MISSION STATION
Mythology
I dreamed that I was two thousand miles away from the mud hut and someone was outside the door waiting to come in. Perhaps a goat stumbling across the threshold and the dead fire caused the dream, or maybe a memory of the masks on Harley’s table, bobbing up one after another into the sleeping mind, like grotesque balloons at a carnival released towards the ceiling, each with its individual expression of terror and power.
It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.
Later the presence took many odd forms : a troop of black-skinned girls who carried poison flowers which it was death to touch; an old Arab; a half-caste; armed men with shaven heads and narrow eyes and the appearance of Tibetans out of a travel book; a Chinese detective.
You couldn’t call these things evil, as Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw was evil, with his carroty hair and his white face of damnation. That story of James’s belongs to the Christian, the orthodox imagination. Mine were devils only in the African sense of beings who controlled power. They were not even always terrifying. I remember that at the age of sixteen it was a being with the absurdly symbolic title of the Princess of Time who haunted my sleep. The poisoned flowers, the Tibetan guards, the old Arab whom I think of now as someone like the Mandingo chief at Koinya, were all in her service. I can still recall the dull pain in my palms and my insteps when I deliberately touched the flowers, for I was always trying to escape her, her kindliness as well as her destructiveness. Once I was incited to kill her: I was given a book of ritual, bound in limp leather like an Omar Khayyam at Christmas-time, and a dagger. But she survived into many later dreams. Any dream which opened with terror, with flight, with falling, with unseen presences and opening doors, might end with her cruel and reassuring presence.
It was only many years later that Evil came into my dreams: the man with gold teeth and rubber surgical gloves; the old woman with ringworm; the man with his throat cut dragging himself across the carpet to the bed.
Full Moon
ALONG the northern border we had been walking through the edge of the enormous bush; now we moved steadily lower and deeper into its heart. The deadness was sometimes broken by the squabble of monkeys; a baboon once crossed the path, running like an old man with the tips of its fingers just touching the ground; a leopard’s pads marked the sand by a stream, where a snake had come to drink And outside the first village, Yeibo, there was a round shallow pond under thorn trees with great carp-like fish lounging lazily in the shadows. It was still early morning, I was happy with the sense that every step was towards home, there was something peculiarly English about the fish, the pond, the quite small trees. It was a foolish mind that had come all this way to find pleasure in a sight so vaguely, so remotely English, a pleasure I felt again when we came out of the forest into a stretch of land like a Midland park; a small stream, a long undulating pasture, a few cows, and groups of trees, like elms, in the long grass. A quarter of a mile away the forest wall set a limit to England, and across the stream in single file came a few men, naked except for their loin-cloths, carrying bows and steel-tipped arrows. It was like the world of Miss Nesbit, where odd savage people appear in country lanes; they might have been coming through the Amulet out of the African forest into an English park. We passed them, going ourselves into Africa, while they with their bows and arrows, their naked cicatrised bodies, went on into the park, towards the great house and the butler’s pantry.
Six hours brought us to Peyi, where the chief was friendly and the hut clean and the village very poor. Nearly everyone was old and diseased, withered, goitered, with venereal sores. The chief had no authority; he was making a mat when we arrived, and when he had finished the villagers crowded on to it, pushing the chief off. There they lounged outside our hut until the full heat of the afternoon dispersed them, watching everything we did, and a girl had her hair deloused by an old woman with sores over her hands.
Eighteen of the carriers approached the hut; I no longer feared a strike or desertion : they were too far away from their own homes for that. And they had developed a kind of pride in the journey. It was a rare adventure in a country where carriers were usually employed from village to village by the day. I heard them sometimes on the march answering proudly “Bolahun” to questioners. It didn’t matter that these strangers had no idea where Bolahun lay. They knew what miles of forest and river they had come, how they had even passed through France, and presently were going to reach the sea.
Now they wanted to borrow threepence each out of their wages. At Ganta they had borrowed two shillings from the cook to buy a goat with, and he demanded sixpence interest, a rate of about fifty per cent a week. The rest of the money they were going to spend on palm wine and extra soup (the name they had for the horrible anonymous wedges of meat or fish with which they cooked their rice). The chief took their money, but he gave them nothing in return, and in this poor village he could find them only one pail of rice for their chop.