ABSTRACT
GREENE is always exhilarated by moving into an unknown country, and no other part of Africa has cast so deep a spell on him as the mists, swamps and fevers of the West African coast. Inspired perhaps by Conrad and Gide’s travels to the Congo, by the African voyages of Rimbaud and Céline, Greene trekked through the Liberian bush in 1934. Conrad wrote apprehensively from Africa in 1890, “After my departure from Boma there may be a long silence. I shall not be able to write until at Léopoldville. It takes twenty days to go there; afoot too! Horrors!” 1 Nearly fifty years later Greene reports, “it was the end, the end of the worst boredom I had ever experienced, the worst fear and the worst exhaustion… we had been walking for exactly four weeks and covered about three hundred and fifty miles.” 2
