The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,30

and sturdy. They all offered to help, and every one seemed a threat. The women beggars, at this time of night, were especially disturbing.

Here, without understanding how it had happened I lost the man in the suit. Here, left alone with a man who said he was my driver, I heard that the man in the suit was not himself a driver; he organised drivers at the airport for people like me.

This man at least knew where I was going, and I allowed myself to go with him.

It was a slow, long journey to the other end of the sleeping town. The driver appeared uncertain about the route.

All kinds of doubt came to me, but then, miraculously, there was the hotel tower.

The man who took me up to the room drew the curtains dramatically and said, like an impresario, “The Atlantic Ocean!” I had to take it on trust. It was too dark to see clearly and I was too tired to concentrate. I had an impression of rollers coming in, heard some of the ocean noise (as I thought) muffled by glass and concrete; and that was all. The man then spoke about the television, took his tip, and was gone, leaving me alone with the deficiencies of the small, bare room: the broken safe, the empty refrigerator.

I telephoned the desk. They said they would send someone to look at the safe. He came up promptly, a sour-looking fellow in blue dungarees with Locksmith in big white letters on the back. He did a few things to the safe and said he had fixed it. He gave a little demonstration, but a short while later the safe went back to its bad ways, and the desk, not at all put out, said they would send the locksmith again. He did come up, too, as promptly as before; but by this time I thought the room was beyond redemption and I should look at another room.

That too was unsuitable. And then the people at the desk began to send me zipping up and down, from floor to floor and room to unsuitable room. It began to seem that a gratuity was called for, if I was to be shown a good room. And almost at the same time the idea came to me—thinking of what I had seen downstairs—that I had been booked into the wrong section of the hotel (it had various sections, and separate actual buildings) and that this error had led me to something like a Nigerian maison de passe.

I remembered that a warning of some sort had been given me by a friend, but he had done so in too coded a way and I had not understood. This friend was now in Dubai, on the Persian Gulf. He had a friend whom he trusted in Kano, five hundred miles away in northern Nigeria. I telephoned them both, and though it would have been early Sunday morning for them, they were marvellous.

The man in Kano must have been a man of some authority, and perhaps also with a gift of correct language. The hotel’s attitude changed at once. I was given a room in another, more suitable building. The man in Kano said I was to go there right away and and not wait for morning. Like the hotel itself, I was happy to obey. The hotel sent its shuttle van to ferry me over. Everyone was civil. New world, new day. It was now about half-past two.

Later, when I was settled in my room, the telephone rang. The caller was impatient, on the brink of rage. He was a car-driver. He said he had been sent to the airport to pick me up but hadn’t been able to find me. He had been hanging around for hours.

I understood then that I had fallen too easily for a suit and a tie and had allowed myself to be kidnapped at the airport. There was a card on the table in my room, warning clients about this sort of thing, urging every kind of precaution before stepping into a taxi. I felt, then, that I had had the luck of the innocent—it does exist: it has looked after me for all of my travelling life—and that, whatever was to come later, this luck had brought me to the hotel.

This was my first day in Nigeria.

In the open lobby of the first building I had noticed—there are many levels of consciousness at any given moment, and perhaps it