite fever, infectious jaundice, possibly trench fever, probably foot-and-mouth disease and a form of equine ‘influenza’… . They have nibbled at the ears and noses of infants in their cribs; starving rats once devoured a man who entered a disused coal-mine.” It wasn’t in the least comforting to remember that there are forty million rats in England; the thought of the one rat which the sister at Bolahun had found sniffing at her hair was enough to hinder sleep.
And lying awake and hearing the rats play among our boxes, I couldn’t help remembering, too, the list of diseases I had read in England: leprosy, yaws, smallpox… . They were all, I felt certain, to be found in Duogobmai, and it was no comfort to know that leprosy was hardly at all contagious and that none of these diseases could be transmitted by fleas in a rat’s fur. One felt that even the dust in the cramped dirty town was poisonous, no less than fleas. And yet all the time, below the fear and the irritation, one was aware of a curious lightness and freedom; one might drink, that was a temporary weakening; but one was happy all the same; one had crossed the boundary into country really strange; surely one had gone deep this time.
Buzie Country
If we seldom sank as low as Duogobmai we seldom rose as high as Nicoboozu, which we reached next day after an easy cheerful trek of only three hours. Alfred had gone home; he had decided that the journey was not going to be a holiday; and in his place Vande had taken a friend of Babu’s, a Buzie man called Guawa. Guawa was an asset; he had the carriers singing before Duogobmai had slipped behind the trees. He sang and he danced, danced even when he carried a hammock or a load; I could hear his voice down the trail, proposing the line of an impromptu song which the carriers took up, repeated, carried on. These songs referred to their employers; their moods and their manners were held up to ridicule; a village when the carriers pressed through in full song would learn the: whole story of their journey. Sometimes a villager would join in the chant, asking a question, and I could hear the question tossed along the line until it became part of the unending song and was answered. ^ At the village before Nicoboozu the fourth lieutenant waited to greet us; he led us to his hut, and his brother brought a present of a large cockerel and a dozen eggs. The fourth lieutenant brought out his weapons, a long spear with a leather grip softened by fur and with a leather sheath, and a sword with goatskin at the hilt. He showed me his warrant as a fourth lieutenant dated 1918, and a letter from his commander recommending him for personal bravery and stating that, though he was completely illiterate and unable to learn the new drills, he was a good officer in peace and war. He said he had fought the Grebos and the Krus, and there was a young naοve brutality in his manner of touching his sword, a pride in killing and death.
Nicoboozu was a clean little town, the huts wide apart, and the chief was old, hospitable and incurious. He dashed us a chicken and a hamper of rice, saw that the hut we were to sleep in was swept, and then retired to his hammock and shade from the midday sun while we had a bath in a tin basin and the jiggers were cut out of our toes.
Nicoboozu was as favourable an example as we could find of a village touched by the Buzie culture” Here the women wore little silver arrows in their hair and twisted silver bracelets, beaten by the blacksmith out of old Napoleon coins brought from French Guinea, and heavy silver anklets; the men wore rings, primitive signet rings with a flattened side, and decorative beaded rings and rings twisted to match the bracelets. The weavers were busy, and every piece of craftsmanship we saw was light and unselfconscious. There was an air of happiness about the place which next day we did not find in Zigita.