Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

KAVANGA: GATES OF THE MORNING 387
pass. Was ever parable so eloquent of sin strangling the
soul?
On and on you forge, the tiny track left behind
scarcely making any impression on the stubborn grass.
Dare to drop your penknife, compass, or anything, and
never was needle in haystack so hopelessly lost. Yet
even here your negro is an eye-opener, and once again the
gulf is seen to yawn between white and black, between
Mr. Know Nothing and Mr. Know All. Watch what
happens. You make a dive into your pocket for—say,
—your compass, and lo, the conviction stabs you that
it is lost Very vaguely, somewhere away back in that
maze of forest it fell to the ground—nay, not the ground,
for that, too, is almost as lost as your compass below the
thick tangle of undergrowth. Yet here is a lynx-eyed
group of blacks actually daring to describe that hopeless
maze of country for miles far to the rear. They know
that forest as though they had planted it. As though they
had planted it 1
Shooting back in memory to the last point
where the compass was in use, there they are chattering out
an astoundingly intimate description of that mad tangle,
tale of twists, loops, and detours. Precisely as a London
policeman lecturing Hodge ticks oflf on his fingers the
requisite number of streets he must pass in order to reach
the British Museum, so too with these negro blood-
hounds and their topsy-turvy forest. Now only a blurred
and exasperating memory to Mr. Musungu, here you
have them stringing it off like so many London streets.
This sort of thing : " Yes, back to that last ant-hill, not