Graham Greene · 1936 · overland

Graham Greene's 1936 account of walking across Liberia with his cousin Barbara, a line of carriers and a map of the interior that was mostly blank with the word Cannibals printed across it. Neither had walked anywhere before. Four weeks in he collapsed with fever and expected to die, and the book's argument is that the discomfort was the point.

1. 1
   Freetown

   Greene and his cousin Barbara reach Sierra Leone with almost no preparation, hire carriers and a cook, and take the train to the frontier - intending to walk across a country whose interior had never been properly surveyed.

2. 2
   The Liberian interior

   For four weeks they walk village to village through forest and high bush, paying in shillings and aspirin - and Greene, feverish and exhausted, finds the tedium doing something to him he had not expected.

3. 3
   Grand Bassa

   He collapses with fever inland and is carried in a hammock toward the coast, entirely convinced he is dying - and then recovers, and is faintly disappointed to be delivered back into a world of tin roofs and shipping offices.

4. 4
   Monrovia

   The journey ends on the Liberian coast, and Greene sails home having discovered what he came for - that the further from Europe he got, the more of himself he could stand to look at.