A Dowayo Village at the end of the dry season is characterized by feverish creative endeavour. Dowayos live in a world of very firm lines. In the wet season, once the rain-chief has applied the remedies to the rain-pots and made the storm clouds gather, one set of activities is permitted. In the dry season, when the rain-pots have been wiped dry or purged with fire, another range of human skills is allowed to be employed. To perform dry-season tasks in the wet season or vice versa is to disturb the cosmic order and could have devastating results for all. The hands that performed such acts would erupt in boils, women would miscarry, pots would explode. Likewise a firm line marks off male from female activities. A man must never draw water. This is women's work. A woman must not weave cloth. That is a man's task. Dowayos live quite happily within the network of such prohibitions. There is a comforting sense of place and appropriate time. The ethnographer comes to know and dread the reply, 'It is not the right time to talk of this. It is not the moment.' No amount of cajolery, no pantomime of disappointment, will melt a Dowayo's heart once it has been deemed the wrong time for certain things.

Dowayo restrictions on labour do not, however, end here. Within the apparent uniformity of life with the cattle and the fields lies a system of demarcations that would inspire envy in a shipyard worker. Only blacksmiths may forge. Only their women may make pots. Hunters may not keep cattle. Rain-makers and smiths must not meet. Each activity has its responsibilities and potential dangers. Precautions not taken, prohibitions ignored, all have their effects on the community.

At the end of the dry season there is always a backlog of things not done or not completed. Grass must be cut for running repairs to the roof. The potter must fire all those pots hanging around the compound. The hunter must hang up his bow on the shrine to wild animals and make offerings of eggs. All this before the rain-chief declares the rainy season and such activities become forbidden. At such moments, the normal languid pace of Dowayo life is transformed. A passing visitor would carry away tales of the frenzied industry and Protestant ethic of this little mountain tribe that would puzzle those that know Dowayos better.

In the midst of all this, an anthropologist comes wishing to 'study material culture'.

It is a clear mark of the anomalous position of an outside fieldworker that he can happily ignore almost all the prohibitions that Dowayos must obey. If he does women's work it is a mere joke, a story to be rehearsed with sniggers around the camp-fire. He will inevitably show himself to be vastly inept at any attempt actually to make something with his hands. When potting he will burn himself. Carried away in the process of weaving, he is sure to trip over the threads, pulling the loom to the ground and ruining the handkerchief-sized piece of cloth it took him hours to produce. All this is part of the anthropologist's contribution to the people who put up with him. He provides light relief, a jester in shorts. A particular favourite of the Dowayos was the basket I wove under the eagle eye of the old woman across the compound. Happening upon her one day as she sat under the shady awning deftly manipulating tree-bark and reeds, I was entranced by this image of rural domesticity. There was something deeply therapeutic and calming in the elegant economy of her gestures. I would have to have a go.

For once there is no shortage of things to look at. In this feverish phase of artisanal activity, the problem is rather where to begin.

The mere sight of a man making baskets is enough to reduce a whole village to hysterical laughter. My instructress wept with mirth. Zuuldibo, coming to see what all the noise was about, guffawed heartily and mimicked the expression of outraged concentration on my face. I could see he would use that later when he came to repeat the story to the men. Children gazed at me with intense wonder. There was something here that defied explanation. The form of the basket was a deep joy to them as it evolved in my stumbling fingers. Dowayo baskets are traditionally round and shallow. My own had no form for which geometry can supply a name. It was elliptical, slightly square on one side, firmly round on the other. It had a sort of lump halfway down that no amount of tugging and pulling could disperse. It had enigmatic loose ends that threatened to unravel. 'Where does this bit go?' I asked. Screams of laughter. Zuuldibo smashed his fist against his thigh and clutched his stomach. He repeated the phrase. That, too, would go into his tale. My assistant looked pained and crept away. Once more. I was letting him down.

The only sour note was from my neighbour, Alice. Alice was a shrew. The Dowayos do not have such a term. They regarded her more directly as 'a bitter vagina'. It was never revealed what had soured her life, what betrayal or disappointment had led to such an unpleasant character. Whatever it was‚ she displayed such a readiness to be disagreeable on all occasions that I could not understand how she had avoided allegations of witchcraft -- the normal fate of tiresome or intimidating women in Africa. Her sons lived in fear of her tongue and had seized the opportunity provided by an indecently early marriage even by Dowayo standards to move in with their wives' kin -- explaining that they were too young to have paid full bride-price and must therefore work for their brides' fathers. She had long since nagged to death the last in a series of ever more timorous husbands and had been swiftly ejected from his village. In her old age, she had returned to plague Zuuldibo, a nephew. Although her limbs had atrophied and she demanded considerable help in the fields, her tongue was still robust and active.

I had many reasons to be grateful to Alice. I discovered after installing myself in the village, that the chief had only allowed a stranger to live in his own compound so that I would serve as a buffer between Alice and himself. She was conveniently able to lean over the low wall that separated us at all hours of the day and talk, talk, talk. Ín the course of a morning, I must have received more exposure to language than one could normally hope for in a week. This was good for me, Zuuldibo sniggered, and remarked that my use of the negative would benefit most. In her many and elaborate pronouncements, she never said anything nice about anyone.

Her comments on my basket-making were not kind or even intended to be helpful. Laughter evaporated around her like dew in the sun. When favouring me with her views on anything -- and Alice had very strong and well-rounded views on most things -- she constantly returned to the evils of celibacy as opposed to the blessings of marriage. She constituted a powerful argument against her own case. The present occasion was too much for her. That a man should actually make a basket! Beneath her withering tongue, I sloped away and hid the product of my incipient craft. Throughout my stay, Dowayos would ask to see it and collapse in helpless laughter in the face of it.

In anthropology, enjoyment is often used as an approximate yardstick of understanding. The idea is that if an anthropologist does not like anything he encounters among an alien people, this is ethnocentrism. If he disapproves of anything, this is the result of bringing to bear the wrong standards. It is often ignored that very often the culture that the ethnographer enjoys least is his own, the one that he should know best. No such strictures are brought to bear upon pleasure. An ethnographer who likes some facet of the culture he is studying is never accused of ethnocentrism or wrong standards. This curious fact has led to a bizarre slanting of ethnographic monographs, wherein the fieldworker is depicted as wallowing in unmitigated delight in the things he experiences. Possibly this is why the actual experience of fieldwork comes as such a shock to the beginner and seems to call into question his commitment to the subject.

Had the Dowayos not shared my detestation of Alice, I should have been hard put to maintain the pleasure principle that I, too, had always unthinkingly accepted. Fortunately, they did. When Alice was in full spate, railing against someone or something unfortunate enough to attract her attention, Zuuldibo could often be heard giving an ironic sotto voce commentary from behind the other wall of the compound. Matthieu became especially good at mimicking Alice's voice and the impersonation of her became something of a party trick with him.

Technical processes do not just produce objects, they offer us models for thinking about other things -- principally ourselves. The invention of the pump gave us new ways of thinking about the human heart. The invention of the computer has recently given us completely new ways of thinking about the brain, displacing models based upon telephone systems. For Dowayos, the process of potting provides a model for thinking about the maturation of the human being through time and the seasons of the year. The actual ritual system is quite complex but its outlines can be quite easily grasped. Humans are born with soft heads. Hot objects and animals are dangerous to them and can cause fevers. At circumcision, a boy is at his wettest as he kneels in the stream bleeding into the water. Thereafter, he is dried by the application of fire as the weather too dries up. The various processes culminate in the baking of the heads of the boys by piling them up and firing branches over their heads. Hereafter, the boys are held to have hardened heads and the heads (glans) of their penes are also held to be dry and properly male. The various changes that occur after death are similarly held to dry the head until it becomes a skull purged of flesh. The use of the potting model is quite clear in the ritual system but never put into words. It was therefore important confirmatory evidence for me that the smiths and potters, in their technical vocabulary, tie the two processes of human maturation and potting together.

Quite suddenly one day, Alice died. Normally, where a death occurred with such swiftness in the absence of previous ill-health, witchcraft should have been suspected. In the present case, no one was too anxious to look further into the matter. A sort of collective sigh of relief went up. It was quite the jolliest funeral I have ever been to. Particular care was taken with the more formal parts of the ritual. Spirits of the dead are enough of a nuisance as it is. No one wanted Alice coming back. And so matters rested for some time.

I now transferred my attention to the potters, with whom I had worked before. My activities here were much less a matter for public amusement since potters and their blacksmith husbands are segregated from the rest of the village on account of the venereal disease and haemorrhoids that their activities are held to cause. It was important to work through the whole process of potting and establish the terms of the trade that only they know.

As usual, research could not long continue undisturbed, pleasant as it was sitting in the potters' compound playing with clay as at nursery school.

A number of strange people appeared in rapid succession. First, there was a grizzled and bearded Spaniard who was driving from Spain to the Cape. Knowing little of the terrain through which he was to pass, except that the Sahara was full of sand and the rest full of mud with few roads, he had prepared himself against disaster by the simple expedient of coming by tractor. At a magnificent fifteen miles an hour, he had chugged manfully across the Sahara and down as far as Cameroon. As protection against the assaults of heat, wind, sand and now rain, he had rigged up an aluminium awning. Necessary supplies and equipment were packed in a trailer that he had dragged without problems for thousands of miles. Astonishingly, the whole idea had worked perfectly. He found that the tractor was the ideal vehicle for the bush. His major problem had been in crossing borders where he fell into the awkward and potentially disastrous category of one importing agricultural equipment. He was having a marvellous time and clearly regarded me as a typical English eccentric, after the fashion of all English eccentrics, in that I dwelt in the bush. In support of his allegations against the race, he told the tale of an Englishman, long resident in Barcelona, who rode a cow instead of a horse. He slowly disappeared and I never saw him again.

'No problem. I normally cycle at night. I've just got a bit behind so I'm catching up by some daytime travel. It's marvellous at night. There's no one about. It's so quiet.'

'But what about the Sahara? How did you manage?'

Scarce had his blue smoke and deafening noise diminished, when a young lady of astonishing whiteness hove into view on a bicycle. She‚ too, it appeared, was set on crossing Africa to revisit the scene of her birth, somewhere in the east. Most notable, was her cycling dress, with all parts of the body covered against the sun. She confirmed that she was an albino and therefore suffered terribly from sunburn. This made it impossible for her to wear the normal shorts and vest and she had a somewhat demure Edwardian air through the sheer quantity of material about her person.

She regarded me like a madman. 'For the views.'

And off she pedalled, leaving the locals profoundly awe-struck. It is astonishing that it is theoretically possible to walk from almost every part of the world to almost every other part yet fear keeps us from doing it.

'But why do you do it?'

'What are you doing in Cameroon?'

'Oh… A little of this, a little of that.'

'What do you do for a living?'

It soon became clear that he was a dealer in African art. This became manifest when people began mentioning to me my 'brother' who had passed through in a car the other day looking for things to buy. At first. I assumed they meant Jon, my American missionary friend. So great, however, were his depredations, so persuasive and determined his methods, that this soon ceased to be likely or even possible.

'It sort of depends.'

He had‚ however, questioned me closely on my own movements and the doings of the Dowayos. I assumed an Embassy connection and left it at that. I returned to Poli.

The last visitor was the most intriguing in many ways. On a visit to the city, I had come across a rather dapper, middle-aged American with shrewd eyes and a certain evasive manner. 'You're American?'

Many of his purchases were decidedly dubious in that the people who sold them had no legal right to alienate the objects of which they were -- strictly speaking -- merely guardians. I was also a little annoyed at the use of my name. My one comfort was that the Dowayos have very little that would be of value on the art market and that his haul would not bring him much in monetary terms.

'Well, you could say it's a holiday.'

'Well, sort of.'

'Are you staying long?'

As I bent down and crept into their compound through the low doorway, it became clear that the baking was some time in the past. New pots were stacked neatly in all corners of the compound, red for normal use, black for widows. Water-jars were being tested for leaks, several new but broken pots lay ready to be used as convenient containers. I recognized one of my own pots that had clearly exploded on firing.

Some time later, I returned to my potters. In the course of my work with them, I had followed pots through all the stages of their preparation. The best way to do this, had been to make some myself. This had been greeted with the usual amusement by my instructors but had proved a useful source of knowledge on the names, for example, of techniques. Being confirmed jokers, the Dowayo potters had promised to fire my eccentric works along with their own more regular pieces the next time they did a bake. This would be the last time before the start of the rainy season -- when firing of pots was forbidden. I was particularly keen to see how one of my efforts with incised floral motifs would turn out. They had promised to let me know when the firing would take place but I never set great store by such promises that would be more often ignored than kept.

During my brief career as a creator of unique Dowayo artefacts, I encountered a critic who, it had been hoped, was finally silent. The ritual precision with which Alice's funeral had been conducted had been intended to ensure that her departure was permanent and complete.

Dealers have done far worse things in their time. It is now standard practice in ethnography to change place names in published accounts so that dealers cannot use them as guidebooks to arrange illegal sales and thefts of objects. Flower motifs on Dowayo pots are unusual -- even unique. Normally Dowayos ornament their pots with simple geometric forms. Such a pot is therefore a considerable curiosity. Potential purchasers are, however, hereby warned…

The head potter emerged. The firing was over? Oh yes, a long time ago. Why had they not let me know? They had tried but I was not at home. Had any of my pots survived? Indeed, all but the broken one over there. Could I see them? She looked baffled. But my brother had come to collect them the other day in his car. He had taken them all away. He had especially liked the one with flowers on.

Later in the day, we trudged round to the rather dispiriting pile of women's skulls dumped behind an outlying hut. They were always overgrown and covered with leaves rather like a compost heap. We poured beer over Alice's and requested her to leave us in peace. 'Not that it did much good when she was alive,' grumped the chief.

Life is not, however, that simple. In Dowayoland, the dead do not simply disappear from this world. The living have a continuing, though uneasy, relationship with them. Several days after the funeral, Zuuldibo appeared, hat askew, clearly raddled from a disturbed night on his bed of impacted mud. He had, he confessed, been plagued by dreams. Now some men would tell you dreams come from the spirits of the dead. As for himself, he was an honest man, he did not know such things. However, in case I was a believer, it was only fair to warn me that Alice had started coming back in dreams. She had had a good deal to say about the way the chief had been conducting his domestic affairs and the lack of offerings to her skull. Her principal message, however, had been for me. 'Stop playing about. Buy your pots like everyone else and take a better wife than you deserve.'

It was an opportunity to turn the conversation to notions of reincarnation. The chief was concerned that one of his daughters had become pregnant at the same time that Alice had died. Normally, such a juxtaposition of death and new life is taken to show that the deceased has somehow managed to jump the queue and become reborn immediately without going through all the complex rites that the Dowayos use to shunt the dead into the category of ancestors. Since the child is expected to take many of its qualities from the dead forebear, he was visibly depressed at having a new version of Alice with him for the rest of his days. I suggested that Alice's appearance in a dream was good evidence that Alice had not yet come up for reincarnation. 'I hadn't thought of that.' Zuuldibo brightened visibly.

But what about circumcision? Was there any news? Zuuldibo sighed. I must be patient. Everything was fine. The ceremony would probably happen. This pulled me up short. No one had ever spoken of 'probably' before. All statements had been of an encouraging definiteness. I was plunged in gloom.

At such moments, morale needs to be lifted. Mysteriously, I received through the postal service a periodical to which I do not subscribe. It contained, on the back page, the obituary of a minor Greek folklorist lifted to prominence by the political switchback of his country. He had died, it seemed, on the prison island where the regime housed those of whom it disapproved. The researcher in question had published data on homosexual slang in modern Athens. This was clearly what had brought him to the attention of the authorities. He had been warned. Sticking firmly to his notions of academic freedom, he had continued research and come up with the even more scandalous, 'Homosexual argot among male prostitutes'. Condemned to incarceration for bringing Greek manhood into disrepute, he had not been cowed. His study of homosexual slang in Greek prisons was published posthumously.

Here, indeed, was an example of a man who turned every misfortune into a research topic. Compared to that, my own problems seemed relatively benign. Anthropological fieldwork may have its oversung heroes but it also has some heroic failures who tend to be passed over swiftly in university courses.

P. Amaury Talbot is known as a punctilious researcher into Southern Nigerian ethnography. In his own arid monographs, however, there is no hint of his real talent which was clearly that of accident-prone self-mutilation. In his journey across Nigeria and Cameroon in the company of his wife and the formidable Olive MacLeod, it is striking that as the latter two wax ever more stalwart, he declines. He begins by falling from his horse on to his head. Scarce recovered, he strikes his head against a beam, 'Unfortunately in the identical place where he had injured it when thrown from his horse in the Kamerun, and the result was delirium and several days of bed.' Once more recovered, he is fed poisoned dates and nearly perishes. Back on horseback, he crashes into a cow. He is also bitten by a snake, but then so is nearly everyone. Compared to him, I was doing well. Museum Studies offers us even more edifying precursors. The indefatigable heiress, Miss Alexandrine Tinné, organized an expedition in the mid-nineteenth century to the Upper Nile that led to the deaths of her mother, aunt and their servants. Undeterred, she resolved to cross the Sahara from Tripoli to Bornu, but, taking her lesson from the earlier fatalities, hired Touareg bodyguards. They shot her.

Being greatly cheered by recollections of the difference between the private and public face of anthropology, I was once more able to face the world. Matthieu and I walked down to the entrance to the village. Here all pretence at roads gave out and the mountain paths began. At the junction was the ritually important crossroad. It is not only in our own culture that crossroads are associated with all manner of beliefs. Logically they are interesting in that they have place but no extension, like a point in geometry, belonging simultaneously to several different paths. It is here that many ritually dangerous objects are disposed of in Dowayoland, a sort of convenient cultural 'nowhere' where costumes of mourning and polluting human exuviae such as hair can be dumped. To one side, had been set up several logs for the men to sit on as they made their way back from the fields. They would rest their weary bones here a while, smoke and talk. As they looked out over the country, they were drawn inevitably to more general topics and discussions of village affairs. Whereas a gathering of men inside the village would always take on the air of a law-court, gatherings outside were truly informal and 'off the record'.

Possibly there were elephants at one time in Dowayoland but no living Dowayo has seen them. There certainly were leopards up in the mountains, though the last recorded one was shot over thirty years ago. Occasionally, there was still the odd antelope moving down towards the river but these were really few. Wire snares, guns -- efficient forms of extermination -- had been seized on eagerly by Dowayos so that wildlife had been greatly reduced, most large species being simply exterminated.

As we came up, there was already a certain amount of excitement. The buzz of conversation was noticeably more animated than usual. It had been decided to hold the last hunt of the year! Everyone was giggling and chattering with eager anticipation. There would be antelope, said one. Antelope? There would be leopards! said another. Elephants! cried a third. Elephants with leopards on their backs! Everyone giggled.

In the village, there was still a 'true hunter', a man with hunting magic and a shrine for the dead animals he had killed, a ritual specialist in the arts of hunting and avoiding the dangers that it could bring. In fact, he seldom got his bow down from the shrine where it hung. Because of his calling, his hot hands -- caused by the animal blood he had shed -- rendered him unable to keep cattle. They would die.

He would direct the hunt and co-ordinate the activities of the men. The most important thing was that no man should have intercourse with a woman for three days. All agreed to this. The hunter gave them a lecture on the importance of this consideration. The chief problem, it seemed, was not intercourse itself but the fact that the woman might have committed adultery with someone else. The smell of this would be communicated to the man. Dowayos never expect too much fidelity from their women and regard adulterous liaisons as an excellent sport to engage in themselves. A man so infected would be incapable of the simplest shot. His hand would shake, his eyes cloud over. His arrow would miss its mark. Worst of all, dangerous beasts of the bush would home in on him. He would be stalked by leopards and scorpions, and risked an awful death. They would smell him from miles away. He would thus be a menace to everyone. There was a great deal of shifty eyeing of each other during this speech that only slowly gave way to the obligatory obscenities always encountered in all-male company. The prohibition was to begin this evening.

The atmosphere in the village was rather like that in a house where several people have sworn to give up smoking at the same time and laid money on their resolve. Everyone suspects the others of cheating. Short absences invite comment, longer absences interrogation. The problem is made worse in a context where men are not allowed to admit before women that they need to defecate, since this is one of the principal reasons for men quietly slipping away unnoticed.

The old men were particularly bothered about the younger, more virile members of the hunt and felt that a further strain was being placed on the always wobbly fidelity of their spouses by their own withdrawal of sexual services. Some men went as far as accompanying their wives down to the water-hole and back when they carried their pots down there to fill them with the green, fetid water of the late dry season. They did not, of course, help to carry the vessels.

Bows are not a good thing to keep around women. The hunter's bow is the most dangerous. It can cause a woman to miscarry. Hunters therefore tend to avoid main paths and skulk around the village on long detours. If they meet a woman, they immediately lay their bows down pointing away from her and will not speak to her until this has been done. The bows of ordinary, occasional hunters are less severe in their effects though no man would be so foolish as to introduce one into a compound where there is a woman with child. Women, however, are very dangerous to them, especially when menstruating. Their effluvium is held to 'spoil' the bow and make it useless. The link in Dowayo thought seems to lie in the similarity of the different types of bleeding involved in each, hunting or menstruation. They are sufficiently similar to need to be kept rigorously apart.

Strangers passing through were noticeably nervous. Why were the Dowayos of Kongle rearming?

The blacksmith's forge glowed hot throughout the next two days as men approached him for arrows and ever-more-refined systems of barbs to prevent a wounded animal dislodging an arrow that had penetrated it. Trailing growths of creeper disappeared from behind men's huts and were boiled down to a waxy poison for the use of the warriors.

Men, therefore, withdrew their weapons from their huts and hid them in the bush. There, they would be strengthened with certain remedies, arrows would be sharpened and dipped in poison. There was plenty for the ethnographer to be getting on with.

Old men made free with their reminiscences. Things had been different in the old days. Animals, they maintained, had been fiercer then. Pressed with questions, Zuuldibo had to confess that he did not actually possess a bow, but in no way would this prevent him from assuming a prominent part in the hunt, as befitted his chiefly dignity. There were other things to be done, the organization of men, the making of much noise, the despatching of animals. He drew his knife and dramatically mimed throat-cutting. He was very good at the despatching of animals. Anyway, his famous dog Revenge was essential for the hunt. Already, it had been tied up for two days without food to make it keen.

The men were awash with the good humour that seems always abundant in Dowayoland when men are cooperating together in something from which women are excluded. Men began to gather outside the village, coming on foot and bicycle, bows incongruously slung over plastic mackintoshes, quivers stuffed with arrows tied to cross-bars with strips of rubber cut from old inner tubes. Beer was promised.

The day dawned bright and cheerful. The whole village was a-tingle. In the dim light, some little boys had gathered with the tiny bows made for them by doting fathers. They practised fierce expressions and swearing on their knives until rebuked by elders. Catching a tardy scorpion they ringed it with blazing straw until it popped and burst to their screams of joy.

The evident displeasure of their women pleased the men immensely. It was proof of male sexual restraint and superiority. One woman came up and gave her young husband his tobacco-pouch which he had forgotten to take with him. There was a hush. Why this good nature? Where had he left the pouch? Suspicious eyes swivelled accusingly. The hunter began to speak bitterly of the whole hunt being spoiled by selfishness and men behaving like women. The young man blushed and looked at the ground. An elder intervened. He spoke gently and sadly of the hot blood of youth, of the importunities of women who would not leave a man alone. He advised the young man to withdraw from the hunt, then no one could accuse him if anything went wrong. But he was innocent! Nevertheless, a wise man would think before continuing on this road. The young man sat in silence for some time as other women -- more suitably bad tempered -- came and slammed down beer-pots on the ground. With tears in his eyes, he left. What will he do? Why, beat his wife of course!

Women made great play with their ill-temper. Those rich enough to own enamel saucepans, rather than clay pots, were able to bang them around to rare effect. The others had to content themselves with shouting at their children or kicking the dogs.

Zuuldibo, having no past hunting triumphs to recount, fell back on those of his father. He was the first man in Dowayoland to have a gun, alas now foolishly sold. Great prodigies had been effected with this weapon. It had even been used on the odd Fulani. Men sighed wistfully, thinking of the old days of warfare.

The beer went round again, warm and steaming. I passed round my cigarettes. It was to be hoped, remarked one old man, that the smell of the White Man would not frighten away the game. Smell, what did they mean? I washed every day. Had they not seen? Indeed, this was part of the problem, like as not. Possibly part of the smell was soap. White men all smelled. What was it like? Dowayos have a rich series of odd sounds to describe smells, conventionalized but not strictly part of the language, rather like our 'ouch' or 'bang'. A hot debate arose as to whether I was sok, sok, sok (like rotten meat, Matthieu helpfully explained) or virrr (stale milk), to which all lustily contributed. Since many Dowayos are, to a European mind, goatily malodorous this conversation came as something of a revelation. I promised to keep downwind.

After a certain amount of further dithering, they all set off‚ myself trailing behind with the little boys, dogs and other camp-followers. There was a great deal of immoderate laughter and whooping. Some of the men were clearly drunk. On the whole, it seemed safer to be behind them rather than in front.

We made our way down to a depression between two mountains where the grass was long and relatively lush from accumulated water. Apparently, a man had sighted antelope here a few days ago. A private scouting foray by the village hunter had confirmed the presence of deer. The men and boys were shushed into silence and immediately developed the giggles like children stealing apples. Many of the men had been circumcised together and so had to joke with each other anyway. It was agreed that the hunter and six other men would make their way round to the other side of the valley and that we would drive the game towards them on receipt of their shouted signal. Since the sides of the valley were steep, the deer should not be able to escape that way. We would have them all.

At this point, came prolonged discussion of the nature of the enterprise in which we were engaged. Some declared that we should make our way to the main water-holes, hide up the trees and just wait for the game to come down to drink. Most felt that this was far too undramatic for their current state of mind and called these dissenters cowards. They left in a huff to follow their own devices. The remaining band of about twenty continued out into the bush.

Finally, there came a shout from the far end. We all stood up and advanced in a line across the depression. Zuuldibo seemed to be indeed a valuable asset. He had perfected a high howl that commanded astonishment while brooking no imitation. Any living thing, one felt, would flee before that. The dogs had picked up the excitement, snarling and trying to dart ahead through our legs. Unfortunately, the dampness in the area had encouraged rank growth of thorny shrubs that seemed to have linked branches to deny us passage. It was never clear who had the idea of starting a fire but soon a long line was ablaze. It was unfortunate that the matter had not been discussed beforehand since the wind was blowing in entirely the wrong direction. We were rapidly engulfed in choking smoke and driven back by the heat of the flames. The little boys were wild-eyed with terror and began to sob. Matthieu and I hauled them up the bare stone walls and led them round to the other side of the flames. We were greeted by seven very irritated men, arrows notched to slay anything that moved. In dribs and drabs, some of the men and dogs made their way through and stood about looking disconsolate. From shouts at some distance, we learned that one small antelope had been killed in all the confusion while the rest had got away.

There now came one of those dull periods of which the whole of fieldwork seems to consist on bad days. We waited for about an hour in the long grass. A steady drizzle developed, the rain not so much falling as seeping coldly into us until we were wretched. Several developed headaches and blamed Zuuldibo's beer loudly.

One of the men, taken by surprise, had fired at it and missed. West African bows, being permanently strung unlike in other parts of the world, are not very accurate at the best of times. Their range too is limited. We were to kill nothing big that day. The dogs, following their meal, had lost interest. The men were downcast. Someone had seen a land tortoise, a sure sign that one of his relatives was to die. The others devoted themselves to smoking out bush-rats by plunging firebrands down one end of their tunnels and skewering them as they fled out the other. This was not quite fit activity for hunters, being more the sort of thing that children do. Several little boys showed themselves very adept at the more difficult parts of the operation and gave their elders instruction. As the rats were clubbed or stabbed, they urinated over their killers. Fortunately, it was not until I returned to Europe that someone told me that this is the source of the deadly disease Lassa fever. Apparently, it is caused by a virus contained in the urine of the rats to which human children are immune but which can be lethal to adults. Not knowing this at the time, I watched the operation for some time and helped carry the haul of rats back to the village.

All at once, there was a great trampling sound and a Dowayo cow appeared, looked at us with polite surprise and stepped delicately round the boil of dogs to disappear into the long grass on the other side.

Suddenly, there came a crashing in the bush. All the armed men swivelled round and raised their bows. The dogs leaped forward unchecked. There was a hideous snarling and yelping, an offstage battle of giants. We advanced in the wake of the hunters. Before us boiled a tangled mass of dogs. It seemed that one dog had become wounded in the operations and the other dogs, smelling blood, had thrown themselves upon it and were tearing it to pieces in the heat of combat. No one intervened. It died a horrible death and the dogs began a lurid cannibal feast. I was the only one who seemed upset by all this, the men joking and laughing. The dog's owner was not there. The dogs crunched and ripped sickeningly.

The next day an outraged elder arrived complaining that some fools had started a fire over by the mountains and all his fences had been burned down. He had been hard put to it to save his granary. Zuuldibo gravely reminded him that he had passed on an instruction from the sous-préfet some time ago, ordering all villagers to clear a firebreak around their huts. The man had not done so. It was his own fault. Let him return to his village before anyone found out and he had to be fined.

The men maintained that they had had a splendid day. But there was no hiding from the women that they were not returning with shoulders bowed beneath the weight of antelope meat. There would be no immoderate feasting in the village that evening. No skulls would he heaped on the hunter's shrine. The women secretly knew that the men had had a rotten time and seemed more cheerful for it.

After this disastrous hunt there was a considerable amount of discussion about the conclusions to be drawn. I, of course, was eager to encourage talk on all these topics and acquired an unwelcome reputation as a scandalmonger. Everyone was agreed that the hunt had failed owing to the unbridled sexual self-indulgence of almost everyone else. One man confessed that he had been unable to dispense with gratification for the required period and hoped that this had nothing to do with the débâcle at the base of the mountain. Just to be on the safe side, he had accused his wife of adultery and beaten her.

The way that the fire had turned back on them, the fact that the dogs had fought each other, the way that the antelope had turned into a cow -- all this argued for either adultery or witchcraft, maybe both. There was a lingering whiff of mutual suspicion in the village. Neighbours had been revealed as sexual gluttons and liars. Wives were possibly adulterous. Witches were at work.

Dowayos have their good times and their bad times like everyone else. They expect a man in this world to have a mixture of good and bad fortune and do not seek too far the ultimate causes of misfortune. They have developed a whole range of devices that account more or less loosely for the complexities of what we call luck. A man may have good fortune through buying appropriate potions which he swallows or by the use of charms and spells. Bad fortune may come from witchcraft of others or the intervention of hostile ancestors. All these may mix together to make the world difficult to interpret. Ancestors may aggravate the witchcraft of a living rival. They may also interfere in the operation of divining, which is normally the only way of determining what factors are at work. A man does not expect too much certainty. What is striking is the change that may occur, within a very short time, in the way that similar events are viewed. Once suspicion of witchcraft is in the air, all the necessary evidence to confirm this belief is automatically generated.

The genitals of Zuuldibo's cattle became infested with worms. His son stumbled on a rocky path and twisted his ankle. Beer that should have fermented turned sour instead. All these things are a fairly regular part of life in Dowayoland and would normally invite no special comment. In the present climate, however, they were all viewed as part of the same thing, as evidence that something more general was amiss. Zuuldibo was clearly worried. One night a little boy appeared at my door asking if I had any 'roots' that could help the chief sleep. I passed on some that I had received from the local doctor during a bout of malaria but the next day Zuuldibo was fretful and explained that he had had bad dreams.

The next night, owls were seen near the cattle. Two of the wives started ostentatiously putting up porcupine quills and other anti-witchcraft remedies on the roofs of their huts. Owls are associated with witchcraft and Dowayos have a deep fear of them 'because of their staring eyes', the same reason they give for fear of leopards. The wives were making a fairly clear statement that they knew there was witchcraft about but they had no part in it.

A few days later, one of the women reported that the water-hole had turned green and slimy. A diviner was sent for. He was a man famous throughout Dowayoland. He would be very expensive.

This is an area where an outsider has a clearly privileged status. All Dowayos agree that white men are ignorant of witchcraft. The secrets have been lost in their own country. They cannot be witches nor can they suffer from witchcraft themselves. On my previous trip, after a series of disasters involving a car crash, sickness and financial difficulty, I had suggested to a number of Dowayos that I might be the victim of a witchcraft attack. They had all laughed as at a great joke.

His appearance was a little disappointing. There were no charms and outrageous clothes, no stick in the form of a snake, no deliberate staring down of those he was speaking to. He was modest and quiet, dressed in a grey tunic. He reminded me for all the world of a consultant at a Western hospital. He called the chiefs whole family together and interrogated them on what had happened, nodding and muttering softly as he drew out their confidences. Interestingly, no one mentioned the hunt which had seemed to me the most significant event of the lot since it had structured all that was to follow. He called for a bowl of water and the women were driven out. It was set carefully before him and he blew over it several times before allowing the surface to clear. He stared intently into it for some thirty seconds. We all held our breath. He cleared his throat and everyone leaned forward to catch his words.

We began with witchcraft. Was there witchcraft? The oracle indicated that there was. What kind was it? He named the various sorts. The oracle picked one out. Was it women? The oracle revealed that it was. Finally, by ever finer questioning, it seemed that we had got down to the level of naming names. Was it the white man? No response from the oracle. The men laughed. I broke out in a sweat. The two surfaces continued to move smoothly over each other. If the zepto stuck at any moment I would still be implicated. It seemed an unfairly long stretch of time before he moved on, like the moment in musical chairs where you have to relinquish lingering claims on one seat without any hope of reaching the next.

It seemed this was a difficult case. He would use the zepto oracle. Aah. He dug in his little leather bag and pulled out some sections of the rectangular cactus-like plant. Two slices were cut and the session began. It seemed wrong that this should happen in broad daylight, with sunshine streaming through the door of the hut. It seemed to call for flickering firelight and dramatic shadows transforming faces into theatrical props. Everything was totally matter-of-fact. We were watching a man in command of his subject. He inspired confidence. The motions of his hands were spare and precise. The divination consists of rubbing together two slices of the plant and asking questions the while. The plant sections stick or go into holes when the significant question has been asked. New sections of zepto are taken and the questioning is continued.

Dowayos know, of course, that diviners can cheat and manipulate the oracle. One expects to pay for quality, not just of the man himself but of the power of his plant. To identify me as the source of the witchcraft would gravely undermine his audience's faith in his reliability.

A woman in the next compound was picked out as the culprit. Contrary to expectation, the diviner did not stop here. He took two new slices of plant. Were there spirits active? There were. Aah, this was a complicated case. The audience nodded approval. Indeed, this was a good man. All patients like to be told that their disease is special, that it stretches the skill of the healer.

The diviner came up with another name, a long-dead woman with no history of molestation of her kin. It was as if he lost his audience at this point. They began shaking their heads and exchanging glances. He felt it too. He began to work faster and produced some fairly fancy material on the actual demands made by the deceased. But he had lost credibility. An attempt to return to the witchcraft of the alleged miscreant in the next compound flopped badly. No one seemed convinced any more.

From the look on Zuuldibo's face, he knew as well as I did where the divination was going to end. It was Alice again, doubtless abetting the witchcraft of this minor nuisance in the next compound.

It came as no surprise that a couple of days later, some of the men arranged for Zuuldibo's father-in-law, also a skilled zepto-slicer, to run another session. Being more attuned to local conditions, he came up with the answer that it was all due to Alice and her interfering ways. Confirmation of this diagnosis came later that night. Another man dreamed that Alice appeared and explained at some length the nature of her grievance. Normally the dead just complain generally of neglect. They have received no offerings of beer or blood. No attempts have been made to organize the ceremonies that make them available for reincarnation. Alice was rather different. Just as in life she had not limited her attention to those matters that might be viewed as strictly her own business, so in death she allowed herself to range widely over the doings of her descendants. She was apparently scandalized that her nephew, Zuuldibo, was not doing more to further the projected circumcision. Her youngest son‚ though married, was still uncut. She wanted something done about it. I felt that at last she had become an ally.