Then take the masks. I had asked Mark whether he feared Landow when Jie was out of his mask and just the blacksmith of Mosambolahun; and it was obvious that he feared him less, but that even then the blacksmith retained an aura of something not quite human. Did the supernatural rest in the mask? No, one person would say, it was in the combination of the two, but on the other hand old disused masks were often retained as charms and ‘fed’, and there were masks, even apart from the man who wore them, which it was fatal to a woman to see : fatal presumably because the devil’s agents would exact retribution, with the knife or with poison, but to what extent was this human punishment also supernatural?
‘Devil’, of course, is a word used by the English-speaking native to describe something unknown in our theology: it has nothing to do with evil. One might equally call these big bush devils angels-for they have the angelic properties of alacrity and invisibility-if that word contained no element of ‘good’. In a Christian land we have grown so accustomed to the idea of a spiritual war, of God and Satan, that this supernatural world, which is neither good nor evil but simply Power, is almost beyond sympathetic comprehension. Not quite: for those witches which haunted our childhood were neither good nor evil. They terrified us with their power, but we knew all the time that we must not escape them. They simply demanded recognition: flight was a weakness.
That night Dr. Harley showed us a grotesquely horrible collection of devils’ masks. Each one had obviously been made by a conscious artist. No effect was accidental. Here were the two-faced masks of a woman’s society; here male masks which women were forbidden to see. These were different from the masks worn by the dancing devils. Those had been part human, part animal, these were modelled closely on human features. There was one with a thin beard made of chicken’s feathers, and another, the oldest (it looked at least three hundred years old), had the thin nose, the high brow of a European. It was quite different from any other mask I saw. It might have been modelled on the features of some Portuguese sailor wrecked or marooned on the West Coast, or it may have gone back no further than a slave-trader at the beginning of the last century, a man like Canot whose autobiography is set on this Liberian coast, a hanger-on perhaps of his Portuguese employer, Don Pedro Blanco, who built his extraordinary palace on the debated marshy land between Liberia and Sierra Leone, near Sherbro, where the cargo steamers of Elder Dempster still sometimes call, to their crew’s discomfort, a palace with separate islands for his seraglio, with billiard rooms and all the advantages of both European and African civilisation. The man on whom the mask was modelled, of course, was as dead as Canot, as the Liberian forest which some urgent motive had caused him to penetrate-perhaps the desire for gold or slaves : but all the power of Ms motive had gone into the mask. I do not think it was greed : it was a fanatical Curiosity which leant out of the empty eyeballs.
A Sacred Waterfall
Before we left Ganta I learned of a sacred waterfall in the forest near the village of Zugbei. If we made a detour on the way to Sakripie, our next big town, we would pass the village. One of Harley’s pupils at the mission school was chief there, and though the existence of the waterfall had been kept secret from Dr. Harley for many years, his pupil had lately shown signs of willingness to guide him to it Human sacrifice had once been offered at the falls, but now the paths were no longer kept open.
Next morning, as we were about to start along Dunbar’s new road north-east to Zuluyi, I heard that Babu could go no further, he was sick. He had been one of the few men, though he spoke no word of English, with whom I thought I had some contact. I had known him to be completely dependable; he had not joined with the carriers who had struck for more pay. I think he was genuinely sick; he had been given heavy loads the last few days and he was not strong, and none of the carriers would have chosen by this time to stay behind alone among a strange tribe, at least ten days’ trek away from his own people. I should have liked to dismiss him with a handsome present, but it would only have encouraged others to go sick. I had to pretend anger and pay him off with a very small dash. I felt guilty of a meanness; he had no friends among the carriers, except Guawa, the other Buzie, and they taunted him. I would have lost any of them more willingly.
But it was awkward to lose any man when I was beginning to feel that I might soon need a hammock badly. There were not enough men now to carry even an empty hammock. I had to tell them to take the heavy pole out and leave it behind and add the hammock to one of the lighter loads. I could see the doctor watching me, critically; he didn’t have to tell me what he was thinking.
It was about two hours’ walk to Zuluyi. The chief there had been one of Harley’s pupils and came to guide us to Zugbei. We passed through a thick steep forest country, up the slopes of what the natives believed to be a holy hill. Tiny fairy people, the chief said, had lived on this hill and they used to come down and help the Manos in war. Harley was interested; it was the first he had heard of any pygmy traditions in Liberia. There might be remains … I think he was picturing to himself reports, excavations, wall paintings, and the only kind of glory his altruistic spirit could appreciate. There was a big hole, the chief said, pointing up a path which disappeared a few feet away into the trees and underbrush, where the small people used to live. Boys used to go once a year with gifts into the hole. The last boy who had gone to the hole was still alive, an old man, in Zugbei. He had had his head shaved, but when he came out his hair was dressed in ringlets. Now no one went into the hole any more, but gifts were still brought.
We reached Zugbei, a tiny village, in the fiercest heat of the day : a worse heat than we had had in the highlands; the air was already saturated with the coming rains. The villages were no longer perched on thimbles of rock above the forest. One came straight into them from the bush; they were like little dried-up airless pools.
The chief led us to the waterfall. None of us expected to see more than a thin trickle of water over a few boulders, for some of the large rivers were so low that the carriers could wade through them and the dug-out canoes lay on the banks cracking for want of use” We walked straight into the thickest wall of forest. The chief and another man led, clearing a path with cutlasses. It was impossible to tell how they knew the way. They walked along fallen trees, scrambled down slopes at an angle of forty-five degrees, cutting all the time; there was no sign of a path. Then suddenly at the bottom of the steepest hill we came out into a dell full of the sound of water, which streamed under feathers of foam over a fall sixty feet deep. AU the slopes became alive with people, girls with the pretty horn-shaped breasts of the Manos, men with cutlasses. The whole village seemed to have come with us, but the forest had been so thick we had seen only the chief and his companion. They sat on the slopes staring at the incredible bounty of water. Within the young chiefs memory there had been human sacrifices at the fall, the feeding of a slave at the end of each dry season to a snake, a hundred feet long, who had lain below the fall. It was the myth of the rainbow snake which one finds as far afield as Australia: the materialisation of the rainbow shimmer in the falling water. The sacrifice had ended when the present chief was a child. The slave, though his hands were tied behind him, had grasped the chiefs robe and carried him over the edge of the fall. That had been the end of the sacrifice and the snake had gone down the river to the St. John and lived now in a pool, very close to where we crossed, between Ganta and Djiecke. We said goodbye to Dr. Harley in Zugbei. We could have slept there, but I couldn’t bear the thought that we had not yet turned south. I wanted at least the sensation of moving, however short a distance, towards the coast. So we went on for half an hour due south to a dull village of which I couldn’t learn the name. It sounded like Mombei. The chief would have no chop cooked for the men, but he dashed me a hamper of rice and they cooked their own. As ! usual there was no peace when we arrived. I was feeling sick and tired. The scramble in the heat to and from the waterfall had exhausted me more than a long trek, and it angered me that, directly I sat down, a carrier called Siafa came to show me his venereal sore. He had had it for three years, he hadn’t shown it to the doctor, who could have injected him, and I felt he might have kept it for a few more weeks untended. But there was one thing I couldn’t afford to do, show my impatience or my lack of knowledge. Daily after that I went through the farce of dressing the sore. Afterwards I dosed myself heavily with Epsom and went to bed; suddenly I felt hopelessly tired of rats; we were no longer short of kerosene, so I left my lamp burning, but it made no difference. There were always shadows for them to play in. The Epsom brought me out of my bed in the night to the edge of the forest. It was almost full moon and the huts stood out in a bright greenish daylight. It was absolutely quiet: not a sound from the dark dead forest. Every door was closed and the goats were the only living things in sight, as they wandered sleeplessly between the huts. I thought even then that the scene was beautiful, but the thought did not alter my impatience to be gone. The spell would only work after many months; now all I wanted was medicine, a bath, iced drinks, and something other than this bush lavatory of trees and dead leaves where at any moment I might crouch upon a snake in the darkness.