convey in a straightforward way what he saw and what happened to him and his cousin on the trek as what he thought about what happened. Thus he is at pains to render the harsh and unforgiving physical conditions of colonial/urban Africa on one hand and of the wilderness on the other. It is often too cold or wet to sleep or too hot to walk during the day. And his relationship with the carriers, despite Greene's apparent lack of bigotry, is perforce the relationship between the imperial Englishman and the uneducated rain-forest blacks upon whom he must rely as servants, interpreters, bridges to alien and primitive tribal cultures. His experience of their experience of them is as unanticipated as the vicissitudes of a journey backward in physical and social time. Vaguely anti colonial in temperament, he is surprised at the degree to which remote black tribesmen (absurdly, on his view) anticipate and even welcome the prospect of European colonization and dependence on Europeans to order their lives.
I never came across a single native in the interior who had a
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