I said : “But if we go outside, do you really think that anything … ?”
They watched me carefully, trying to make out if I were serious. Mark was a Christian boy, he wouldn’t answer directly, he was ashamed of his fear, but he said he thought we oughtn’t to go. Amedoo broke in excitedly with a story it was difficult to follow about what had happened in 1923 at dinner one night at a District Commissioner’s in Sierra Leone : “The D.C. he sit here, his wife she sat there, Mr. Trout he sat here, Mrs. Trout she sat there and the devil passed through.” He said that if we went and saw the devil, the devil would put a medicine on the town and there would be no white man after we had gone with better medicine. The boys went into the two rooms and drew the mosquito-screens over the windows; after they had cleared dinner they sat with the carriers in the cookhouse with the blinds pulled down; we could see the lamp shining on the floor through the slats and the shadows of the silent figures.
But the needs of the body had to be satisfied, and taking our electric torches we went out through the compound to the edge of the forest. The town of over two thousand inhabitants might have been deserted; the pale sickle of a new moon, a sky luminous with stars, circle after circle of shuttered huts. The place had an eerie air after Nicoboozu and Duogobmai, where music and dancing, laughter and cries went on till midnight, for it was not yet nine. But as we returned up the path out o^ the forest and flashed our torches on the town, we lit up two human figures who were standing silently outside the devil’s hut. Perhaps the devil had set a watch on Zigita to see who moved or peeped, because for some time after we returned to the rest-house we could hear feet moving in the compound, lightly stirring in the dust outside. As we undressed the devil’s music began in Zigita, the pulse of a drum. We turned out the lamps and lifted the screen from the window which faced the town, but there was nothing to be seen from the direction of the devil’s hut; no lights moved. “When once,” Saki wrote, “you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.” We had the creeps that night; there were no doors and anyone could slip into the house under the mosquito-screens. I very nearly took the automatic out of the moneybox to load it; only selfconsciousness prevented me.
I had expected the atmosphere in the morning to clear. This was the day of rest which the carriers had looked forward to, but they showed no sign of enjoying it. They lingered in the rest-house, avoided the town. Mark said it was a bad place where they fought with poison and not swords, and I remembered uneasily how simple it would be for the devil to poison the carriers’ food and teach the sceptical whites a lesson. Thunder kept wandering along the hills; two carriers complained of their heads and one of his belly, and I sent off a messenger to the Lutheran mission at Zorzor warning them of our coming next day, although I had meant to stay another day at Zigita, All the morning the building of the fence round the new hut went on, a line of women carrying pails of water up and down the hill from the river to loosen the soil. The noise was like that of a distant football match; every now and then there were screams of delight as if a try had been scored. Once the headman arrived on the verandah and asked for some oil, and if I had not stopped him, Laminah would have given him the greater part of our supply.
Again a warning was brought to the compound that the devil was leaving his hut. After the drums had sounded, no one was to go outside. The fat baleful man appeared with a lot of trash to sell, and I, not knowing then who he was, chaffed him at the gateway of the compound. He had with him a little old man with a white goatee beard who wanted us to buy some crude leather pouch. Yes’m and ‘No’m the fat man said at intervals. “And this devil,” I said, “why can’t I see him?” He laughed evasively and Laminah plucked at my sleeve. He knew who the fat man was and he was scared. The fat man turned and saw him. He became boisterously funny, but without any humour showing in his little sunk eyes. He said, “You want to see devil, eh?” gripping Laminah’s arm, and he began to talk to him in his own tongue.
When Laminah got away he was stammering with his fear. The fat man, he said, was the devil’s headman and the old man with the goatee beard his medicine man. The headman had frightened him badly in revenge for his bargaining over the sword; he had told him that he would be carried away into the bush for seven years and forcibly initiated into the Bush Society. The thunder rumbled round the hills and the clouds broke up. Amedoo joined us. He said, “England good place. You have one God and no devils. I have one God too but plenty devils.” He was a Mohammedan. He began all over again the story about the English D.C. He wanted to prove that it wasn’t safe to laugh in private at a Big Bush Devil. They could make themselves invisible; they could hear everything.
Then the rain came washing down, a vertical wall of water, while the thunder rumbled. We ran for shelter. Mark met us on the verandah, anxious to impress us, too, with how bad a place it was. The D.C., Amedoo began to tell us all over again, had been having dinner. “Mrs. D.C. sat here, Mr. Trout there.” The D.C. had laughed and said that he would like to see the devil, and immediately the devil had passed invisibly through the dinner-table splitting it in half. Through a window we could see a man standing outside the devil’s hut in the pouring rain fanning the thunderstorm away with a switch of elephant hair, fanning it away from the devil’s hut towards the compound and the hills. He stood there for more than two hours in the rain, fanning.
The storm continued all the evening and well into the night. It certainly kept away from Zigita; the hills and the huts leapt up in green light; the thunder travelled all the way along the rim, the lightning screwing down into the forest. There was no sound from the devil’s hut. The stage was magnificently set for a supernatural act. I had promised the boys we would not look outside, but we kept watch on the hut through a crack in the shutter. It leapt and receded before the green flames; something should have happened to crown the wild night, but nothing did. The devil never stirred and the great natural preparation went on too long without a climax; the storm became a bore.
That night the rats came leaping into my room like large cats; they knocked things over; they made too much noise for me to sleep, though they always evaded the eye of the torch. A tin went crashing over; once I could have sworn that the lamp itself had gone. But curiously, when daylight came, nothing was out of order; even the biscuit-tin I had heard fall was in its usual place.
There was certainly something bad about Zigita. I never felt quite well again until I reached the Coast