It was not that I believed in the devil’s power so much as in the power of my own mind. The suggestion of malice and evil here was so great that I could imagine it influencing my mind until I half believed, and a half-belief can be strong enough to affect the health.
So in a way I was just as glad to leave Zigita as the carriers were. They broke into song as soon as they got beyond its boundaries, and made fast time on the wide treeless track south to Zorzor. We couldn’t see twenty yards ahead at first because of the deep wet fog which dropped softly round us, but when the sun had sucked it up, we experienced the real ferocity of Africa on the shadeless road. It staggered and sickened me even through a sun-helmet. Once a beautiful little green snake moved across the path, upright,, without hurry, bearing her bust proudly forward into the grasses like a hostess painted by Sargent, poisonous with gentility, a Fabergι jewel.
At lunch in the only shade the wide gorge provided the messenger arrived from Zorzor with a note to tell me that I could have a house in the compound of the Lutheran mission.
Kindness in a Corner
I had expected something better of a mission than this parched playground on a hilltop opposite Zorzor: the deserted houses, nobody about, the dusty plants, and at last the fat American woman trailing forward through the afternoon heat in a green-flowered dress, the pattern tightly expanded across the hips, a white topee. She whined at us dismally that this was the house: the dusty rambling shuttered house stuffy with the smell of vermin, torn mosquito-wire across the windows. She couldn’t find the keys and gazing through the windows I could see stacks of missionary literature on wobbly tables and files of broken filters against the peeling walls. “You see, I’m all alone here,” the American woman wailed, trailing round the building looking for the keys, but she checked herself, when she had taken another look at my dirty shorts, my dirty face and unshaven skin, and when a little later I insisted, “Are you really quite alone?” she wouldn’t answer the question, scared, I suppose, for her goods and her honour.
If Duogobmai was the dirtiest place in the Republic, Zorzor was the most desolate. It hadn’t been left to itself; the whites had intruded, had not advanced, had simply stuck and withered there, leaving their pile of papers, relics of a religious impulse, sentimental, naοve, destined to failure. Mrs. Croup’s husband had been drowned at Monrovia: the other man in the mission had gone off his head, Mrs. Croup had been alone now for six months. I heard her voice whining away across the compound, as I hypocritically called after her some expression of my pleasure at sleeping in a house after the native huts, “Well, I guess we try to keep it free of bugs.”
But she was a kind woman, and her whine had its excuse. I found next day that I was whining too. It was the heat. One hadn’t the energy to finish forming words; the voice trailed out, like bad handwriting, after the first syllable. She was kind, courageous, practical and a little bizarre. She sold me a cracked lamp from the mission stores at a great deal more than its value, and she kept a black baby in her house and a cobra in her garden. The cobra she fed with a live chicken every day; she had always meant to watch it as it swallowed the chicken, but somehow, though she guessed it would be interesting, she had never thought to watch through the lid of the hutch at the right time. She said enigmatically, “I’d have sent you an invite to dinner, but I’m going home in six months,” an excuse which became even more difficult to understand when later in the evening, learning that we were leaving next day, she said : “Oh, if I’d known you were going that soon, I’d have sent you an invite’
That evening I had a conference at her house. She had advised me to cut across the corner of French Guinea to Ganta, making my first stay at Bamakama. As usual the carriers said it was too far. So I took Amah down to her, as the spokesmen of the men, and Vande slid in at the door with a dour silent carrier who always trailed at his heels. They sat on stools and the baby crawled about their feet and Mrs. Croup stoked up a roaring fire in the tiny stuffy tropic room lined with photographs in Oxford frames.
But as Mrs. Croup talked, I became more and more doubtful whether she really knew anything about the route. She always travelled in a hammock specially made to carry her weight, with eighteen hammock-carriers. She drove them hard : a ten-hour trek was nothing to her. She sent out for a man who knew the route, but he had never been farther than Bamakama and then he had taken two days over the journey; he believed there was a short way by Jbaiay, but he wasn’t sure whether it was passable, whether £he chiefs had mended the bridges since the last rains.
I could see the carriers’ doubts growing; they were thinking that again I was going to force them into too long a trek. So I told them that we would go next day to Jbaiay and there discover the road to Bamakama; if it was too far we would spend the night at Jbaiay. They assented to the plan with suspicious alacrity… .
There were no rats that night: only cockroaches, ready to eat anything available. They lay there, while the light was on, flattened like large blood blisters against the wall, but when it was extinguished they flashed faster than lizards on the hunt. Sir Harry Johnston, who knew only the coast districts of Liberia, never penetrating, I believe, much farther inland than his rubber plantation at Mount Barclay outside Monrovia, speaks of these cockroaches as “obviously harboured and bred in the heaps of refuse which accumulate” in the Americo-Liberian settlements. But really they can be found everywhere in the Republic. “These insects,” he wrote, “do not hesitate at night to attack human beings who are asleep. They creep to the corners of the mouth of the sleeping person to suck the saliva. They eat the toe-nails down to the quick, and above all, they gnaw at any sore place or ulcer on the skin… . Dr. Buttikofer relates that he only saved his body from attack at one time by placing bowls of rice and sugar in his bedroom as a counter-attraction… . The present writer has been attacked in a somewhat similar way, but on board dirty and uncomfortable steamers on the West Coast a good many years ago. [n the bunks of these steamers cockroaches swarmed, and there were of course no mosquito curtains to shield the unfortunate passenger, who would wake in the dead of night, in black darkness, to find two or three large cockroaches clinging to his lips.”
This, as I grew more tired and my health a little failed, seemed to be what I would chiefly remember as Africa : cockroaches eating our clothes, rats on the floor, dust in the throat, jiggers under the nails, ants fastening on the flesh. But in retrospect even the cockroaches seem only the badge of an unconquered virginity, “never sacked, turned, nor wrought.” In Sierra Leone, in the bright electric Hill Station, one was conscious under the fans beside the iced drinks of how the land had been subdued; but even in the capital town of Liberia one was aware only of a settlement, a very chancy settlement that might be wiped out at any time by yellow fever. White and black, they were living here for a short while on the surface of the land, but Africa had the last say, and it said it in the form of rats and ants, of the forest swallowing up the little pits the Dutch prospectors had made and abandoned. There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love it when one finds it.
BLACK MONTPARNASSE
The Carriers’ Strike
NEXT morning we entered France : so the colony was known among the natives of the Republic. One of the men reported sick before we started, was paid off and left behind. The number of carriers had now almost reached a minimum. My cousin used a hammock and needed four carriers, but I reduced my hammock-men to three : I hadn’t used the hammock yet and unless I went sick I saw no reason why I should ever need to use it.