Journey Without Maps

by Graham Greene

  To reach our next stop, Zigi’s Town, I found difficult enough. It was nearly nine hours’ solid trek from Tapee, going down all the while into a damper closer heat, and the first few miles of path were flooded waist-high. Our guide, whom the Commissioner of Grand Bassa had lent to lead us to the door of the PZ store on Bassa beach, proved useless from the start. Dressed in a ragged blue uniform, a rifle over his shoulder which wouldn’t have fired even if he’d had the rounds, with all his belongings in a little tin pail, he dropped behind at the first village we reached. He was called Tommie and he had a brazen boyish charm. He knew the way, but he had no intention of walking at our rate. He started each day well, but after half an hour he would slip aside into the bush and not catch up again until the midday halt. By that time he was usually a little drunk. Because he wore a uniform he could rob any village he passed of palm wine, fruit and vegetables.

  I remember nothing of the trek to Zigi’s Town and very little of the succeeding days. I was so exhausted that I couldn’t write more than a few lines in my diary; I hope never to be so tired again. I retain an impression of continuous forest, occasional hills emerging above the bush so that we could catch a glimpse on either side of the great whalebacked forests driving to the sea. Outside Zigi’s Town there was a stream trickling down the slope and a few ducks with a curiously English air about them. I remembered trying to sit down, but immediately having to deal with the town chief over food for the carriers, trying to sit down again and rising to look for threepenny-bits the cook needed for buying a chicken, trying to sit down and being forced up again to dress a carrier’s sores. I couldn’t stand any more of it; I swallowed two tablespoonfuls of Epsom in a cup of strong tea (we had finished our tinned milk long ago) and left my cousin to deal with anything else that turned up. My temperature was high. I swallowed twenty grains of quinine with a glass of whisky, took off my clothes, wrapped myself in blankets under the mosquito-net and tried to sleep.

  A thunderstorm came up. It was the third storm we’d had in a few days; there wasn’t any time to lose if we were to reach the Coast, and I lay in the dark as scared as I have ever been. There were no rats, at any rate, but I caught a jigger under my toe when I crawled out to dry myself. I was sweating as if I had influenza; I couldn’t keep dry for more than fifteen seconds. The hurricane lamp I left burning low on an up-ended chop box and beside it an old whisky bottle full of warm filtered water. I kept remembering Van Gogh at Bolahun burnt out with fever. He said you had to lie up for at least a week: there wasn’t any danger in malaria if you lay up long enough; but I couldn’t bear the thought of staying a week here, another seven days away from Grand Bassa. Malaria or not, I’d got to go on next day and I was afraid.

  The fever would not let me sleep at all, but by the early morning it was sweated out of me. My temperature was a long way below normal, but the worst boredom of the trek for the time being was over. I had made a discovery during the night which interested me. I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.

  It seemed that night an important discovery. It was like a conversion, and I had never experienced a conversion before. (I had not been converted to a religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed.) If the experience had not been so new to me, it would have seemed less important, I should have known that conversions don’t last, or if they last at all it is only as a little sediment at the bottom of the brain. Perhaps the sediment has value, the memory of a conversion may have some force in an emergency; I may be able to strengthen myself with the intellectual idea that once in Zigi’s Town I had been completely convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere act of living.

  The Edge of ‘Civilization’

  It was supposed to be a seven-hour trek from Zigi’s Town to Bassa Town, the first stop inside Bassa territory. I was doubtful if I could make it without some help from a hammock, so I took on two extra carriers and my men hacked a pole to take the place of the one I had discarded. I was feeling very weak, but I hadn’t enough carriers to let myself be carried all the way, so I walked the first two hours and then had ten minutes in the hammock and walked again. I didn’t like being carried. A two-man hammock puts a great strain on the carriers and my men were already tired by the long trek. One heard the hammock strings grinding on the pole and saw the shoulder muscles strain under the weight. It was too close to using men as animals for me to be happy.

  The villages we passed were all deserted except for a few women. An elephant had been killed somewhere in the bush, I suppose with the poisoned spears the natives in these parts shoot from ancient guns, and all the men for miles around had gathered to strip its flesh. To our surprise we arrived, in less than four hours, at Bassa Town. I was glad, save that it made the Coast seem farther away than ever. We were two days now from Tapee, but the young native sub-Commissioner here still spoke of Grand Bassa as seven days away. He was the only man in the place, a new village built of square low huts; all the others were off after the elephant, so I was a little afraid of what my carriers might do in a town deserted of its menfolk.

  But I couldn’t be bothered. As soon as I’d eaten some lunch I went to bed and sweated again between the blankets, for the fever had returned. The huts were too low for me to stand upright, and instead of rats there were huge spiders everywhere. I had just enough energy to note depressingly in my diary: ‘Last tin of biscuits, last tin of butter, last piece of bread.’ It was astonishing how important these luxuries had become; there were ten biscuits each, we separated them in the tin and rationed them each in our own way, but the butter proved to be rancid and had to be used for cooking.

  I noted, too, a sign that we were meeting the edge of civilization pushing up from the Coast. A young girl hung around all day posturing with her thighs and hips, suggestively, like a tart. Naked to the waist, she was conscious of her nakedness; she knew that breasts had a significance to the white man they didn’t have to the native. There couldn’t be any doubt that she had known whites before. There were other signs too: the scarcity of food and the high price of rice. It would be higher still, the sub-Commissioner said, when we got nearer to Grand Bassa. He wanted me to buy a couple of hampers in Bassa Town and so save perhaps sixpence on each hamper. There are limitations to native mathematics, and Laminah could never understand why I refused, why it would cost more to save a shilling on rice and employ two extra men to carry it.

  That day was the last short trek on the way to the Coast. There was no longer any talk of ‘too far’. The carriers longed as much as I did to escape from the bush and reach the sea, and as for my poor servants, they were dog-tired. Their nerves were on edge and one evening Amedoo and the head carrier came to blows in front of me over a dish of dirty meat scraps. It was February the twenty-seventh when we left Bassa Town, and we had been walking since February the third. An eight-hour march brought us to Gyon, but it did not seem to bring us any closer to Grand Bassa. That remained, according to rumour, a week away. It still seemed impossible to me that we should ever reach it. My fever did not return after Bassa Town, but my temperature remained a long way below normal.

  The vitality of both of us reached the lowest ebb that day and the next. We had to be very careful all the time not to quarrel. We only saw each other for an hour or two at the end of the day, but even then it was not easy to avoid subjects on which we might disagree. The range of such subjects, indeed, had become almost as wide as life itself. At first it was enough to avoid politics of any kind, but now we were capable of quarrelling over the merits of tea. The only thing was to remain silent, but there was always danger that silence might strike one of us as sullenness. My nerves were the worst affected and it was to my cousin’s credit that we never let our irritation with each other out into words.

  Gyon was an empty inhospitable place of square dirty huts painted on the outside with white splashes on a kind of liver-brown mud. Some ass
ociation in a tired brain with the plague-marked houses in Stuart London made me think the place unhealthy, and it was one of the curious results of complete exhaustion that the mind couldn’t separate fantasy from reality. The place was only empty because all the men were away on their farms except the headman, who would do as little for us as he could, but to this day I find it hard to realize that the village was not emptied by disease.

  We had to sit on our boxes for more than three hours before the men returned and we could find huts for ourselves. As for my servants, I could find nothing for them; they had to sleep in the open cookhouse round their fire, and they got little sleep, for they were afraid of wild beasts, particularly of elephants and leopards. We were in leopard country, every road into Tapee had been guarded by a trap, wooden boxes in which a kid could be tied with a drop-door weighted with bundles of shells.

  There was no longer enough whisky for sundowners and we rationed the last half-bottle in teaspoonfuls, which we drank in our tea. As we ate our supper some kind of trial was being held by the carriers in front of Amedoo as judge. They sat before him in two long lines and each witness in turn stated his case with the gestures and intonations of accomplished orators. It was still going on when I went to bed at eight, and I learned the next day from Mark that the trial was not over till midnight.

  I never properly knew what it was all about, but early next morning Kolieva, who had once been my favourite hammock-man with Babu, came to me as I sat in the village kitchen waiting for breakfast and wondering whether I could stand another long trek (my shoes had given way, the soles had worn evenly down until they were as thin as tissue-paper, and then they simply disappeared. I had only left a pair of gym shoes with crêpe soles). I couldn’t understand what he said to me; the other carriers clustered round; it was obvious that a Court of Appeal was supposed to be sitting. Amedoo explained, but I’m not sure that I understood him correctly.

  One of the carriers who was called Bukkai had left something behind at the spot where we stopped for lunch. It had been taken by Fadai, the thin emaciated boy with lovely eyes and venereal disease who called himself a British subject because he had been born in Sierra Leone. When Bukkai accused Fadai of the theft and threatened to bring the case to trial, Fadai was quite ready to return whatever it was (I think it was a needle and cotton) rather than make trouble, but Kolieva, taking him down to the stream below the village, had extorted money from him by threats and by promising to bear false witness on his behalf. The trial took place, but Kolieva remained silent and Fadai told the whole story. Then Kolieva became the accused, and to bear false witness in their eyes was a more serious offence than to steal. He was found guilty and fined four shillings by Amedoo, a very large sum representing nearly ten days’ wages. As I was uncertain whether I understood the facts, and as I knew how reliable Amedoo was and the sentence seemed popular, I said, ‘I agree,’ and because Kolieva would have argued it, the absurd imperial phrase, which never failed to silence them, ‘Palaver finished’. At first Kolieva declared that he would come no farther and demanded his pay, but the thought of the long trek alone through strange tribes daunted him.

  The Detective of Darndo

  That day was another long trek, nearly eight hours of it. Our guide slipped behind at the first village we reached; and I could feel every root and stone through my gym shoes. The carriers whom we had taken on at Bassa Town and who had asked to come with us failed half-way and I couldn’t use my hammock at all. It was typical of the Bassa tribe to promise and then to fail. I developed a bitter dislike of the very appearance of Bassa men, the large well-covered bodies, the round heads, the soft effeminate eyes. The Coast had corrupted them, had made them liars, swindlers, lazy, weak, completely undependable. But it was from the Bassa tribe, and from the Vais, whose territory, too, touched the decadent seaboard, that the governing class recruits new members. To the criticism that the native has no hand in the administration, the Americo-Liberian will point to Bassa and Vai men in the Government departments, Bassa and Vai Commissioners and clerks. *

  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 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 a 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 cafés 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 he defended them as far as he could, with what vitality was left in his fever-drained body, from the exactions of 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 command. This was the greatest happiness of all: 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 King 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 PZ 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.