ALBERTO MORAVIA
405
the road and almost block the view of the sky, which is reduced to a
blue stripe parallel to the red stripe of the road.
At first, this tangled forest seems quite varied in its foliage, its
trunks, its hanging branches, but this variety also repeats itself until
finally the eye tires and ceases to seek it and appreciate it.
If
you stop
suddenly in the forest, here too you will be struck by the purity and
transparency of the silence. The forest rises straight up on both sides
of the road; a small stream winds through it, black, stagnant, unmoving
among the trees; here and there along the shores of that low slimy
water you can see enormous tree-trunks that fell from age and are
decaying there in peace, the eternal death-like peace of prehistory. The
forest is funereal, gloomy, mute and empty; and it seems that there
is nothing in the forest but serpents and insects. The forest, also, like
the savanna, seems to wish, every now and then, to escape from its
formlessness and to simulate something finite, recognizable, formed, such
as a clearing, a pathway, an isolated tree, a group of trees; but almost
immediately this sign crumbles and vanishes into the formless green
and dusk of the equatorial vegetation.
Prehistory in Africa exists not only in the structure of the landscape
but also in the universal presence of the only religious belief that is
truly aboriginal-magic. In Europe, the world of magic survives with
modest, indecipherable relics, like the wreckage in the sea after a
shipwreck; but in Africa you are always aware that the world of magic
is still complete, intact and active as a concept of life. Now the world
of magic is exactly that which is considered the evil of Africa, no
longer by the Europeans, but by the Africans. This evil has its roots in
fear, a fear of prehistory, of all the irrational forces which man, over
many thousands of years, has succeeded in driving back and dominating
in
Europe, and which here in Africa are still intrusive and unchecked.
It
is a fear to which the European eventually becomes accustomed, since
he has his roots elsewhere and his personality is more solid and less
ephemeral than the African's; on the whole, it is a fear that is painfully
pleasant. But the fear of the African, deprived as he is of a history, with
a personality that flickers like a candle flame, is a beautiful, a good
fear, a nameless fright, a perpetual, obscure terror. Magic is the
expression of this fear of prehistory; it is as ugly, gloomy and demented
as the evil of Africa is aphrodisiacal and pleasing, even
if
it is disinte–
grating and destructive. In reality, magic is the other face of Africa's evil.
At the market of Lagos, after having wandered around in the
impure sultry air through various aisles of booths and stalls overflowing
