To my relief the Bassa men proved, as usual, to be liars. The first of us reached the mission after only three and a half hours. It was a Saturday and a bell was ringing for church in a cluster of white buildings on a hilltop. The missionary came down to the path and brought us in, a German living there with his wife, trying to convert the Bassa tribe to a belief in the millennium and the sacred distinction between the Sabbath and the Sunday. They fed us on real German ginger cake and gave us iced grape juice to drink, and talked about wireless sets in throaty English, and the touch of iced drink on the lips was like the end of everything, so that already I began to look back on Kpangblamai and Nicoboozu as something gone out of my life for ever. Grand Bassa, they said, was only eight hours away and Harlingsville six hours, but when I mentioned the lorry that I hoped would meet us there, they had bad news. There was only one car in Grand Bassa and that had broken down some months before, and they doubted whether it had been repaired. I wished then that I had not told my servants and the carriers of the lorry. The thought that when I got them to Harlingsville they would still be faced with another two hours’ trek worried me as much as the growing suspicion that another eight hours of walking would be too much for me.
We came out of the forest altogether a few hours later on to a broad grassy path across long rolling downs, which seemed to indicate the sea was near. We had been in the forest now almost uninterruptedly since the day we crossed the border on the other side of Liberia. It was like breathing again to leave it. At every crest now we hoped to see the Atlantic. After Tommie overtook us, tipsy and singing some unintelligible song the carriers took up and handed down their line till it faded over the crests. That encouraged me, for if Harlingsville was far off, our guide would have stayed behind to drink and rob. More and more people came up the path from the direction of the sea, and of each Tommie asked if there was a car in Harlingsville, but they all said there was no car. We passed an unfinished concrete bridge marking where the road had once reached, for this road had gone backward. Then a few seedy houses appeared, definitely houses now and not huts, with a first floor and tin roofs but without glass in the windows, with the air of old-fashioned chicken coops magnified to take men. Through a window I saw a group of half-castes playing cards round a bottle of cane juice. It was the familiar Africa of the films, of semi-Parisian revues and Leicester Square. Sometimes there were chickens or a goat or an allotment. This was civilisation; we had seen it last in Freetown.
And then at three o’clock unexpectedly we were in Harlingsville, the wooden houses rising to two floors, with outside staircases, a smell of human ordure drawn up by the sun, a Post Office marked in chalk letters, men and women in trousers and shirts leaning over fences, and as the path bent, there at the beginning of a wider road a motor-lorry stood. I wanted to laugh and shout and cry; it was the end, the end of the worst boredom I had ever experienced, the worst fear and the worst exhaustion. If I had not been so tired (it was March the second, we had been walking for exactly four weeks and covered about three hundred and fifty miles), civilisation might not have seemed quite so desirable in comparison with what I was leaving: the complete simplicity on the edge of subsistence, the little groves of rice-birds, the graves of the chiefs, the tiny fires at sundown, the torchlight, the devils and the dancing. But civilisation, for the moment, I was ready to swallow whole, even the tin roofs, the stinking lurching lorry from which the natives on the way from market in Grand Bassa drew back with the same dread as their fellows had shown on the road to Kailahun, hiding their faces against the banks as the monstrosity ground by. The journey had begun and ended in a lorry in the stink of petrol.
Civilisation, of course, even at the Grand Bassa level, offered a little more than that; it offered iced beer in the home of the P.Z. manager over the store which was just closing down from want of trade, fresh Liberian beef of unbelievable toughness, a straggling row of wooden houses ending on the clean wide beach with the surf breaking beyond, for the surf had saved Grand Bassa, like all other Liberian trading stations” from quays and docks; it offered a selection of hideous churches, one of which woke me early next morning with the sound of what must have been a gramophone record, repeating over and over again, “Come to church. Come to church. Come to church.”
It offered, too, a wooden police station with a little group of uniformed figures avidly watching my carriers collect in the courtyard of the store to be paid off. In a way I was glad to see the last of them, but as I listened to the manager warning them to be gone as quickly as possible from Grand Bassa, for the police would be after their money, I felt sorry for the end of something which was unlikely ever to happen again. One was never likely to live for long in a company so simple and uncorrupted; they had none of them before seen so many stores, the sea, a motor-lorry; their eyes were full of excitement and wonder at Grand Bassa, and they didn’t even know the way back. Nobody here could tell them, and when Vande suggested that they might make their way along the beach to Monrovia and there get in touch again with the Holy Cross Mission, the manager warned them that none of his own men went that way unless they carried guns. The beach is the most dangerous road in all Liberia to travellers, because its people have been touched by civilisation, have learnt to steal and lie and kill.
They drifted away out of the courtyard one by one, with nothing to do, conscious of their native clothes among the trousered Bassa. They didn’t take the warning to get clear away out of town with their money, for that night I lay in bed listening to the drunken singing and shouts of Vande and Amah under the wall. Cane juice was the only cheap thing in Grand Bassa, and I could tell the difference between their drunkenness now and the happy sleepy mellow state the palm wine had put them in. This was crude spirit and a crude coastal drunkenness.
The Seedy Level
One was back, or, if you will, one had advanced again, to the seedy level. This journey, if it had done nothing else, had reinforced a sense of disappointment with what man had made out of the primitive, what he had made out of childhood. Oh, one wanted to protest, one doesn’t believe, of course, in ‘the visionary gleam’, in the trailing glory, but there was something in that early terror and the bareness of one’s needs, a harp strumming behind a hut, a witch on the nursery landing, a handful of kola nuts, a masked dancer, the poisoned flowers. The sense of taste was finer, the sense of pleasure keener, the sense of terror deeper and purer. It isn’t a gain to have turned the witch or the masked secret dancer, the sense of supernatural evil, into the small human viciousness of the thin distinguished military grey head in Kensington Gardens with the soft lips and the eye which dwelt with dull lustre on girls and boys of a certain age.
He was an Old Etonian. He had an estate in the Highlands. He said, “Do they cane at your school?” looking out over the wide flat grass, the nursemaids and the children, with furtive alertness. He said, “You must come up and stay with me in Scotland. Do you know of any girls’ school where they still—
you know ” He began to make confidences, and
then, suddenly taking a grip of the poor sliding brain, he rose and moved away with stiff military back, the Old Etonian tie, the iron-grey hair, a bachelor belonging to the right clubs, over the green plain among the nursemaids and the babies wetting their napkins.
I could hear a policeman talking to Vande under the wall, and suddenly I remembered (though I told myself still that I was dead sick of Africa) the devil’s servant at Zigita waving away the lightning and the rain with an elephant-hair fan, the empty silent town after the drums had beaten the devil’s warning. There was cruelty enough in the interior, but had we done wisely exchanging the supernatural cruelty for our own?