Galaye
The smell of the dead rat, the cockroaches which had got at our clothes and eaten them into holes, drove us away early. I was anxious above everything to get to Ganta. Mrs, Croup had spoken of it as three days away, but the chief at Bamakama seemed to think it was at least another three days off. It seemed to recede rather than approach; nobody at Bamakamft really knew the way, because Ganta was in Liberia, another country, and though the Mandingo traders recognise no boundaries, their country stretching from Timbuctoo to the Coast and Paris, across desert and forest, the ordinary tribesman has seldom moved more than a day’s march from his town. The boundaries between country and country, as between tribe and tribe, might be no more than a tiny stream the carriers waded through beneath a shower of butterflies, but they could not have been more definite if all the European display of barbed wire and Customs sheds had been visible on either bank.
The chief strapped on a sword and acted as guide. I was glad that he set so smart a pace: if we were ever to reach Ganta, I thought, the men had got to be raced through the villages between. I had promised them a short march of three hours; but I was afraid my temper would give way altogether if I had to argue them on at every village. So we raced ahead, the chief and I and Kolieva, and left my cousin and the men to follow; I knew the carriers hadn’t the resolution to stop behind without me.
It took exactly three hours to get to Galaye, a populous little town with the remains of old mud walls at the back like pieces of abandoned scenery. The rest-house here was in such a state of decay that I wouldn’t use it and chose a hut in the village instead. It was a hospitable place; few of the younger people had seen a white face before and they stood all day in the doorway. There was nothing you could do without their noticing it; to draw a handkerchief 4rom the pocket caused a craning of necks. It worked a little on the nerves, this constant stare; but you had to recognise the superiority of their attitude over the white man’s to something strange. We were as good as a circus; they had no wish to stuff us or skin us or put us in cages. The carriers, after one more dispute over the water-carrying, were very cheerful, but I knew better by now than to expect their happiness to last. Their mood changed more rapidly than April weather. They, too, were appreciating something genuinely Gallic, for the girls of Galaye had an air of greater freedom towards strangers than I saw in any other tribe : one girl in particular who, when dark fell and the drums and harps were taken out, joined in the carriers’ dances, a stamping and thrusting out of the elbows and buttocks, a caricature of sexuality. When they approved of a dancer, the others crowded round and stroked his arms and forehead, a curious intimate tactile applause.
The dancing went on for hours in a close hot circle before our hut. The moon was half full, and the increasing light worked on their spirits. This was one of the revelations of Africa, the deadness of what we think of as alive, the deadness of nature, the trees and shrubs and flowers, the vitality of what we think of as dead, the cold lunar craters. The carriers were aware of the moon with an intimacy from which we were excluded. At Galaye it was already moving in their blood, so that even Amedoo burst into the circle and danced with a sudden wild lapse from dignity. But the most grotesque of the dancers was a moron dwarf They dropped him into the ring with a couple of piccaninnies of three years old who were as tall as he, and he swayed a great inflated head, blister a pin would burst, to the beat of the rattle and then howled and wept to be released.
I lay in bed while the music went on and held Burton against the mosquito-net to let the lamplight shine feebly through on the page of cheap print. The cover was already going damp, as if the book had been left out in the dew, The word nigra caught my eye, as I listened to the feet stamping and the calls I couldn’t understand. I suddenly felt, reading the lines of Calpurnius Graecus, the irresistible tug of the familiar, a longing for flowers and dew and scent It was hard to believe they existed in the same world and that there were emotions of tenderness and regret that couldn’t be expressed with a harp, a drum and a rattle, buttocks and black teats.
Te sine, vae misere mihi Mia nigra viento, Pallentesque rosae, nee dulce rubens hyacinthus, Nullos nee myrtus nee laurus spiral odores.
I put the light out and listened to the moonlit tumult, but when it ceased and the villagers crept into their huts and put up the doors, there was such a rush of rats down the walls that I switched on my torch and saw the shadows racing down. But I had left my door open and they didn’t stay. I had the night to myself.
The Dead Forest
The next day was the eleventh of the trek, and we turned back into the great forest with very little idea of where we should spend the next night, except that I was determined it should be at least fifteen miles towards the vanishing Ganta. Examining my diary I find the first expression of a weariness which was more mental than physical Ganta, which I had thought was two days away from Zorzor, seemed to be receding. I had long given up thinking in terms of hours, but I still clung to time in the sense of darkness and daylight, not admitting yet that to be happy in Africa one must cease to count even the days and weeks and months.
The chief at Galaye told me that Ganta was still three days away, and only after Ganta would we begin to head south. Every march took us farther from the coast.
It was not that the villages were ever dull to me, and only here in French Guinea were their simplicity and hospitality a little tarnished by the touch of white rule, but the rising in the dark, the hurried breakfast, the seven hours of tramping along narrow paths through the hot-house forest with no view to either side and only occasional glimpses of sky above, this routine became almost unbearable. I was usually alone with a carrier or a guide who couldn’t speak English, for Mark and Amedoo could not keep my pace, and I had to try in vain to occupy the mind, to think of things to think about. I would calculate: I can think of this place or that person for so many hundred steps, and I would have a sense of triumph when the thought lasted me for a few dozen steps further than I had hoped. But usually it was the other way; the image or the idea lost interest a long while before I had taken the hundred paces. And this succession of thoughts had to be kept up for six or seven hours on end. I remember for what a long time I was able to think of fruit salts, for far longer and with more longing than I thought of beer or iced drinks. I suppose my digestion was suffering from the tinned foods, rough rice, the dry tough African chickens, and about five eggs a day. For the only way to economise our tinned supplies, which threatened to run short, was to eat off the country, rice, eggs and chicken, for meal after meal.
If the forest had been full of dangerous life, the day’s marches would have been more supportable. A few monkeys, a snake or two, the sound of heavy birds creaking invisibly overhead, and ants, ants everywhere, this was au the life in the dead forest The word ‘forest’ to me had always conveyed a sense of wildness and beauty, of an active natural force, but this forest was simply a green wilderness, and not even so very green. We passed on twelve-inch paths through an endless back garden of tangled weeds; they didn’t seem to be growing round us so much as dying; there was no view, no change of scene, nothing to distract the eyes, and even if there had been, we couldn’t have enjoyed the sight, for the eyes had to be kept on the ground all the way, to avoid the roots and boulders. It was a relief, a distraction, when a stream broke the path. A carrier would horse one across, for it was dangerous to wet the feet in the tiniest shallow stream because of guinea-worm which the Mandingo traders had brought down from the Sahara. The smell of the carriers had long ceased to be noticeable: I suppose our own smell by that time was bad enough, for fear of the same worm prevented JH5 bathing as the carriers did in the rivers. The guinea-worm makes its way through any sore in the foot, going up as far as the knee. When the foot is afterwards put in water the worm spews its eggs into the water through the sore. The only way to deal with it in the absence of a doctor is to find its end like a thread of cotton and wind it out in a long unbroken length round a match-stick. If the worm breaks, the leg may fester.