Chasing the Devil by Tim Butcher

Author:Tim Butcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407087047
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Message in a Bottle

Above: Masked Liberian devil rests during a dance, as photographed by the Greenes, February 1935

Below: Dancing devil in Liberia, as photographed by the author, March 2010

Dawn mist hid the mission buildings when we left Bolahun just as it had for the Greenes. Brother Frank insisted on saying a few words of blessing before we set out, so David, Johnson and I gathered solemnly, eyes lowered, in the murky half-light as he opened his service book and read us ‘Prayer Before a Journey’. His delivery was monotone but these lines stood out:

The Lord shall preserve you from all evil;

It is he who shall keep you safe.

By the time they left here, the Greenes’ entourage had grown to twenty-six bearers and four servants. As well as the two valets and one cook hired in Freetown, the Greenes took on another personal attendant at Bolahun, an irrepressible teenager called Mark who acted, in the words of Graham Greene, as ‘interpreter, jester and gossip’. The Greenes sat outside the mission house at the top of the hill eating a leisurely breakfast of freshly baked rolls and watched as their slow-moving column set off, snaked slowly down the slope and disappeared into the gloom.

Johnson’s local contact with a motorbike had turned up promptly, a very sober even sombre individual. After agreeing terms, he shook my hand and introduced himself formally as ‘Mr Omaru’.

‘And your first name?’ I asked chattily. He made as if he had not heard me, walked off and set about loading the two rucksacks on his bike.

Brother Frank joined us for the first half mile or so as we walked past houses branded by war. As well as the sinister graffiti there were bullet-holes and, in the mucky roadside gutter, the occasional spent shell casing. When I pointed them out Brother Frank shrugged his shoulders, unable to remember from which of the many armed attacks on Bolahun they came. Once he was happy we were heading in the right direction, he wished us well one final time, shook our hands warmly and turned for home.

Ahead stretched a jungle trail reaching all the way across Liberia to the Atlantic coast, a route I knew only from the writings of Graham and Barbara Greene. I had no idea if the villages they described, or the forest trails in between, still existed. For a few moments I was taken back to my first true travel experience when, at the age of seventeen, I was sent across the world to spend a year in New Zealand. After arriving I remember looking at a calendar and crying. The year ahead, spread across the columns and pages, reached way beyond the limits of my teenage experience. I had never spent more than a few weeks away from home and yet there, in front of me, stretched twelve long months in four even longer, upside-down austral seasons. I remember recovering my composure after a few moments and resolving to take each day as it came. The months could look after themselves.

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