It was little wonder, then, that the senses were dulled and registered only acute boredom. I suppose there was some beauty in the forest, but the eye had long ceased to be aesthetic The great swallow-tailed butterflies which rose in clouds round our waists at the stream sides seemed no more worth watching than the black ants which fastened on the flesh.
Perhaps the Liberian forest is peculiar in Africa for the quality of deadness, for other writers more often complain in their parts of Africa of the noise and savagery of the jungle. M. Celine is an example. “The forest is only waiting for this signal [the sunset] to start to shake, whistle and moan in all its depths, like some huge, barbarous, unlighted railway station… .” How we would have welcomed the moans and whistles of that station. You can grow intimate with almost any living thing, transfer to it your own emotion of tenderness, nostalgia, regret, so that often of a relationship one remembers the scene with the most affection. A particular line of hedge in a Midland county, a drift of leaves in a particular wood : it is only human to imagine that we receive back from these the feeling someone left with them. But no one had ever transferred to this forest any human emotion at all. Like the shell of a house on a bankrupt housing estate it had never been lived in.
That poem of A. E. Housman’s which begins Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays.
For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways had a curious fascination for me during those weeks; it was like a succession of pleasant. sounds in a foreign language; it represented the huge difference between this Nature and what I had previously know. I used to reserve it as a last resort for when I could think of nothing else to think about and recite it very slowly to myself, wondering whether I had covered a hundred yards between the first and the last verse.
The poem had ceased to mean anything; it was impossible here to think of Nature in such terms of enchantment and nostalgia; it would have been like cherishing a dead weed in a pot, a sign of mental derangement.
And full of shade the pillared forest Would murmur and be mine… .
So Housman wrote, sharing the feeling of Wordsworth and many English Nature poets, that Nature is something alive which could be possessed as one possesses a friend or a lover, but this forest had never belonged in that way to anyone. Perhaps it was even wrong to think of it as dead, for it had never been alive.
But it was only fair, I suppose, that the moments of extraordinary happiness, the sense that one was nearer than one had ever been to the racial source, to satisfying the desire for an instinctive way of life, the sense of release, as when in the course of psychoanalysis one uncovers by one’s own effort a root, a primal memory, should have been counterbalanced by the boredom of childhood too, that agonising boredom of ‘apartness’ which came before one had learnt the fatal trick of transferring emotion, of flashing back enchantingly all day long one’s own image, a period when other people were as distinct from oneself as this Liberian forest. I sometimes wonder whether, if one had stayed longer, if one had not been driven out again by tiredness and fear, one might have relearned the way to live without transference, with a lost objectivity.
Rain in the Air
The chief from Galaye acted as our guide back from the plateau into the forest, wearing for the occasion a black tail coat and a green beret, with one of his men to follow him and carry his sword. At a large village, Pala, they told us that the next town was Bamou, a long way off; we should certainly not reach it until six, and we had started the mardi at seven. There was nowhere in between where we could sleep. The men were grumbling already as they arrived, and I could foresee a long series of angry complaints. But I wouldn’t consent to stay at Pala, (that would be to delay our arrival at Ganta too long), so I didn’t wait for all the carriers to arrive, to get together and rebel, but walked off with a guide, the hammock-men and Amedoo.
We went for more than three hours without passing a village, and the path was wide enough for the sun to scorch us incessantly; for lunch we had to make a clearing with swords in the bush itself to gain enough shade. But in the small village we reached at last I learnt to my relief of a town not more than an hour and a half away. The village chief was hospitable, bringing out gourds of palm wine for my carriers to drink, and I did not notice in time his unwillingness to offer his hand. Only after I had put out my own and he had reluctantly taken it did I see that it was covered with white sores. It may not have been leprosy, and in any case leprosy is only very slightly contagious, but it spoilt my food for me all that day.
I never knew the name of the place we reached. It cannot have been Bamou, for we must have left that path. It had a guest-house in a little enclosure just outside the town. The chief was sullen and inhospitable, he wouldn’t provide a cooked meal for the carriers, nor would he allow them to sleep in the town. He said they would cause trouble there. I bought rice from him at the highest rate I had yet paid and he left again with his headman and a little train of disapproving ancients.
The air was heavy with thunder. The carriers felt ill-as they lay about in the verandah. I sat listening to snatches of argument, until just before sunset, as the storm gathered and bore down out of the northwest, shouts and bugle-calls brought everyone to the fence. A procession was approaching the compound from the village. A man with an old sporting gun over his shoulder led the way, then a covered hammock borne by four men, attendants running on either side and one of them blowing blasts on a bugle. I thought it must be at least a French Commissioner and hoped that he would not ask to see my papers, for I had no visa which would allow us to pass through a French colony. But it wasn’t a French Commissioner who stepped out of his hammock and strutted to the gate with a dog at his heels and a riding whip hung at his wrist. He was a black with tight curled ringlets and black side-whiskers. He wore an old white topee, a Fair Isle jumper, breeches and braces and a belt, gaiters and little white kid boots. He stood swinging his whip, watching us as if we were curious caged animals, with superb arrogance. Somebody said he was the chief from Djiecke, the next town on the track to Ganta. He spoke neither English nor French, but when I asked him through Mandingo Amah how far it was to Djiecke, and told him that I intended to reach the town next day, the answer came, of course, ‘too farlittle It seemed unlikely, for it was nearly sunset and he would hardly have planned to spend the night in the bush. When he had stared at us for long enough he swaggered back to his hammock and to the sound of one more heraldic blast was borne away swaying into the forest. A heavy storm broke soon after dark: lightning like one prolonged flickering illumination. The carriers slept on the floor of the verandah. The sound of their breathing and snores was very companionable in the pounding electric night, and they kept away the rats. But die storm worried me. The dry season was supposed to last another month, but sometimes the rains came early. It would never do to be caught in the interior, for on the lower level below Ganta the ways in the wet season were impassable; Central Liberia between the villages became a swamp, and we had not yet even turned towards the south.