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in what not to do,” since it tries, says he, to combine too many different habitats. As an ecological unit, it was not to be compared with the six estimable parks of Senegal. Even the tiny Parc des Iles de la Madeleine—the group of islets off Dakar where the beautiful red-billed tropic bird comes to nest—was a precious ecosystem of coastal rocks, the only such in all West Africa! “These are
our
cathedrals, M’sieu Booze,” he bellows, refusing to get Dr. Bo-zee’s name right. It was not as in other lands of Africa, where parks were mostly tsetse wastelands for which man could find no better use; in Senegal, the parks were areas selected to preserve representative habitats, “
un réseaudes parcs complémentaires!
” Besides, Cameroon was part of Central Africa. As for the remainder of West Africa, the chances were that any choice would be the wrong one. Mali, of course, had a wild reserve near the Senegal border that might be thought of as a
parc complémentaire
to Niokolo Koba, and then there were the so-called “Parcs du W” in Benin, Upper Volta, Niger. But access to such “parks” was very difficult, travel inside of them impossible, so how could one say what might be left in the way of animals? Dupuy’s shrug suggested that M’sieu Booze would be well advised to take a closer look at Senegal. Failing that, the next best thing was the Parc de la Komoé in Ivory Coast, since that was where Dupuy’s own former
adjutant
was warden. For want of better information, we took Monsieur Dupuy’s advice and arranged to leave next day for Ivory Coast.

    On the flight next day to Ivory Coast, the carry-on baggage of one Senegalese lady consisted of three large and springy fish; the tails of these whoppers refused to fold down neatly, and kept flipping up the wings of their cardboard carton. For lunch we were served “bush meat”—in this case, small and cold dead birds with gloomy sizzled heads, smeared with what we dearly hoped was pâté. Otherwise the flight southeast over the Guinea forests was uneventful until, circling wide over the sea on the approach to Abidjan, there came into view the reddish beach and long, unbroken line of surf that spared this “Windward Coast” (now Liberia and Ivory Coast, which lay to windward of the slave ports of the Gold Coast—modern Ghana) from the worst depredations of the slavers. In the 1770s there was heavy slaving activity at the mouth of the Bandama River, in the region to the west at Grand Lahou, but the absence of a port (and therefore of a European shore station) made the commerce erratic, and until the race for colonies occurred, in the latenineteenth century, few white men cared what lay behind the thick green jungle walls of this “Bad People’s Coast,” later renamed for the precious ivory of its elephants. Before 1950, when a channel through the barrier beach was stabilized, and a harbor constructed in the vast Ebrie Lagoon, Ivory Coast was no rival to Senegal in trade and benefits from Europe; now oil has been discovered here to augment a prosperous lumber industry and coffee, rubber, and oil-palm plantations, and Abidjan is a boom town of new buildings and new cars. Like Senegal, this country has maintained strong trade relations with the Western World, and today the two are far more prosperous than all other states of former French West Africa combined.
    Because prosperity has come too fast, Abidjan is a European city that on this fetid, humid coast retains all the dirt, smells, and decrepitude of the old slave ports. Incompetence is masked with sullenness and the price of sullen service is exorbitant—not an unusual combination on this continent, yet more acceptable in those parts of Africa that are still “African.” Except for a remarkably rude customs, all offices were closed
pour le weekend
; there was no way of obtaining information about travel north to the Parc de la Komoe. Our reservation at the Tiama Hotel, where huge fruit bats flop back