The rot set in when I decided to go to Garoua for supplies. The decision was rather thrust upon me; I had nothing left to eat, barely enough petrol to make the city limits and fifteen hundred francs (about £3). Such circumstances are conducive to bold action. I had promised Augustin a lift and we rendezvoused at first light behind the main street in the hope of sneaking out of town without being loaded to the gunwales with millet or gendarmes after a lift. A swift dash freed us from the town and we resigned ourselves to the heaving, wrenching crawl over the worst part of the road, leading down to the tarmac. We never made it. Some five miles short of our goal, I rounded a corner to find that the road had simply disappeared in the rain. It is a bad Western habit to assume that because a road goes into a corner, it will continue round the other side. With a terrifying crunching of metal, we plunged into a foot-deep ditch right across the track.

The next period of my stay was without doubt the most unpleasant I have ever spent anywhere, a time when I wallowed in the sin of despair.

We arrived without further disaster, having carefully obeyed the injunctions painted on the inside of the vehicle telling us not to spit, fight, vomit or break windows. By now, it was nearly midday and Augustin took me to dine in his favourite African restaurant where the choice consisted of take it or leave it. I took it, then left it. I was brought a cow's foot in a large enamel bowl of hot water. When I say "cow's foot" I do not mean something based upon a cow's foot, but the entire article complete with hoof, hide and hair. Try as I might, there seemed no way of even getting into it. I declared a sudden loss of appetite. Augustin seized it and reduced it to bones with the dedication of a swarm of driver ants.

It was obvious at once that there was something amiss with the steering. It whined and grumbled and doggedly refused to affect the direction of the wheels. Having lived on a Junior Lecturer's salary, I had had precious little to do with cars and was at a loss how best to proceed. Clearly, help was in order. Normally Herbert Brown could be relied upon to mend anything; wondrous tales were told of his mechanical prowess. With two coat hangers and an old plough, he would improvise a gearbox. His engineering solutions were never elegant but often worked. He would return them to customers with the remark, "It's just a load of junk, but out here nothin' works for long." Alas, he was away. There was nothing else for it, I still had to get to Garoua. We pushed the vehicle to the side of the road and continued on foot, flagging down a bush-taxi when we reached the tarmac. I did not, at that time, take the inscription on the door "God's will alone decides" as an omen.

Nonetheless, we reached my abandoned vehicle as night fell. He made a rapid inspection. There was no problem; all he had to do was hit it. He crawled underneath and there was heard the clang of metal on metal and what I took to be Fulani oaths. Beaming, he emerged. It was not perfect but would get me to Poli whence I could send for a new part.

Two notable successes marked this trip. Firstly, I charmed some money out of the bank to which I had so rashly committed my finances. Secondly, we arranged a lift back to Poli with the sous-préfet's mechanic. This was, I foolishly thought, an incredible stroke of good fortune. After being driven for hours round various Fulani areas of the city on incomprehensible errands, we set off for Poli. The road is very narrow and patronized by huge lorries with trailers hauling cotton and petrol back and forth between Chad and the N'gaoundere rail link. I noted with dismay that when he passed one of these monsters by swerving over to the verge with one wheel inches away from a three-foot drainage channel, the driver closed his eyes tightly.

We arrived at the top of the big hill leading down to Poli and began to descend. It was not until we approached a narrow bridge crossing a ravine that I realized that the steering had gone again. I had time to recollect the sharp spikes along either side of the bridge -- all that remained of the balustrade after an accident that had killed a sous-préfet at this very spot several years before. We struck a tree, bounced off, struck a rock and headed straight for the ravine. I was already standing on the brakes to no great avail. We were poised an instant on the edge and then plunged over.

I was frankly delighted. Augustin and I embarked and set off at a sedate pace. The steering indeed felt a little strange but worked with a certain approximation. The road was covered with owls. They would sit on the surface and fly up to attack the headlights of cars; the slaughter of them on the roads is very great, and they terrify Dowayos. Owls are thought to carry sorcery under their wings at night. Should a man hear the sound of one about his compound or cattle, he immediately seeks remedies against them.

A sapling caught us neatly and gradually collapsed under the weight. In complete calm, I turned off the engine, asked Augustin if he was all right and evacuated the vehicle. At the top of the ravine, something suddenly snapped in both of us and we sat looking at the jagged rocks and laughed hysterically -- not, of course, from amusement, but from some wave of sheer emotion compounded of terror, relief and incredulity. I think we probably sat there quite a while. At this stage, we seemed to have got out of it very lightly. Augustin had bruised his chest. I had hit my head on the wheel and one or two toes, fingers and ribs seemed to have suffered. Hiking into town, we set about a couple of beers Augustin had secreted against dire emergencies. We felt we had qualified.

The next day the full awfulness of the situation was brought home. An inspection of the wreck convinced me that repair would be a protracted and expensive business and that we had indeed been lucky to escape without serious injury. We had a check-up with the local doctor who declared us both unharmed. From the fact that I still have fingers and toes set at odd angles and a lump on two ribs, I infer that his examination failed to show up a number of minor fractures. The worst part was the condition of my jaw. Two teeth at the front seemed very loose and my whole jaw began slowly to swell up, causing me considerable pain.

Dowayos, as mentioned, divide diseases between "infectious diseases", head witchcraft, ancestor interference and pollutions. Only infectious diseases or accidental injuries that may be caused by witchcraft can be helped with herbs. The attribution of one particular disease to a specific cause is quite complex. The names of some diseases refer both to symptoms and a causal agent (like our word "cold" which implies certain symptoms and a viral cause). Other names are just symptoms (like "jaundice" that can be the result of many diseases). To tie up symptoms with diseases, various forms of divination are used. A healer may be called to cast the entrails of a chicken into water, the man may be viewed through a glass ball by a specialist who can thus determine his malady. The most common form of divination, however, is to rub the plant zepto between the fingers while calling out the various forms of disease that may afflict the man. When the zepto breaks, this shows that the correct name has been found. The diviner then moves on to the causative agent -- witchcraft, ancestors, etc. Next comes the remedy. Three divinations normally suffice to give full information. If the sick man cannot come to the diviner himself, he should send some of the straw from the roof of his granary, the most private and personal area of a man's compound.

Hoping for the best, I reverted to Kongle and continued my researches into leopards and wildcats, dosing myself with Valium to get to sleep at night.

One of my principal concerns now was the classification of disease, and in pursuit of this I spent a lot of time with one traditional healer in particular who had the disadvantage of living at the top of a sheer cliff above Kongle. We would spend hours collecting roots, discussing the identification of disease and the differences between various treatments.

Pollution diseases usually require the attention of experts -- circumciser, sorcerer or rainchief. Often, causes and effects can be linked in a rather oblique fashion. For example, what we would term a sprain is held to hurt because worms have got into the limb; worms come from rain, so only the rainchief can cure them. Contact with the affairs of the dead, on the other hand, involves treatment by the sorcerer and consists of rubbing the garments or other personal belongings of the dead man onto the victim. The worst pollution diseases come from the blacksmith and his wives, the potters. Excessive contact with them, especially with the tools of their trade, causes what one can only term an ingrowing vagina in women and a prolapsed anus in men. The bellows that afflicts men is a remarkably phallic object and the fact that it attacks the anus rather than the penis has to be connected to the "official" version of circumcision, claiming it to involve sealing of the anus.

If a named ancestor is held to be responsible, a man is dispatched to the skull house with blood, excrement or beer to fling on the skull of the importuning kinsman.

Some Dowayos make a good income from the possession of magic stones that cause everything from toothache to dysentery. Those afflicted have to come to them for the cure. Dowayos see nothing wrong in making money in this way.

Other men set up charms that cause pollution illness to protect their property. A close contact of mine was the clown for the village of Kongle. He was proprietor of the only orange tree in the area and was inordinately attached to me since the time I bought two hundred oranges from him. (I should confess that I had not intended to buy two hundred oranges but twenty; an inadequacy in my handling of numerals lay at the root of the problem.) To protect his tree from the ravages of children, he attached certain plants and goat horns to it so that anyone who stole his oranges would cough like a goat and have to come to him to be cured.

Head witchcraft is transmitted from close relatives in peanuts or meat. It fears sharp objects and a boy should therefore not be exposed to it before circumcision or he may bleed to death. At night it wanders around and is said to look like a small chick; this is what is carried under the wings of an owl. It sucks the blood of men and cattle and may kill them. Protection may be had by putting sharp thistles or porcupine quills on the roof of one's hut. After death, skulls are examined for witchcraft. I did not at first grasp that people who die "of witchcraft" are generally not the victims of witches, but witches whose witchcraft has been injured by such charms: once the witchcraft is injured the owner dies. Dowayos use this to explain the high mortality rate among young men who go to the city to work in the dry season. They are only young -- mere boys -- who have not learned to control their witchcraft. It is especially excited by the sight of meat on butchers' slabs and cuts itself on all the sharp knives lying around there.

On one occasion a woman was universally held to be a witch and to have conveyed the infection to her two daughters, both of whom had died. I was present at the examination of the skull of the second. The head was removed from the corpse by an old man using a bent stick. He was much admired for the dexterity with which he inserted the end in the eye socket and flicked off the head without losing any teeth that drop down into the stomach. The cadaver was some three weeks old and the stench was fairly bad; the man would receive a goatskin from the parents for this service. As usual there was a fair amount of ribald humour. The women were sent away: "If we bent down to pick up the head and farted you would tell everyone." They withdrew with considerable peevishness and the men examined the head. In my time in Dowayoland I examined a large number of skulls but could never convince myself that the difference between one held to show witchcraft and one free of it was based upon any perceived morphological distinction. The old men were always unanimous, however. The announcement of the finding of witchcraft was greeted not with anger but quiet satisfaction by the village. The woman was, in fact, a close neighbour of mine and immediately jokes began to fly about to the effect that only a white man, immune like all white men to witchcraft, could live next to her. She seemed annoyed at this slur and offered to walk over the skulls of the dead, in which case, were she the source of their witchcraft, she would die. The husband refused to let her. "What's the point?" he explained to me. "She'd only die and then I'd have to buy another wife."

It is revealed after death as two spikes under the upper jaw. If these are red or black this means the witchcraft has killed. Where there have been a number of deaths of confirmed witches in a single family, suspicion will normally rapidly centre on a particular relative. In pre-colonial times accused witches were put to the ordeal. They would be required, if male, to drink beer in which the knife of circumcision had been soaked; if guilty, their stomachs would swell up and they would bleed to death. Alternatively, they would be required to drink beer containing the poisonous latex sap of the dangoh (Euphorbica Cameroonica) cactus. If they did not vomit they would die and be held convicted as charged; if they did vomit, white vomit betokened innocence, red vomit guilt. The guilty would then be hanged by the blacksmith.

There was none of the wide-eyed fear I had rather expected in the face of witchcraft; the whole thing was viewed in a rather deadpan, matter-of-fact fashion. Dowayos always stressed to me that there were different sorts of head witchcraft, only one of which was bad. Some forms merely gave a man clean teeth; other forms gave success in farming and involved no other person's disadvantage. They would never quite believe me when I explained that such matters interested me because they did not exist in the land of the white men. I was unaware at that time of the Dowayo pedigree as a reincarnated magician that had been constructed for me. Dowayos would never call me a liar but they had a particular facial expression they would adopt when I was trying to put some particularly blatant falsehood over on them such as the existence of underground trains, or the absence of bridewealth in England.

Healers were, on the whole, only too happy to work with me for the relatively small payment I was able to provide. Their only fear was that I would steal their remedies and set myself up in business. In primitive society knowledge is seldom freely available; rather it belongs to people. A man owns his knowledge. He has paid for it and he would be a fool to give it away without payment to another, just as he wouldn't give away his daughters without brideprice. It was only reasonable that they should charge me. Dowayos justify their remedies by their pedigrees. An old remedy is better than a new one; any innovation is suspect as it does not carry the imprimatur of the ancestors. Consequently, there is no attempt to find new remedies.

Healers were initially suspicious of my "clinic" until they had satisfied themselves that I limited myself to the treatment of infectious diseases with white men's roots and was not in competition with them. One particular case raised certain moral and strategic difficulties. The Chief's brother, who lived several huts away, used to come and visit me quite often. He was a gangling, awkward and affable man who had a reputation for being not too bright. I realized one day that he had not been to see me for several weeks and, on inquiring whether he was away, I was informed that he was dying. He had suffered a severe bout of amoebic dysentery and the healer from up the cliff had been called. The examination of the entrails of a chicken had revealed that he was being afflicted by the spirit of his dead mother who wanted beer. This had been flung upon the skull but there was no improvement. Another healer was called. He revealed that, in fact, the illness derived from another spirit masquerading as the spirit of the man's mother. Offerings were made but the young man still weakened. The Chief's third wife, who had looked after him as a boy, was very distressed and came and wailed outside my hut asking if I had no roots that might save him. It was impossible to refuse, since I indeed had some powerful amoebicides and antibiotics. I explained to everyone that I was not a healer and that I did not know whether my roots might help but that if they wished me to try to heal him I would do so. I had been afraid of alienating the healers by this but they were quite prepared to find that a wrong diagnosis had been made. The man's recovery was swift. He passed from a skeletal condition to good health in a matter of days and there was general rejoicing. The healers were in no way put out. They merely explained that this was a complex case of a man ill with an infectious disease but that various spirits had taken advantage of it to increase his sufferings. They had dealt with the spirits; I had dealt with the disease.

It was only when they were ill that I really felt sorry for Dowayos and felt their way of life to be inferior to our own. Otherwise they enjoyed freedom, held themselves to be wealthy, had clear access to their major forms of sensual gratification in beer and women, and had their self-respect. Once ill, however, they died needlessly in agony and terror. There was no real help for them in the government hospital in Poli. There was a regulation that every patient had to turn up with a half exercise book to keep the records of his case in. Illiterate tribesmen had no need of exercise books and therefore never had one to hand; they were not on sale in Poli and the hospital staff refused to keep them as this was not part of their responsibility according to the rules. Patients would be turned away and refused urgent medical treatment until they could find an exercise book. Inevitably, I became a benefactor in this matter, as did the missions, but the effect was that many Dowayos did not bother to go to the hospital at all. There were doubtless many deaths as the result of this, and I found it impossible to condone the arrogant inhumanity of officials in such circumstances. I was guiltily aware that, when I myself was ill, simply because I was a white man I would be expected to jump queues and receive preferential treatment as did local grandees.

Another sensitive moment cropped up at the visit of a French botanist on a whistle-stop tour through Cameroon researching for a projected botanical atlas showing the distribution of plants in the country. I arrived back in my village one day to find this gentleman ensconced in the schoolhouse while surveying the local flora in six hours flat. The Dowayos, of course, could not see why anyone should be interested in plants for their own sake. It was clear that he was trying to steal Dowayo herbal remedies that he would sell elsewhere at huge profit. He ran to a somewhat larger establishment than I did, having procured his own chickens in preference to the local models and two retainers to attend to his wants. We sat down in the middle of the bush to an absurd dinner, complete with tablecloth and serviettes, while Dowayo children crouched round us in a circle, wide-eyed with curiosity. He kindly explained to me how best to take botanical samples for later identification. Face-to-face with Africa, the differences between a French botanist and an English anthropologist seem minimal and we talked far into the night.

By our lights, the remedies handed out by traditional practitioners are ineffective or even harmful. So alien to our world view are such practices as rubbing goats" horns on a patient's chest to cure tuberculosis that we do not even bother to check their effectiveness. We can handle them quite well under general principles of sympathetic and contagious magic, so that for the anthropologist they hardly register at all. This aspect of their beliefs never really struck me until I began to work with the rainchiefs; but that must be told in its place.

The next day my local healer was more than a little brusque at this outrageous raid staged by my "brother". I finally convinced him that we were not even from the same country by referring to the fact that Zuuldibo had offered him beer which he had refused. He was a foreigner, like Herbert Brown at the Protestant mission. The distinction between these races and the English was like that between the terrible Fulani and the good Dowayos.

Most Dowayo remedies are based upon the same three magic plants that are expected to deal with all forms of misfortune from adultery to headache. They divide each into several species that cannot be distinguished by the layman by mere physical inspection. Dowayos would always speak as if they were staunch positivists, never believing anything for which they had no direct sense evidence. "How do you tell one kind of zepto, for example, from another?" I would ask. "How can I tell whether this is the kind that stops adultery or the kind that heals headaches?" They stared at me in sheer disbelief at such simplicity. "By trying them," they would answer. "How else?" They would then go off into long diatribes about stones that caused rain, people who turned into leopards, bats that vomited their excrement through their nostrils as they had no anus -- all in violation of their positivist principles. It was impossible to know in advance how they would react to questioning in this sphere. Sometimes they would rattle out the three different ways of saying "I do not know" with various degrees of exasperation. On occasions I would actually get a straight answer, but more often it was "I do not know. I have not seen. How could I know when I have not seen?" I began to earn a reputation as a man who would believe anything.

My jaw, however, had not healed up; indeed, it had got much worse, An unpleasant mixture of blood and pus had begun to ooze from my gums. The time had come to seek help. I stopped off at the mission and found Herbert Brown, who was delighted to hear of the way in which Africa had confounded all my expectations, justifying as it did his own gloomy view of the Dark Continent. He undertook to attempt a repair of the car, although he could not say quite when it would be completed. If I had known it would take nine months, I would have been less grateful. As it was, I felt at least that I had shifted the burden a bit and hitched a ride on the mail truck to Garoua.

During this period I at last began to feel I was pulling in some data. I had begun to adapt to the demands of African life and field method. I remembered having read somewhere that goldmining consisted of shifting three tons of rubbish for each ounce of gold extracted; if this was true, fieldwork had much in common with gold-mining.

I never understood the reluctance of the mail truck's driver to take Whites in his conveyance; he would take anyone else for a small payment. When it came to a Westerner, he would invoke transport regulations as holy writ and refuse point blank. Sometimes a well-intentioned gendarme would lean on him on my behalf, but the whole process of getting out of Poli without transport added hugely to the frustrations of life. But finally I arrived at Garoua where, I had been informed, there lurked a dentist, the only other one in Cameroon being in the capital. After many red herrings involving putative Red Chinese dentists who turned out to be tractor drivers, I eventually tracked the man down at the local hospital.

As soon as the surgery door opened, I found myself propelled by waiting Africans to the front of the queue. Within was a certain amount of dilapidated dental equipment and a large diploma from the University of Lyons, which reassured me somewhat. I explained the problem to a huge man inside. Without more ado, he seized a pair of pliers and pulled out my two front teeth. The unexpectedness of the attack somewhat dulled my senses to the pain of the extraction. The teeth, he declared, were rotten. Perhaps, he hinted darkly, they had always been rotten. He had removed them. I was cured. I should pay the nurse outside. I sat blankly in the chair, blood gushing down my shirtfront, and tried to make him understand that he could now proceed to the next stage of his treatment. It is not easy to argue in a foreign tongue in the absence of two front teeth; I made little progress. Finally, he understood that I was a difficult patient. Very well, he declared huffily, if I was not content with his treatment, he would bring the dentist himself. He disappeared, leaving me wondering who had just operated upon me. I had fallen into the obvious trap of believing that anyone in a dental surgery, wearing a white coat and prepared to extract teeth, was a dentist.

Being still at the stage of the Western woolly-minded liberal, I took my place in the queue and waited. After some time, a French businessman arrived. He shouldered his way to the front of the queue and gave the nurse 500 francs. "Is there a white dentist?" he asked. The nurse demurred "He's not white but he's from France." The expatriate considered this and left. I stayed.

I spent a somewhat awkward interval wandering around Garoua, gap-toothed and werewolf-fanged. People approaching me crossed the street to avoid passing too close. There was so much blood on my chest that I looked as if I had been mortally wounded. I could only lisp and stutter explanations to inquisitive gendarmes who clearly suspected me of some vile act of human dismemberment.

Another man appeared, also in a white coat. Swiftly, I asked whether he was the dentist. He agreed that he was. This other man was his mechanic; he also repaired watches. A dental repair to bridge the hole in my apparatus would be very expensive. It was very difficult and required great skill. He had that skill. I tried to explain to him that unless I could talk, I could not work. If I could not work, I could not pay him. He brightened visibly. I should return in the afternoon. He would confect a plastic device. As a valued patient, I qualified for an anaesthetic. He injected novocaine into my gums. It seemed a strange thing to do after the operation but I felt too wretched to care.

In the afternoon I returned and received two plastic teeth that balanced precariously on my gums and a bottle of pink liquid to gargle with. I was charged ten times the legal rate for treatment but knew no better than to pay up. As I left, I noticed the syringe I had been injected with lying on the floor.

Learning to cope with this dreadful prosthetic device was a complication I could well have done without. The Dowayos, of course, were delighted with it: many of them have their front teeth filed away to resemble my condition. I asked them why they did this? Was it for beauty? Oh no. Was it -- and here the anthropologist was indulging his fancy -- to provide for the body an entrance which was the same shape as the gate at the entrance to the village? Oh no, patron. They did it, they informed me, so that if a man's jaw locked solid, they could still push food into his mouth and he could eat. Did this happen often? As far as anyone knew it had never happened, but it might. My ability to remove my teeth, and even more, their own ability and willingness to remove themselves in mid-conversation, were matters of great interest to Dowayos.

Matthieu, pleased by the way that my removable teeth had elevated his status, reported that there were rumours that my local healer was about to perform this ceremony for his dead wife. I always hated going up to see him because it involved crawling up a crumbling rock face with precipitous drops, but there was nothing for it. The man had chosen this inhospitable place to live for several reasons. Firstly, it was traditionally the way Dowayos were supposed to live, cultivating the hillsides on terraces so steep that they do so on their knees. Moreover, being several hundred feet higher, the climate was more suited to growing small varieties of millet that were more valued by Dowayos than the gross forms that flourish on the plains. In theory all offerings to the ancestors should be in this higher form of millet and the beer made with it is stronger. Finally, there was less trouble from the ravages of cattle in the fields.

It was now nearly harvest time and the Dowayos were fitting as many wet-season ceremonies as they could into the last month before the end of the rains. After death there are ceremonies to place a man's bow, which is attached behind the skull-house, and a woman's water-jar, which is returned to her brothers by husband or son. I was particularly keen to see these. Only once all the ceremonies had been witnessed and recorded would any analysis of their rationale or structure become possible.

This would be a relatively easy location to work in: mountain villages are cool, the man was sure to make me welcome, and it was not far from my own hut. I checked cameras, recorder, etc., and made a preliminary visit to grease my host's palm and glean his motives for organizing the ceremony and what preparations had been made. This was always a wise move. Once a ceremony was under way, there would be so many marauding kinsmen that no one would have time for an anthropologist's foolish questions. Moreover, it gave me time to look at the sort of answers I was getting and the sort of questions I was putting and see whether they could not be improved on. I would follow this up with a second visit several days after the festival to clear up any points that arose in the heat of performance and check identities, inconsistencies and differences with other villages" ways of conducting the ritual. It was also a chance to get good pictures of ritual paraphernalia that would not have been returned to their owners yet and which might not emerge clearly in photographs taken during the ceremony. I had decided as a matter of policy to send my undeveloped films home and have friends check them there. Having them developed in Cameroon would be both expensive and unreliable, and keeping them for eighteen months in such a climate very risky. It meant that many would be lost in the mail and that I would not be able to see them myself until I returned to England, but on the whole it seemed the wisest course. The great disadvantage was that it considerably increased my contact with the officials at the post office who were past masters at ineptitude and unhelpfulness, even by local standards.

Once they settled in Poli they were the relentless goal of my mail runs. In their agreeable company one could speak English of a sort, eat bread that Jeannie baked in the kitchen, listen to music and talk about things other than millet and cattle. It was Jon's task to communicate to Dowayos "the meaning of Christianity", as it was mine to establish "the meaning of Dowayo culture". We both helped each other to an understanding of the limitations of our mutual endeavours. Jon was the proud owner, moreover, of twelve barrels of trash literature that he generously lent out. I maintain that it was this, above all else, that kept me sane in Dowayoland. Those infinite longueurs between ceremonies, those terrible dull evenings after seven o'clock when all Dowayos were abed, became so much less frustrating with something to read. Fieldwork became the most concentrated literary experience of my life. Never before had I had such an opportunity to read. I read sitting on rocks, half-way up mountains, sitting in streams, crouched in huts by the light of the moon, waiting at crossroads by the light of oil-lamps. I was never without one of Jon's paperbacks. When expectations failed and holy oaths to me were broken, I would simply slip into fieldwork gear, pull out my paperback and outwait the Dowayos.

Jon and Jeannie Berg, as they revealed themselves, were now missionaries to Poli -- colleagues at the Protestant mission of Herbert Brown. They were young Americans, new to Africa, as baffled by the whole experience as I had been. It was Jon's task to look after teaching in the Bible school; Jeannie was his helpmate. We all bore the heavy scent of higher education.

These last few days before the ceremony brought a major change in my conditions of life. I was in town on my mail run when there appeared an unknown truck laden with boxes, barrels and trunks. Unknown vehicles were always grounds for rife speculation. This one contained two unknown white people, a man and a woman. As resident white man it fell to me to go up first and poke my nose into their affairs. We had a conversation in rather awkward French, in the course of which it became apparent that we were all anglophones and my hand, with two broken fingers, was crushed in a manly grip.

I acquired an enviable reputation for stubbornness. If someone promised to meet me and did not turn up, I simply sat down with a book and waited until he did turn up. I felt that I had finally achieved a Western victory over the Dowayo notion of time.

Jon and Jeannie, apart from solving my transport problem and proving willing to haul supplies from the city, fulfilled several other needs. Jon lent me a key to his office, so I could use it when he was travelling. It had a real desk, the first flat writing surface I had seen in Dowayoland, electric light and paper. These luxuries cannot be appreciated by anyone who has not lived in an African mountain village. I could step through the door and simply leave Dowayoland for several hours at a stretch. I could spread out my notebooks and begin to analyse my data, to detect areas where my knowledge was sketchy, to scent other parts where inquiry might be rewarding, to pursue the demands of abstract thought without interruption or distraction -- most un-African pursuits.

All this, of course, lay in the future on our first encounter, but events rather overtook my own expectations. I was engaged, as I mentioned, on the recording of the jar-ceremony. I turned up on the announced day and found, to my surprise, that the ceremony would indeed take place as advertised. I confess that climbing the mountain took rather more out of me than I had expected; by the time I reached the top I could hardly stand, and the world was swimming before my eyes. I recorded the ceremony as best I could, the decoration of the dead woman's jar as a candidate for circumcision, the songs and the dance where a man carried the jar on his head. But something was definitely very wrong. I could hardly keep my eyes open, the weight of my camera seemed unbearable, Dowayo "explanations" suddenly annoyed me beyond all measure. I was sitting on the wall of the cattle-park, working out the kin-relations between the various participants, when a man warned me not to sit in that particular place on pain of catching a horrible disease. I sought explanations from my assistant. The problem lay, he explained, in certain broken pots over in one corner. Therein accumulated certain gases that might draw the vitamins from my stomach. This gibberish was just too much for me and I found myself in a great rage, rather to my surprise since this was quite typical of the explanations I was used to from Dowayos who could read and write. In my normal frame of mind I would have noted this merely as an attempted translation of a traditional Dowayo perception into a pseudo-Western form. In fact, as I discovered by much painstaking inquiry later, the danger lay in the stones to ensure the fertility of the cattle that were buried under the broken pots. These could interfere with human sexuality and should only be approached by old men well past the age of paternity. In sitting as I was, I was risking my own fertility.

Still rather bleary-minded, I continued my work for another week or so until Jon drove out to the village to see me with another missionary from N'gaoundere. I do not recall our conversation. It was something to do with the sexual connotations of penis yams, an example of which I had procured that very day. They exchanged meaningful looks and went into a huddle. It seemed that they were a little concerned at my condition and wanted to give me a lift to the mission hospital at N'gaoundere.

By the end of the ceremony, I was hardly able even to make notes and fled back down the mountain at breakneck speed to collapse on my mud bed. Next day, before the sun rose fully, I crept into town to see the doctor. He looked in my eyes, examined my bright orange urine under the microscope and declared that I had viral hepatitis. "You haven't had any injections from a dirty needle recently?" he asked. I thought back to the dentist at Garoua. The only cure was a regime of B complex vitamins, plenty of rest and rich diet. Given my current circumstances, this was out of the question. After some two days in bed, I felt rather better and went back up the mountain to finish the inquiry into the jar-ceremony.

I was far from convinced that such extreme measures were necessary but, luckily for me, they insisted on dropping by the next day on the way out of town. It seemed wise to ponder the matter. Armed with soap, I set out for the swimming-place but, a mere hundred yards from the village, was assailed by a huge bout of fatigue that made it impossible to continue. Sitting down on a convenient rock, I was quite unable to command my legs. It began to rain heavily but motion was still totally beyond me. I recalled that it was my birthday and simply collapsed in tears, in which condition I was discovered by Gaston, a man from a nearby village. I sobbed out my inability to walk and he simply picked me up and carried me back to my hut, where I slept until hauled to the hospital.