Then take the masks. I had asked Mark whether he feared Landow when he was out of his mask and just the blacksmith of Mosambolahun; and it was obvious that he feared him less, but that even then the blacksmith retained an aura of something not quite human. Did the supernatural rest in the mask? No, one person would say, it was in the combination of the two, but on the other hand old disused masks were often retained as charms and ‘fed’, and there were masks, even apart from the man who wore them, which it was fatal to a woman to see: fatal presumably because the devil’s agents would exact retribution, with the knife or with poison, but to what extent was this human punishment also supernatural?
‘Devil, of course, is a word used by the English-speaking native to describe something unknown in our theology: it has nothing to do with evil. One might equally call these big bush devils angels – for they have the angelic properties of alacrity and invisibility – if that word contained no element of ‘good’. In a Christian land we have grown so accustomed to the idea of a spiritual war, of God and Satan, that this supernatural world, which is neither good nor evil but simply Power, is almost beyond sympathetic comprehension. Not quite: for those witches which haunted our childhood were neither good nor evil. They terrified us with their power, but we knew all the time that we must not escape them. They simply demanded recognition: flight was a weakness.
That night Dr Harley showed us a grotesquely horrible collection of devils’ masks. Each one had obviously been made by a conscious artist. No effect was accidental. Here were the two-faced masks of a woman’s society; here male masks which women were forbidden to see. These were different from the masks worn by the dancing devils. Those had been part human, part animal, these were modelled closely on human features. There was one with a thin beard made of chicken’s feathers, and another, the oldest (it looked at least three hundred years old), had the thin nose, the high brow of a European. It was quite different from any other mask I saw. It might have been modelled on the features of some Portuguese sailor wrecked or marooned on the West Coast, or it may have gone back no further than a slave-trader at the beginning of the last century, a man like Canot whose autobiography is set on this Liberian coast, a hanger-on perhaps of his Portuguese employer, Dom Pedro Blanco, who built his extraordinary palace on the debated marshy land between Liberia and Sierra Leone, near Sherbro, where the cargo steamers of Elder Dempster still sometimes call, to their crews’ discomfort, a palace with separate islands for his seraglio, with billiard rooms and all the advantages of both European and African civilization. The man on whom the mask was modelled, of course, was as dead as Canot, as the Liberian forest which some urgent motive had caused him to penetrate – perhaps the desire for gold or slaves: but all the power of his motive had gone into the mask. I do not think it was greed: it was a fanatical curiosity which leant out of the empty eyeballs,
A Sacred Waterfall
Before we left Ganta I learned of a sacred waterfall in the forest near the village of Zugbei. If we made a detour on the way to Sakripie, our next big town, we would pass the village. One of Harley’s pupils at the mission school was chief there, and though the existence of the waterfall had been kept secret from Dr Harley for many years, his pupil had lately shown signs of willingness to guide him to it. Human sacrifice had once been offered at the falls, but now the paths were no longer kept open.
Next morning, as we were about to start along Dunbar’s new road north-east to Zuluyi, I heard that Babu could go no further, he was sick. He had been one of the few men, though he spoke no word of English, with whom I thought I had some contact. I had known him to be completely dependable; he had not joined with the carriers who had struck for more pay. I think he was genuinely sick; he had been given heavy loads the last few days and he was not strong, and none of the carriers would have chosen by this time to stay behind alone among a strange tribe, at least ten days’ trek away from his own people. I should have liked to dismiss him with a handsome present, but it would only have encouraged others to go sick. I had to pretend anger and pay him off with a very small dash. I felt guilty of a meanness; he had no friends among the carriers, except Guawa, the other Buzie, and they taunted him. I would have lost any of them more willingly.
But it was awkward to lose any man when I was beginning to feel that I might soon need a hammock badly. There were not enough men now to carry even an empty hammock. I had to tell them to take the heavy pole out and leave it behind and add the hammock to one of the lighter loads. I could see the doctor watching me, critically; he didn’t have to tell me what he was thinking.
It was about two hours’ walk to Zuluyi. The chief there had been one of Harley’s pupils and came to guide us to Zugbei. We passed through a thick steep forest country, up the slopes of what the natives believed to be a holy hill. Tiny fairy people, the chief said, had lived on this hill and they used to come down and help the Manos in war. Harley was interested; it was the first he had heard of any pygmy traditions in Liberia. There might be remains . . . I think he was picturing to himself reports, excavations, wall paintings, and the only kind of glory his altruistic spirit could appreciate. There was a big hole, the chief said, pointing up a path which disappeared a few feet away into the trees and underbrush, where the small people used to live. Boys used to go once a year with gifts into the hole. The last boy who had gone to the hole was still alive, an old man, in Zugbei. He had had his head shaved, but when he came out his hair was dressed in ringlets. Now no one went into the hole any more, but gifts were still brought.
We reached Zugbei, a tiny village, in the fiercest heat of the day: a worse heat than we had had in the highlands; the air was already saturated with the coming rains. The villages were no longer perched on thimbles of rock above the forest. One came straight into them from the bush; they were like little dried-up airless pools.
The chief led us to the waterfall. None of us expected to see more than a thin trickle of water over a few boulders, for some of the large rivers were so low that the carriers could wade through them and the dug-out canoes lay on the banks cracking for want of use. We walked straight into the thickest wall of forest. The chief and another man led, clearing a path with cutlasses. It was impossible to tell how they knew the way. They walked along fallen trees, scrambled down slopes at an angle of forty-five degrees, cutting all the time; there was no sign of a path. Then suddenly at the bottom of the steepest hill we came out into a dell full of the sound of water, which streamed under feathers of foam over a fall sixty feet deep. All the slopes became alive with people, girls with the pretty horn-shaped breasts of the Manos, men with cutlasses. The whole village seemed to have come with us, but the forest had been so thick we had seen only the chief and his companion. They sat on the slopes staring at the incredible bounty of water. Within the young chief’s memory there had been human sacrifices at the fall, the feeding of a slave at the end of each dry season to a snake, a hundred feet long, who had lain below the fall. It was the myth of the rainbow snake which one finds as far afield as Australia: the materialization of the rainbow shimmer in the falling water. The sacrifice had ended when the present chief was a child. The slave, though his hands were tied behind him, had grasped the chief’s robe and carried him over the edge of the fall. That had been the end of the sacrifice and the snake had gone down the river to the St John and lived now in a pool, very close to where we crossed, between Ganta and Djiecke.
We said good-bye to Dr Harley in Zugbei. We could have slept there, but I couldn’t bear the thought that we had not yet turned south. I wanted at least the sensation of moving, however short a distance, towards the Coast. So we went on for half an hour due south to a dull village of which I couldn’t learn the name. It sounded like Mombei. The chief would have no chop cooked for the men, but he dashed me a hamper of rice and they cooked their own. As usual there was no peace when we arrived. I was feeling sick and tired. The scramble in the heat to and from the waterfall had exhausted me more than a long trek, and it angered me that,
directly I sat down, a carrier called Siafa came to show me his venereal sore. He had had it for three years, he hadn’t shown it to the doctor, who could have injected him, and I felt he might have kept it for a few more weeks untended. But there was one thing I couldn’t afford to do, show my impatience or my lack of knowledge. Daily after that I went through the farce of dressing the sore. Afterwards I dosed myself heavily with Epsom and went to bed; suddenly I felt hopelessly tired of rats; we were no longer short of kerosene, so I left my lamp burning, but it made no difference. There were always shadows for them to play in. The Epsom brought me out of my bed in the night to the edge of the forest. It was almost full moon and the huts stood out in a bright greenish daylight. It was absolutely quiet: not a sound from the dark dead forest. Every door was closed and the goats were the only living things in sight, as they wandered sleeplessly between the huts. I thought even then that the scene was beautiful, but the thought did not alter my impatience to be gone. The spell would only work after many months; now all I wanted was medicine, a bath, iced drinks, and something other than this bush lavatory of trees and dead leaves where at any moment I might crouch upon a snake in the darkness.
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 Khayyám 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.
* Dr Harley has now completed more than 20 years at Ganta. (1946)
Chapter 2
‘CIVILIZED MAN’
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 bent like an old man with the tips of its fingers just touching the ground; a leopard’s pads had 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 cicatrized 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 through 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.
But, curiously enough, this didn’t matter. They bore no malice. It was the night of full moon. They had very little to eat, they had nothing to drink, the moon and its deep green sight made them happy. They even shared their small meal with the chief and until very late the village was full of song and laughter and running feet. They were crazy with pleasure in the small moon-filled clearing. One could only envy them: we, the civilized, had lost touch with the real lunar influence. It meant to us self-conscious emotion, crooners and little sentimental songs of lust and separation; at best a cerebral worked-up excitement. It couldn’t mean this physical outburst, this unthinking tidal urge to joy. Mark said to me on the next day’s march, ‘Last night we were so happy.’ Next night to our eyes the moon would be just as full, they had no calendars to tell them that the moon was on the wane, they didn’t need calendars. Night after night they had felt the tightening of the influence that binds us to the cold empty craters; now they felt it loosen. Every month the world turned back into its empty sky.
Steve Dunbar
A young man in a Boy Scout’s hat and native robe came to meet us next day in the wide clean streets of Sakripie, where there were stores and Mandingo traders in turbans and soldiers of the Frontier Force: a Paramount Chief’s town.
The Paramount Chief was away, but this was his son who came and led us to a guest-house in the chief’s compound, a huge square with a flag-pole surrounded by whitewashed huts belonging to his wives. He
had the ingratiating air of a motor salesman, but he was harassed all the time because he had no authority; he was a joke, no one troubled to obey him. He had a faint hope, I think, as he sat with me on the verandah of the guest-house that our coming would give him prestige. He sent for a chicken and some eggs but nobody brought them. He swore at everyone he could see; he was almost in tears with vexation.
‘My name,’ a voice said softly behind me, ‘is Steve Dunbar. I am very pleased to meet you. These chairs are yours? They are very nice. I have been looking at your beds.’ I looked round. A middle-aged Mandingo in a scarlet fez and a native robe nodded and smiled. He spoke excellent English. He said, ‘You are travelling through our country. I hope you have my hospitality everywhere. Your chairs are very interesting. I have not seen anything like them.’
‘They fold up,’ I said.
‘That is very interesting. I will buy one of them.’