The villages we passed were all deserted except for a few women. An elephant had been killed somewhere in the bush, I suppose with the poisoned spears the natives in these parts shoot from ancient guns, and all the men for miles around had gathered to strip its flesh. To our surprise we arrived, in less than four hours, at Bassa Town. I was glad, save that it made the Coast seem farther away than ever. We were two days now from Tapee, but the young native sub-Commissioner here still spoke of Grand Bassa as seven days away. He was the only man in the place, a new village built of square low huts; all the others were off after the elephant, so I was a little afraid of what my carriers might do in a town deserted of its menfolk.
But I couldn’t be bothered. As soon as I’d eaten some lunch I went to bed and sweated again between the blankets, for the fever had returned. The huts were too low for me to stand upright, and instead of rats there were huge spiders everywhere. I had just enough energy to note depressingly in my diary: “Last tin of biscuits, last tin of butter, last piece of bread.” It was astonishing how important these luxuries had become; there were ten biscuits each, we separated them in the tin and rationed them each in our own way, but the butter proved to be rancid and had to be used for cooking.
I noted, too, a sign that we were meeting the edge of civilisation pushing up from the Coastlittle A young girl hung around all day posturing with her thighs and hips, suggestively, like a tart. Naked to the waist, she was conscious of her nakedness; she knew that breasts had a significance to the white man they didn’t have to the native. There couldn’t be any doubt that she had known whites before. There were other signs too : the scarcity of food and the high price of rice. It would be higher the sub-Commissioner said, when we got nearer to Grand Bassa. He wanted me to buy a couple of hampers in Bassa Town and so save perhaps sixpence on each hamper. There are limitations to native mathematics, and Laminah could never understand why I refused, why it would cost more to save & shilling on rice and employ two extra men to carry it That day was the last short trek on the way to the Coast. There was no longer any talk of ‘too far\ The carriers longed as much as I did to escape from the bush and reach the sea, and as for my poor servants, they were dog-tired. Their nerves were on edge and one evening Amedoo and the head carrier came to blows in front of me over a dish of dirty meat scraps. It was February the twenty-seventh when we left Bassa Town, and we had been walking since February the third. An eight-hour march brought us to Gyon, but it did not seem to bring us any closer to Grand Bassa. That remained, according to rumour, a week away. It still seemed impossible to me that we should ever reach it. My fever did not return after Bassa Town, but my temperature remained a long way below normal.
The vitality of both of us reached the lowest ebb that day and the next. We had to be very careful all the time not to quarrel. We only saw each other for an hour or two at the end of the day, but even then it was not easy to avoid subjects on which we might disagree. The range of such subjects, indeed, had become almost as wide as life itself. At first it was enough to avoid politics of any kind, but now we were capable of quarrelling over the merits of tea. The only thing was to remain silent, but there was always danger that silence might strike one of us as sullenness. My nerves were the worst affected and it was to my cousin’s credit that we never let our irritation with each other out into words.
Gyon was an empty inhospitable place of square dirty huts painted on the outside with white splashes of a kind of liver-brown mud. Some association in a tired brain with the plague-marked houses in Stuart London made me think the place unhealthy, and it was one of the curious results of complete exhaustion that the mind couldn’t separate fantasy from reality. The place was only empty because all the men were away on their farms except the headman, who would do as little for us as he could, but to this day I find it hard to realise that the village was not emptied by disease.
We had to sit on our boxes for more than three hours before the men returned and we could find huts for ourselves. As for my servants, I could find nothing for them; they had to sleep in the open cookhouse round their fire, and they got little sleep, for they were afraid of wild beasts, particularly of elephants and leopards. We were in leopard country, every road into Tapee had been guarded by a trap, wooden boxes in which a kid could be tied with a drop-door weighted with bundles of shells.
There was no longer enough whisky for sundowners and we rationed the last half-bottle in teaspoonfuls, which we drank in our tea. As we ate our supper some kind of trial was being held by the carriers in front of Amedoo as judge. They sat before him in two long lines and each witness in turn stated his case with the gestures and intonations of accomplished orators. It was still going on when I went to bed at eight, and I learned the next day from Mark that the trial was not over till midnight.
I never properly knew what it was all about, but early next morning Kolleva, who had once been my favourite hammock-man with Babu, came to me as I sat in the village kitchen waiting for breakfast and wondering whether I could stand another long trek (my shoes had given way, the soles had worn evenly down until they were as thin as tissue-paper, and then they simply disappeared. I had only left a pair of gym shoes with crκpe soles). I couldn’t understand what he said to me; the other carriers clustered round; it was obvious that a Court of Appeal was supposed to be sitting. Amedoo explained, but I’m not sure that I understood him correctly.
One of the carriers who was called Bukkai had left something behind at the spot where we stopped for lunch. It had been taken by Fadai, the thin emaciated boy with lovely eyes and venereal disease who called himself a British subject because he had been born in Sierra Leone. When Bukkai accused Fadai of the theft and threatened to bring the case to trial, Fadai was quite ready to return whatever it was (I think it was a needle and cotton) rather than make trouble, but Kolieva, taking him down to the stream below the village, had extorted money from him by threats and by promising to bear false witness on his behalf. The trial took place, but Kolieva remained silent and Fadai told the whole story. Then Kolieva became the accused, and to bear false witness in their eyes was a more serious offence than to steal. He was found guilty and fined four shillings by Amedoo, a very large sum representing nearly ten days’ wages. As I was uncertain whether I understood the facts, and as I knew how reliable Amedoo was and the sentence seemed popular, I said, “I agree,” and because Kolieva would have argued it, the absurd imperial phrase, which never failed to silence them, ^Palaver finished”; At first Kolieva declared that be would come no farther and demanded his pay, but the thought of the long trek alone through strange tribes daunted him.
The Detective of Darndo
That day was another long trek, nearly eight hours of it. Our guide slipped behind at the first village we reached; and I could feel every root and stone through my gym shoes. The carriers whom we had taken on at Bassa Town and who had asked to come with us failed halfway and I couldn’t use my hammock at all. It was typical of the Bassa tribe to promise and then to fail. I developed a bitter dislike of the very appearance of Bassa men, the large well-covered bodies, the round heads, the soft effeminate eyes. The Coast had corrupted them, had made them liars, swindlers, lazy, weak, completely undependable. But it was from the Bassa tribe, and from the Vais, whose territory, too, touched the decadent seaboard, that the governing class recruits new members. To the criticism that the native has no hand in the administration, the Americo-Liberian will point to Bassa and Vai men in the Government departments, Bassa and Vai Commissioners and clerks.