It isn’t that one wants to stay in Africa : I have no yearning for a mindless sensuality, even if it were to be found there : it is only that when one has appreciated such a beginning, its terrors as well as its placidity, the power as well as the gentleness, the pity for what we have done with ourselves is driven more forcibly home.
While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the King my brother’s wreck And on the king my father’s death before him.
After the blinding sunlight on the sand beyond the bar, after the long push of the Atlantic sea, the lights of Dover burning at four in the morning, a cold April mist coming out from shore with the tender. A child was crying in a tenement not far from the Lord Warden, the wail of a child too young to speak, too young to have learnt what the dark may conceal in the way of lust and murder, crying for no intelligible reason but because it still possessed the ancestral fear, the devil was dancing in its sleep. There, I thought, standing in the cold empty Customs shed with a couple of suitcases, a few pieces of silver jewellery, a piece of script found in a Bassa hut, an old sword or two, the only loot I had brought with me, was as far back as one needed to go, was Africa : the innocence, the virginity, the graves not opened yet for gold, the mine not broken with sledges