I shall call the next village we stayed in Darndo. It sounded like Darndo, and it is marked on no map. I reached it with one or two carriers a long way ahead of the others. In a small square hut with a verandah draped with the Liberian flag, a number of elderly. It is the pride of the Vai people that they have the only written language in Africa, but the Bassa are imitating them, and I found a piece of their script stuck, perhaps as a charm, in the roof of my hut. The natives were sitting with a half-caste. He was dressed in dirty pyjamas, he had a yellow face, a few decaying teeth, a glass eye; he was one of the ugliest men I met in Liberia, but there is no one there for whom I feel now a greater affection. He gave me a chair, he brought me the first fresh fruit I had seen for weeks, large bitter oranges and limes; he arranged a hut for me, and he expected no return.
He was an absurd and a heroic figure. He said to me, “You are a missionary, of course?” and when I said “No,” he fixed me with his one eye, while the other raked the glaring afternoon sky above the dirty huts. He said, “I believe you to be a member of the Royal Family.” I asked him why he believed that “Ah,” he said, “it is my business. You see I am a detective.” But he had run completely out of paper; there was none to be got nearer than the Coast; and when I gave him a dozen pages out of my notebook, he was embarrassingly grateful. I thought he was going to weep from his single eye, and he disappeared at once into his hut to write 3. report that a member of the British Royal Family was wandering through the interior of the Republic.
But I have said he was heroic. Like Mr. Nelson he was a tax-gatherer- He belonged to the Coast, to the cafes of Mr. Wordsworth’s dreams, and here he was stuck away in a tiny village of a strange tribe. Like Mr. Nelson he was unpaid, he had to live on what the natives gave him, but unlike Mr. Nelson he gave something in return. They trusted him and be defended them as far as he could, with what vitality was left in his fever-drained body, from the uniformed messengers who streamed back and forth between Tapee and the Coast. It needed courage and it needed tact.
I think his kindness saved us both that day from complete collapse, that and the news he gave us that there was a road for twelve miles out of Grand Bassa to a place called Harlingsville and that a Dutch company in the port possessed a motor lorry, for that might easily shorten the distance by a day. With the dark another storm came up, rumbling over the hills between us and Tapee. A miserable man dragged himself over to my hut across the coffee beans which were lying in the dust to dry. He asked me whether I was a doctor and I said that I had a few medicines, but when he told me it was gonorrhoea he suffered from, I had to admit that nothing I had with me would help him. The information took a long time to penetrate. The sight of a white man had made him hope; he just stood there waiting for the magic pill, the magic ointment, then moved dispiritedly away to sit in his own hut and wait for another miracle.
That night I couldn’t eat my food, I felt sick as well as exhausted, and a new fear had been put in my mind by Souri, the cook, who, when he had seen me eating the half-caste’s oranges, had taken them away from me. He said these bitter oranges were not fit to eat, they would make a white man ill, and I remembered how I had been warned against over-ripe fruit by Dr. Harley at Ganta, so that now the fear of dysentery was added to the fear of fever as I lay awake too tired to sleep and the rain came down in a solid wall of water over Darndo.
I didn’t believe that I should be able to walk a step next day, and so I asked the detective to get me six extra carriers. By that means I thought I should be able to use the hammock continuously next day without tiring my own men, who had the long trek behind them. But in the morning I felt better and rather than delay while men were fetched from the farm accepted two carriers only, one a typical Bassa, tall, boasting, fleshy, with the usual false boyish sullenness. The detective was very proud of him, calling him Samson and boasting of his strength, but long before King Peter’s Town Samson was the last carrier, holding up the whole train, grumbling at the weight of his load.
We were aiming at King Peter’s Town and Grand Bassa was still something to be hardly hoped for, in the vague future, when suddenly at lunch-time from a friendly village chief I heard that it was close, that with the help of the lorry from Harlingsville it was only one day’s march from King Peter’s Town. The news spread to the boys, to the carriers. We sat and grinned at each other, blacks and whites, closer in this happiness than we had been all through the trek; in our relief of spirit there was no longer any need to control the temper, one could curse and quarrel as well as laugh, and to the carriers’ joy I broke out at the hated Tommie with a flow of obscenity I hadn’t known was at my commandlittle This was the greatest happiness of alclass="underline" to feel that restraint was no longer necessary. Rashly I told the boys about the lorry that I would get to meet us at Harlingsville and soon every carrier knew of it; they had never seen a car, but they knew what it meant, twelve blessed miles without loads, without effort.
It was a seven and a half hours’ trek to Kong Peter’s Town and a shabby village at the end of it, but we were happier than we had been since we left Bolahun. I scribbled a note in pencil to the manager of the P,Z. store announcing our arrival and asking him to send the lorry up to the end of the road to meet us, and not even the warnings of the three extra Bassa carriers I hired for the next day that Harlingsville was “too far, too far,” that it was a twelve-hour trek, depressed me, I pretended for the sake of my own men to disbelieve them, but secretly I put my watch back a couple of hours, determined that even if it were a twelve-hour trek, we should yet do it and sleep in Grand Bassa. The messenger stuck the note into a cleft stick and with some of our last oil in his lamp set off to walk to Grand Bassa all night through the forest. I remember a whistle blowing among the shabby huts as Tommie marshalled a few ragged uniformed messengers with rifles as useless as his own before a flagstaff in the centre of the village and the Liberian flag waved up and down again while Tommie tried to make his awkward squad stand at the ‘present’. But they laughed at him and someone stole his whistle, and all that evening Tommie went glowering up and down the village looking for it.
Grand Bassa
We rose at four-fifteen, but the new carriers and Tommie delayed us and we did not leave King Peter’s Town till six. I wasn’t quite so cheerful then, the Bassa men persisted that it was twelve hours to Harlingsville, five hours first to a Seventh Day Adventist mission, where they wanted us to spend the night. But. the smash-and-grab raid was nearly over; it was only later that I could separate the physical tiredness which was caused by the long fast trek from the actual circumstances of the primitive life; I thought then that it was the interior I was weary of, when it was only the march, the forest, the inadequate resources of-my own brain. I wasn’t going to waste another day in the interior if we had to walk the clock round to avoid it. As it might be a very long trek I avoided using the hammock until the very end, though if it hadn’t been for the strain on the carriers, there would have been an almost unalloyed delight in the swinging motion and the long stare upwards, the sight of the blue cracks moving through the great fan of leaves between the tapering grey boles, the sense of being carried south with no more exertion, back to the life I began to think I cared for more than I had known.