I said that the Government wage didn’t include food, and I was paying for their food. They could not tell that their food only came to about twopence a head; but they stood in a surly circle, not really listening to anything. It was no good arguing the merits of the case. Besides, the merits were all on their side. I was exploiting them like all their other masters, and it would have been no comfort to them to know that I could not afford not to exploit them and that I was a little ashamed of it. I pretended to be puzzled, to understand nothing of what they meant; they had contracted … I told somebody to fetch Vande and when he came I asked him what it was they were arguing about; I had understood from him that they had agreed to work for three shillings a week.
Then I bluffed. There was nothing else to do. They had me on the spot. Babu and Amah were on my side and of course my servants; Vande, too, I thought, from the way he spoke to them, though I couldn’t understand a word of Bande. I said, “Tell them they can go home. I’ll give them their pay, but they won’t get any dash, I’ll take new carriers here.” He talked to them, they shouted things at him, after what seemed a long while he smiled. He said, “They no want to go.” It was the moment to strike harder. Kolieva seemed to be the ringleader; I told him to go. I’d pay him off. I thought to myself all the while : if I can keep them together for a fortnight more they will be in a country as strange to them as to me; they won’t want to leave. There was a tribe, about a week ahead, which was still supposed to practise cannibalism on strangers; they wouldn’t want to be paid off there. But I had won: Kolieva explained it was all a mistake, grinning with shame; and a moment later they were laughing and joking as if there had been no disagreement; they were like children who have tried to get an extra holiday but bear no grudge because they have never really believed they would succeed. But the dispute had let out most of the bad blood; for two more days there were to be continual arguments, which wore my temper to threads, and then quite suddenly they began to work together happily and smoothly.
Vande asked whether they could kill the kid I had been given in Kpangblamai, and it seemed the right moment for conciliation. I said ‘yes,’ not expecting the immediate slaughter there in front of the hut: the little kid held down on the ground by its legs like a crucified child, the knife across the throat and the screams through the flow of blood. The kid took a long time dying, the blood welling out across the earth, gathering in pools on the baked unporous ground, as the light went and someone in the chiefs enclosure began to shake a rattle. And it was good to know that one had not been deserted.
Bamakama
The next day wasn’t so good. We were out on the trail with a guide from Koinya by seven, but the paths were very rough for the carriers, and they and my cousin fell a long way behind. There was a multiplicity of little paths and the country was slowly changing from the Liberian hills and forest to a plateau covered with tall elephant grass twice the height of a man, a plateau which I suppose stretches northward to what Mungo Park called the Mountains of Kong, and then on again to the Niger. On one of these tiny paths I saw the only horse, with the exception of the bony mare in Freetown, I saw in West Africa; an old Mandingo with a white beard and a turban sat it and watched us go by through the grass. A boy carried all their gear upon his head. He may have come from very far away, perhaps from the Sahara After three and a half hours’ march we reached the St. Paul River again, or the Diani as this upper reach is called. On either side the forest followed it, ‘H slow shadowed river, seventy yards across, under the huge trees. It was only at the watersides that nature was ever beautifuclass="underline" away from the rivers it was too dry and shrivelled and lifeless for beauty. But here there was faint movement, depth and gleam: refreshment, too, in the thought that the great slow stream was moving down to our destination, though by a quicker route, and would come out two hundred miles or so farther, past the great central forest, into the flats and mangrove swamps of Monrovia.
A ferry took us to the other side, a raft built of the trunks of trees lashed together and pulled across on a creeper rope. Amedoo was with me and Amah and about ten of the carriers; the others were somewhere behind with my cousin. After half an hour I was anxious, but my anxiety was small compared with Amedoo’s. He had been ordered in Sierra Leone by Daddy to take care of us and never to show his face again in Freetown without us, and the responsibility weighed on him. He walked restlessly up and down the high bank above the river, shouting, but the sound died out a few yards away among the trees. There was nothing we could do if they had lost their way, and my cousin’s lot really would have been happier than mine. My cousin had Laminah and the cook and Vande, the beds and mosquito-nets, and most of the food and more than half the carriers. I tried to make up my mind what I should do; it would be no use chasing each other all over French Guinea. I decided to go on, just as my cousin, I learnt later, had decided to go back.
But at last when I was on the point of giving the order to march, for fear we should be caught by darkness in the bush, an answer did come, from between the big trees, from across the water, and presently a tired angry band rejoined us. Among the many paths which had to be closed with sprays, one had been left open and they had taken it. The path had narrowed into nearly nothing at all, but they went on, Laminah cutting a way for them with the sword he wore, until they reached a closed wall of greenery and knew they were lost. In such densely overgrown country it was easy enough to be lost completely within a mile of a village and for all they knew they might be ten miles from any other human beings. If it had not been for the fiver I should have gone straight on to Bamakama without knowing that they were lost, and if Laminah had not found a man who guided them to the St. Paul, a piece of luck they couldn’t have expected when once they had strayed off the main path, we should have been permanently separated, for my cousin had no idea of the route I intended to follow the other side of the St. Paul.
Another four hours’ marching along narrow winding trails through thick elephant grass brought us to Bamakama. Here there was a rest-house for travellers outside the village in a small rotting compound, but it was so long since any white man had used it that it was in a horrible state of decay, the hut was full of bugs and suddenly as we drank our tea an army of flies descended on the compound, settling all over our faces and the food. The monkey sat in a corner moaning like a child, and as the sun declined and the flies left us, the cockchafers came, detonating against the wall. A rat had died under the floor, and “the smell of decay settled over the compound. Tim was the second place where there was nothing to do but get drunk. We looked across the wall with envy towards the airy village. We were enclosed like lepers with the dead rat and the cockchafers.
And again there was the inevitable palaver. That night it was the water-carriers who caused the bother. The water for our washing and for the filter had to be carried up every day from the nearest stream in basins. Kolleva headed a deputation. I couldn’t make out clearly what it was about; a tribal dispute seemed to have split the carriers into hostile groups. They complained, I think, that Amah, the second headman, favoured the Bande carriers; they didn’t do their share of the water-carrying. They asked that Amah should cease to be second headman. The fight went on a long while and I was glad to be a little drunk. But I slept badly; what Daddy had told me in Sierra Leone came back now when my nerves were tired with the marches and the squabble. I imagined all night that leeches were falling on my face. It was really the plaster ceiling of the pretentious rest-house which the rats were demolishing. I was too drunk to remember that the mosquito-net protected me.