It's not something that you could possibly capture in photographs. It's something that you capture in dreams, and it goes into your unconscious, and you've more or less had it, it stays there forever. A great moment when the nightmares cease. Okay, now you may think I'm absurd, so just imagine, going with me.

This is a village called Boa right at the... Macao, right at the head of this little waterway. And everything is stacked with emotion, and I don't really know why. Now Marcellin, as I told you, the head of conservation in the People's Republic of the Congo, Water and Forest, he, a very handsome man, and said he was blacker than any man he knew, which meant that he had a greater desire, and a need, a physical need for sex, than any other man he knew. And that I should pay him double, because not only was I making him ill walking eight hours a day in a jungle and all his ulcers had opened up, but I was also forcing him to sleep alone in his tent at night without a woman. So this was hanging in the air.

Now, there was a very beautiful schoolmaster's wife in the village of Macao, and I say that because we all went down with the women to bathe, to wash every morning. And they'd collect the water and so on. And she was staring at Marcellin, and then her long wraparound, but reaching under it with a bar of soap, which is a precious thing, and soaping her breasts. It was just erotic beyond belief. And Marcellin, of course, pretended not to notice. Anyhow, so he sleeps with her, of course, and I'm more or less sleeping next door, but not actually in the same cabin, going downriver, which happened, when I had to wrap a shirt around my head. The noise was...

Anyhow, so I've asked for a fetish from this great, very spooky, very powerful figure, all in black, dressed in black, with a great, floppy goitre, looked about 90 years old, but he couldn't have been. And that's another little parentheses. You see, the only old people you see in that part of the river, that far inland, are sorcerers and their wives, because if you sleep with a sorcerer's wife, you're dead on penetration. So that more or less stops that. And if a sorcerer sleeps with an ordinary man's wife, everybody will know, word will get around. He will not be respected again. He will lose his powers at once. So Doku, this old man I'm going to tell you about, he had a wife of, I should say, about 70. One, maybe 40. A 30-year-old and then, the latest girl, which I think she was probably 15 or 16. And all disease-free. Now I said to him, 'Look, I really need a fetish, because... for my own protection, because I have lots of enemies in Oxford.' You know, the only reason he'd give me one. And then I thought, 'Well, firstly, that's a rotten move. Now I'm starting to worry if I do have any enemies in Oxford. I mean, I want to be loved by everybody, including the milkman. Doesn't matter.' So I'm slightly anxious already, anyway. So Marcellin takes me. We go to this hut, bigger than any of the other huts, much more impressive, at midnight. Everything is at midnight, not that anybody has a watch. And we knock on the door and Doku opens it, dressed in black, and half-shadows of a fire, and gourds hanging from the rafters, which look like skulls. It's a terrific atmosphere. And every sorcerer has to be a showman. But the powerful thing is, of course, that I think they believe it themselves.