Laminah said softly behind my chair, “Amedoo’s feet very bad’
At least I had the good sense not to alienate my servants. I depended on them for any comfort that could be wrung out of the country; it was they who, however tired they were, saw first to putting up our beds and chairs, to preparing our food, to boiling water for the filter. I said, “If his foot’s really bad, we’ll stay’
Laminah said, “Amedoo go on. He say he no hum-bug.”
“It’ll be only three hours from here,” I said. “Only three hours, the doctor said so.” They didn’t believe me, but they went about among the carriers repeating what I had said; they put up a good pretence of believing. It is one of the curious things about a black servant, the way in which he includes loyalty in his service.
I am not praising him for that. One ought not to be able to buy loyalty. It enabled me to victimise my carriers. I walked straight off out of the village with my two spare men and left the carriers behind. I was paying them three shillings a week and that sum paid, not only for an eight-hour day or more of heavy carrying, but for their loyalty. The poor fools when I left them had the moneybox, I was a foreigner, my servants were foreigners, they could have shared the money out and gone home. But I was almost certain, though I had known them only two days, that they would follow. I ought to have despised them, as I would have despised the little tame employee at home who puts his office first. But after a while I began to love them for it. Perhaps there is a difference. There was no trait of cowardice in their loyalty, no admission that the richer is the better man. They did sell their loyalty, but it was a frank sale : loyalty was worth so many bags of rice, so much palm oil. They didn’t pretend an affection they didn’t feel. Love was quite one-sided as it ought to be.
So they followed after me, though a long way behind. Three hours went by and there was no sign of Duogobmai. The worst midday heat wore off soon after four. Another village offered hospitality I wouldn’t take. Babu and Kolieva stayed and drank water outside one of the ragged huts, but I went stubbornly on to where the forest began again. A man followed me. He had a few words of English : he said we would never reach Duogobmai before dark. There was still another village between. But I went on : I couldn’t bear the thought of waiting; I had been walking now for more than eight hours, but I had gained my second wind. One of the two men dropped behind; I was alone with Babu and the harps; it was not only the heat that was fading out of the air, the ferocity of the light between the branches was tamed.
Suddenly Babu sat down by the side of the path and changed his vest. He smiled shyly, winningly; we were coming to a town; he had to clean himself, just as much as any season-ticket-holder who straightens his tie before he gets to the City. As the light went out the forest began to rouse and one wondered whether after all it was so dead as it had seemed. I couldn’t help remembering that the man in front was in the greater danger from a snake, but the man behind from a leopard, for leopards, one is told, always jump at the back. Another village lifted itself on the skyline at the green tunnel’s end : the sky was grey, the huts so black that quite suddenly one realised how close night was. It would have been wise to stay, but it was a tiny village, not more than thirty huts on a little cracked hilltop. The thatch was falling in, a few horrible tiny dogs with bat ears came barking out and three old women sat on the very edge of the hill, sorting out cotton seeds, dirty and scarred and naked, like disreputable Fates. The hill dropped straight below them. They were just on the margin of life.
I didn’t believe there was rice enough in the place to feed my men.
Below the hill a wide river lay flat and heavy in the evening light. It was the Loffa, which flows down into the sea about thirty miles above Monrovia. None of these Liberian rivers have been traced from their source in the French Guinea hills to the sea; their upper course is represented in the British War Office map with dotted and inaccurate lines. They usually fall in rapids about fifty miles from the coast and so commercially are of little value, but even in these calm upper reaches they are not used at all by the natives of the Republic : the only canoes one sees are ferries, and these almost all on the French border. One would expect villages to cluster round these rivers, but actually they flow through the wildest and least inhabited part of the bush until within a few days’ trek of the coast. The way over the Loffa that evening was by a great hammock bridge. It was a really lovely architectural sight, seventy yards of knotted creeper swinging down from an’ arboreal platform fifteen feet in the air and out and up ten yards above the Loffa to another tree on the opposite bank. The foothold was about a foot wide, but it was railed on either side with creepers to the height of a man’s shoulders. Sometimes die creepers had given way, and one had to stretch across the gaps while the whole bridge swung like a rope ladder.
Halfway across Mark was standing with a chicken in his hand. He was sick and tired and hungry. He could hardly stir another yard. But Amah, who had been carrying a load all day since they left more than twelve hours before, was quite fresh. He was waiting for Mark on the other side. He had taken off his robe and was naked except for his loin-cloth. He picked up the Revelation suitcase and swung it up to his head as if he were only beginning the day’s march. He was admirable when things went wrong; he sulked and grumbled only on a day of rest or after a short march. It amused him that I should have overtaken them, and he strode up the path from the Loffa laughing and chattering in Bande.
Duogobmai came in sight, a line of blackened huts at the top of a long red-clay slope. A strange pink light welled out of the air, touching the tall termite mounds which stood along the path. It seemed to have no source in the darkening sky, it gave the whole landscape, the ant-heaps and the red clay and the black huts of Duogobmai on the hilltop camp, a curious Martian air. Men ran out of the huts and looked down at us, climbing up out of the dusk and the forest.
It was quite dark when we came into the town and felt our Vay between the huts to find the chiefs. Duogobmai looked very old andlittle very dirty. It was like a Tudor town in its cramped crowded way; the thatch of the huts touched, one had to stoop between them, and the narrow paths were blocked with creamy moonstruck cows like Jerseys with twisted horns standing in their turd among the hens and dogs and small fierce cats and goats.
The chief was a middle-aged man with thick lips and little cunning eyes who looked more Oriental than West African in his red fez. He sat in a hammock before his hut. I couldn’t tell whether he was friendly or not. He just sat there and listened to Amah speaking, to Amah asking for huts and food for thirty men. He was a slow thinker and he was startled by our sudden appearance. He hadn’t seen a white face for years. I still believed that this must be the Dagomai the doctor had directed me to, but no, the chief said, no white people had stayed here since they had begun to pay hut tax, and that was as far back as memory took him. In his slow way he was immensely tickled; it was as good as a circus. He sent some men to clean a hut.
It was quite dark : there was no moon. The blacks moved between the huts with smouldering torches, but the little cheerful embers lit only wretchedness and dirt. A few carriers tottered in and sank immediately to the ground beside their loads with their heads in their hands. There was no humbugging; they were completely exhausted. Amah led me to the hut which had been chosen for us: a small round hut with a native couch at one side, where there was just room for two beds. The chief’s lamp, the only one in the village, stood on the floor and the sweepers raised clouds of dust which rose and settled again : there was a burnt-out fire in the middle. Somebody put a box on the floor and I sat down to wait. I was anxious: I couldn’t imagine how my cousin and the carriers could get across the long hammock bridge in the dark, avoiding all the gaps where the creepers had given way. I sent Amah with the lamp down the hill to see if he could find them and sat in the dark and heard the first rustle of the rats above. I dropped into a doze, and nearly an hour later voices roused me, a lamp swaying between the huts, a sudden pack of worn-out men. Amedoo rushed like a whirlwind into the hut, lashing with his stick at the legs of the few blacks who sat there with me: he could never remember that he wasn’t any longer in the British Empire. He was worn out and in a despairing rage because half the carriers, he said, had stayed at the village the other side of the Loffa, refusing to cross the bridge in the dark. There were no beds, no mosquito nets, no lamps, no torches, no food, and worst of all in the blasting heat of the hut, no filter.