Would Berselius never speak! Berselius all the time was glancing from the rhino to Adams.

"Fire!"

The ear-blasting report of the elephant gun echoed from the forest, and the rhino, just as if he had been tripped by an invisible wire fence, fell, tearing up the ground and squealing like a pig.

"Good," said Berselius.

Adams wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He had never gone through a moment of more deadly nerve tension.

He was moving toward his quarry, now stretched stiff and stark, when he was arrested by Felix.

"Cow," said Felix again.

The cow had broken cover at the report of the gun and had got their wind.

Just as two automatic figures of the same make will, when wound up, and touched off, perform the same actions, the cow did exactly what the bull had done—ran about in a fierce and distressed manner and then charged right in the eye of the wind.

"Mine," said Berselius, and he went forward twenty paces to meet her.

Berselius, chilling and aloof to the point of mysteriousness, had, since the very starting of the expedition, shown little of his true character to his companion. What he had shown up to this had not lowered Adams's respect for him.

Self-restraint seemed the mainspring of that commanding force which this strange man exercised. His reprimand to the porters for the loss of the boy, expressed in a few quiet words, had sent them shivering to their places, cowed and dumb. Animal instinct seemed to tell them of a terrible animal which the self-restraint of that quiet-looking little man, with the pointed beard, alone prevented from breaking upon them.

Berselius had allowed the bull to approach to a little over a hundred yards before letting Adams fire. He had gauged the American's nerve to a nicety and his power of self-restraint, and he knew that beyond the hundred-yard limit he dared not trust them; for no man born of woman who has not had a good experience of big game can stand up to a charging rhinoceros and take certain aim when the hundred-yard limit has been passed.

The thunderous drumming of the oncoming brute echoed from the forest. Had its head been a feather-pillow the impact of the three tons of solid flesh moving behind it would have been certain death; but the head was an instrument of destruction, devised when the megatherium walked the world, and the long raking horn would have ripped up an elephant as easily as a sharp penknife rips up a rabbit.

Before this thing, and to the right of it, rifle in hand, stood Berselius. He did not even lift the gun to his shoulder till the hundred-yard limit was passed, and then he hung on his aim so horribly that Adams felt the sweat-drops running on his face like ants, and even Felix swallowed like a man who is trying to choke down something nauseous. It was a magnificent exhibition of daring and self-restraint and cool assurance.

At twenty-five yards or a little under, the cordite rang out. The brute seemed to trip, just as the other had done, over some invisible taut-stretched wire, and skidding with its own impetus, squealing, striking out and tearing up the grass, it came right up to Berselius's feet before stiffening in death. Like the great automaton it was, it had scented the human beings just as the bull had scented them, "fussed" just as he had fussed, charged as he had charged, and died as he had died.

And now from the camp rose a great outcry, "Nyama, nyama! (Meat, meat!)." From the soldiers, from the gun-bearers, from the porters it came. There were no longer soldiers, or gun-bearers, or porters; every distinction was forgotten; they were all savages, voicing the eternal cry of the jungle, "Nyama, nyama! (Meat, meat!)."

In the last rays of the sunset the two gigantic forms lay stretched forever in death. They lay as they had composed themselves after that long stiff stretch which every animal takes before settling itself for eternal sleep; and Adams stood looking at the great grinning masks tipped with the murderous horns, whilst Berselius, with his gun butt resting on his boot, stood watching with a brooding eye as the porters and gun-bearers swarmed like ants around the slain animals and proceeded, under his direction, to cut them up. Then the meat was brought into camp. The tails and the best parts of the carcasses, including the kidneys, were reserved for the white men, and the rations from the rest of the meat were served out; but a dozen porters who had been last in the line, and who were accountable for letting the boy drop behind, got nothing.

It was pitiable to see their faces. But they deserved their punishment, notwithstanding the fact that in the middle of the meat distribution the missing boy limped into camp. He had a thorn half an inch long in his foot, which Adams extracted. Then the camp went to bed.

Adams in his tent under the mosquito net slept soundly and heard and knew nothing of the incidents of the night. Berselius was also sleeping soundly when, at about one o'clock in the morning, Felix aroused him.

One of the porters had been caught stealing some of the meat left over from the distribution of the night before.

The extraordinary thing was that he had fed well, not being one of the proscribed. He had stolen from pure greed.

He was an undersized man, a weakling, and likely to break down and give trouble anyway. His crime was great.

Berselius sent Felix to his tent for a Mauser pistol. Then the body was flung into the forest where the roaring, rasping cry of a leopard was splitting the dark.



CHAPTER X

M'BASSA

Seven days' march took them one hundred and twenty miles east of Yandjali and into the heart of the great rubber district of M'Bonga.

Twenty miles a day ought to have been covered on an average, but they had delayed here and there to shoot, and the extra porters, whose duty it was to carry the trophies, were already in requisition.

It had been forest most of the way, but forest broken by open spaces; they had crossed two great swards of park-like country where the antelope herds moved like clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have been English but for the tropic haze and heat and the great n'sambya trees with their yellow bell-like blossoms, the m'binas with their bursts of scarlet bloom, the tall feather-palms, and the wild papaws of the adjoining woods.

But in the last two days of the march the forest had thickened and taken a more sombre note; nothing they had come upon heretofore had been quite so wild as this, so luxuriant and tropical. It was the haunt of the rubber vine, that mysterious plant which requires a glass-house atmosphere and a soil especially rich. The great rubber forest of M'Bonga, thousands of square miles in extent, is really composed of two forests joined by an isthmus of woods. Dimly, it is shaped like an hourglass; south of the constriction where the two forests join lies the elephant country for which Berselius was making, and Felix had led them so craftily and well, that they struck into the rubber district only fifty miles from the constriction.

In the forest, thirty miles from the elephant ground, lies the Belgian fort M'Bassa. They were making for this place now, which was to be the base from which they would start on the great hunt.

The fort of M'Bassa is not used to-day as a fort, only as a collecting-place for rubber. In the early days it was a very necessary entrenchment for the Belgians, as a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo Zaps terrorized the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been brought under the blue flag with the white star. They are now "soldiers," and their savagery, like a keen tool, has been turned to good account by the Government.

In the great forest of M'Bonga the rubber vines are not equally distributed. Large areas occur in which they are not found; only in the most desolate places do they grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the rubber vine into subjection; it will have nothing to do with the vineyard and the field; it chooses to grow alone.

Everything else comes to its harvest with a joyous face, but the rubber vine, like a dark green snake, fearful of death, has to be hunted for.

Even in the areas of the forest which it frequents, it is only to be found in patches, so the harvesters cannot go in a body, as men do to the harvesting of the corn, or the cotton, or the grape; they have to break up into small parties and these again subdivide, leaving a single individual here and there where the vines are thickest. He, entirely alone, at the mercy of the evil spirits that are in his imagination and the beasts that are in the forest, makes a rude shelter out of boughs and leaves, and sets to work making incisions in the vine and draining them drop by drop of their viscous sap.

Sometimes he sings over this monotonous work, and in the long rains between the intervals of the shower-bath roarings you can hear the ululations of these folk through the drip of the leaves, and at night the spark-like glimmer of their fires dots the reeking gloom.

These are the conditions of the rubber collector's task, and it is not a task that ever can be finished; year in, year out, it never ceases.

These woods through which Felix led them were to the woods near Yandjali what the music of Beethoven is to the music of Mozart.

Immense and gloomy symphonies. The trees were huge, and groaned beneath the weight of lianas cable-thick. At times they had to burst their way through the veils of leaves and vines, the porters losing themselves and calling one to the other, and the head of the expedition halting till the stragglers were collected; at times the ground they trod on was like grease from the cast-down fruit of the plantains that grew here enormous, and sodden, and dismal, showering their fruit in such quantities that the bush-pigs, devour as they might, could never dispose of it all.

On some of the trees, like huge withered leaves, hung bats, and from some of the trees the beard-moss hung yards long, and of a spectral gray; the very weeds trodden underfoot were sappy, and the smell of their squirting juice mixed itself with the smell of decay.

It was not even ground, either; the whole forest would dip down into an unseen valley; you felt yourself going down hill, down, down, and then you knew you were at the bottom of a sub-arboreal valley by the deeper stagnation of the air. Open spaces, when they came, showed little sky, and they were less open spaces than rooms in the surrounding prison.

Felix was not leading them through the uttermost depths of this place; he was following the vague indications of a road by which the rubber from M'Bassa was carted to the river.

They were travelling along a highway, in fact, and the dimmest indication of a track where other men have been before is a thing which robs the wilderness of much of its terror.

The loneliness of the forest beyond track or way, in those vast depths where the rubber collectors have to go alone, I leave you to imagine.

At last, at noon, on the third day of their journey to this place they struck rising ground where the trees fell away till no trees were left, and the blue sky of heaven lay above their heads, and before them on the highest point of the rise, Fort M'Bassa burning in the sun.



CHAPTER XI

ANDREAS MEEUS

The Parthenon in all its glory could not have looked more beautiful to the returning Greek than this half-ruined fort in the eyes of Adams.

A thing built by the hands of white men and shone on by the sun—what could be more acceptable to the eye after the long, long tramp through the heart-breaking forest!

The fort of M'Bassa was quite small; the surrounding walls had gone to decay, but the "guest house" and the office, and the great go-down where the rubber was stored, were in good repair and well thatched.

Outside the walls were a number of wretched hovels inhabited by the "soldiers" and their wives, and one of these soldiers, a tall black, with the eternal red fez on his head and a rifle slung on his back, was the first to sight the coming expedition, and to notify its approach with a yell that brought a dozen like him from the sun-baked hovels and, a moment later from the office, a white man in a pith helmet, who stood for a moment looking across the half-ruined wall at the newcomers, and then advanced to meet them.

He was a middle-sized man, with a melancholy face that showed very white under the shadow of the helmet; he was dressed in dingy white drill, and he had a cigarette between his lips.

He looked like a man who had never in his life smiled, yet his face was not an unpleasant face altogether, though there was much in it to give the observer pause.

His voice was not an unpleasant voice, altogether, yet there was that in it, as he greeted Berselius, which struck Adams sharply and strangely; for the voice of Andreas Meeus, Chef de Poste at M'Bassa, was the voice of a man who for two years had been condemned to talk the language of the natives. It had curious inflections, hesitancies, and a dulness that expressed the condition of a brain condemned for two years to think the thoughts of the natives in their own language.

Just as the voice of a violin expresses the condition of the violin, so does the voice of a man express the condition of his mind. And that is the fact that will strike you most if you travel in the wilds of the Congo State and talk to the men of your own colour who are condemned to live amongst the people.

One might have compared Meeus's voice to the voice of a violin—a violin that had been attacked by some strange fungoid growth that had filled its interior and dulled the sounding board.

He had been apprised a month before of the coming of Berselius's expedition, and one might imagine the servility which this man would show to the all-powerful Berselius, whose hunting expeditions were red-carpeted, who was hail-fellow-well-met with Leopold, who, by lifting his finger, could cause Andreas Meeus to be dismissed from his post, and by crooking his finger cause him to be raised to a Commissionership.

Yet he showed no servility at all. He had left servility behind him, just as he had left pride, just as he had left ambition, patriotism, country, and that divine something which blossoms into love of wife and child.

When he had shaken hands with Berselius and Adams, he led the way into the fort, or rather into the enclosure surrounded by the ruinous mud walls, an enclosure of about a hundred yards square.

On the right of the quadrangle stood the go-down, where the rubber and a small quantity of ivory was stored.

In the centre stood the misnamed guest house, a large mud and wattle building, with a veranda gone to decay.

The blinding sun shone on it all, showing up with its fierce light the true and appalling desolation of the place. There was not one thing in the enclosure upon which the eye could rest with thankfulness.

Turning from the enclosure and looking across the fort wall to the distance, one saw a world as far from civilization as the world that Romulus looked at when he gazed across the wall outlining the first dim sketch of Rome.

To the north, forest; to the south, forest; to the east, forest; and to the west, eternal and illimitable forest. Blazing sun, everlasting haze that in the rainy season would become mist and silence.

In the storms and under the rains the great rubber forest of M'Bonga would roar like a reef-tormented sea, but on a day like this, when, gazing from the high ground of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms, the sombre green of the n'sambyas, to the haze that veiled all things beyond, on a day like this, silence gazed at one Sphinx-like, and from the distance of a million years. Silence that had brooded upon Africa before Africa had a name, before Pharaoh was born, before Thebes was built.

Meeus led the way into the guest house, which contained only two rooms—rooms spacious enough, but bare of everything except the ordinary necessities of life. In the living room there was a table of white deal-like wood and three or four chairs evidently made by natives from a European design. A leopard skin, badly dried and shrivelling at the edges, hung on one wall, presumably as an ornament; on another wall some Congo bows and arrows—bows with enormously thick strings and arrows poisoned so skilfully that a scratch from one would kill you, though they had been hanging there for many years. They were trophies of the early days when Fort M'Bassa was really a fort, and from those woods down there clouds of soot-black devils, with filed teeth, raided the place, only to be swept away by rifle fire.

There was no picture torn from an illustrated paper adorning the place, as in Verhaeren's abode, but on a rudely constructed shelf there lay just the same stack of "official letters," some of these two years old, some of last month, all dealing with trade.

Meeus brought out cigarettes and gin, but Berselius, safe now at his base of operations, to make a little festival of the occasion sent to the stores, which his porters had deposited in the go-down, for a magnum of champagne. It was Cliquot, and as Meeus felt the glow of the wine in his veins, a flush came into his hollow cheeks and a brightness into his dull eyes; forgotten things stirred again in his memory, with the shadows of people he had known—the glitter of lamplit streets in Brussels, the glare of the Cafe de Couronne—all the past, such as it was, lay in the wine.

Meeus was one of the "unfortunate men." He had held a small clerkship under the Belgian Government, from which he had been dismissed through a fault of his own.

This was five years ago. Up to his dismissal he had led the peddling and sordid life that a small government clerk on the Continent leads if he has nothing to save him from himself and from his fellows: the dry rot of official life had left him useless for anything but official life. A sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the day of his dismissal, when he found himself cut off from work and adrift in the world, with five hundred francs in his pocket. In one glorious debauch, which lasted a week, he spent the five hundred francs, and then he settled down to live on a maiden aunt.

He called it looking for work.

She lasted for a year and nine months, and then she died, and her annuity died with her. He felt her loss deeply, for not only had her money helped to support him, but she was his only real friend, and he had a heart in those days that seemed so far distant from him now.

Then it was that Poverty took him by the hand and explained patiently and with diagrams the hardness of the world, the atrocious position of the declasse, who has never studied the art of roguery so as to make a living by it, and the utter uselessness as friends of those good fellows who sat in the cafes and walked the boulevards and ogled the women.

He tramped the streets of Brussels, at first in seedy clothes and at last in filth and horrible rags. A relative came to his assistance with two hundred francs; he bought himself clothes and made himself respectable, but, in a fortnight, found himself relapsing again, sinking like a swimmer whose momentary support has gone to pieces.

Just as the waves were again about to close over his benighted head, an acquaintance got him a post under Government. Not under the Belgian but the Congo Government.

Andreas Meeus was exactly the type of man this Government required, and still requires, and still uses and must continue to use as long as the infernal machine which it has invented for the extraction of gold from niggers continues to work. A man, that is to say, who has eaten orange-peel picked up in the market-place; a man who has worn out his friends—and his clothes. A man without hope.

One would think for the work in hand they would choose the greatest blackguards possible: convicts convicted of the worst crimes of violence. Not at all. These men would be for one thing too intractable; for another thing, too unstable, and for another thing (strange to say), possessed of too much heart. The Congo Government knows its work far too well for that. It does not take the murderer or the violent criminal from the penitentiary to do its work; it takes from the streets the man without hope. The educated man who has fallen, the man who can still think.

Meeus went to Africa just as a man goes to prison. He hated the idea of going, but he had to go, or stay and starve. He was stationed three months at Boma and then he was moved to a post on the Upper Congo, a small and easily worked post, where he found out the full conditions of his new servitude.

This post had to do with what they call in the jargon of the Congo administration, Forest Exploitation. Gum copal and wax was the stuff he had to extract from the people round about.

Here he found himself morally in the clutches of that famous and infamous proclamation issued from Brussels on the twentieth of June, 1892, by Secretary of State Van Estvelde.

The Bonus Proclamation.

According to the terms of this proclamation, Meeus found that besides his pay he could get a bonus on every kilo of wax and copal he could extract from the natives, and that the cheaper he could get the stuff the more his bonus would be.

Thus, for every kilo of wax or copal screwed out of the natives at a cost of five centimes or less, he received into his pocket a bonus of fifteen centimes, that is to say the bonus to Meeus was three times what the natives got; if by any laxity or sense of justice, the cost of the wax or copal rose to six centimes a kilo, Meeus only got ten centimes bonus, and so on.

The cheaper he got the stuff the more he was paid for it. And those were the terms on which he had to trade with the natives.

Then there were the taxes. The natives had to bring in huge quantities of wax and copal for nothing, just as a tax owing to the State, a tax to the Government that was plundering and exploiting them.

Meeus, who had a spice of the tradesman in him, fell into this state of things as easily as a billiard ball falls into a pocket when skilfully directed.

The unfortunate man was absolutely a billiard ball in the hands of a professional player; the stroke of the cue had been given in Belgium, he rolled to his appointed post, fell into it, and was damned.

His fingers became crooked and a dull hunger for money filled his soul. His success in working the niggers was so great that he was moved to a more difficult post at higher pay, and then right on to M'Bassa.

He was not naturally a cruel man. In his childhood he had been fond of animals, but Matabiche, the god-devil of the Congo, changed all that.

He saw nothing extortionate in his dealings, nothing wrong in them. When things were going well, then all was well; but when the natives resisted his charges and taxes, defrauding him of his bonus and lowering him in the eyes of his superiors, then Meeus became terrible.

And he was absolute master.

Away here in the lonely fort, in the midst of the great M'Bonga rubber forest that was now speechless as a Sphinx, now roaring at him like a sea in torment; here in the endless sunlight of the dry seasons and the endless misery of the rains, Meeus driven in upon himself, had time to think.

There is no prison so terrible as a limitless prison. Far better for a man to inhabit a cell in Dartmoor than a post in the desert of the forest. The walls are companionable things, but there is no companionship in distance.

Meeus knew what it was to look over the walls of the fort and watch another sun setting on another day, and another darkness heralding another night. He knew what it was to watch infinite freedom and to know it for his captor and jailer. He knew what it was to wake from his noonday siesta and see the same great awful splash of sunlight striking the same old space of arid yard, where the empty tomato tin lay by the rotten plantain cast over by some nigger child. He knew what it was to lie and hear the flies buzzing and wonder what tune of the devil it was they were trying to imitate. He knew what it was to think of death with the impotent craving of a sick child for some impossible toy.

Look into your own life and see all the tiny things that save you from ennui and devilment, and give you heart to continue the journey from hour to hour in this world where we live. Your morning paper, the new book from the library you have just got to read, the pipe you hope to smoke when you return from work, the very details of your work; a hundred and one petty things that make up the day of an ordinary man, breaking the monotony and breaking the prospect before him into short views.

Meeus had none of these. Without literature or love, without a woman to help him through, without a child to care for or a dog to care for him, there at Fort M'Bassa in the glaring sunshine he faced his fate and became what he was.



CHAPTER XII

NIGHT AT THE FORT

The night was hot and close and the paraffin lamp in the guest house mixed its smell with the tobacco smoke and with a faint, faint musky odour that came from the night outside. Every now and then a puff of hot wind blew through the open doorway, hot and damp as though a great panther were breathing into the room.

The nights in the forest were chill, but up here at Fort M'Bassa they were stewing in a heat wave.

Adams, with his coat off, pipe in mouth, was leaning back in a basket chair with his feet on a sugar box. Berselius, in another easy chair, was smoking a cigar, and Meeus, sitting with his elbows on the table, was talking of trade and its troubles. There is an evil spirit in rubber that gives a lot of trouble to those who deal with it. The getting of it is bad enough, but the tricks of the thing itself are worse. It is subject to all sorts of influences, climatic and other, and tends to deteriorate on its journey to the river and the coast of Europe.

It was marvellous to see the passion with which this man spoke of this inanimate thing.

"And then, ivory," said Meeus. "When I came here first, hundred-pound tusks were common; when you reach that district, M. le Capitaine, you will see for yourself, no doubt, that the elephants have decreased. What comes in now, even, is not of the same quality. Scrivelloes (small tusks), defective tusks, for which one gets almost nothing as a bonus. And with the decrease of the elephant comes the increased subterfuge of the natives. 'What are we to do?' they say. 'We cannot make elephants.' This is the worst six months for ivory I have had, and then, on top of this—for troubles always come together—I have this bother I told you of with these people down there by the Silent Pools."

A village ten miles to the east had, during the last few weeks, suspended rubber payments, gone arrear in taxes, the villagers running off into the forest and hiding from their hateful work.

"What caused the trouble?" asked Berselius.

"God knows," replied Meeus. "It may blow over—it may have blown over by this, for I have had no word for two days; anyhow, to-morrow I will walk over and see. If it hasn't blown over, I will give the people very clearly to understand that there will be trouble. I will stay there for a few days and see what persuasion can do. Would you like to come with me?"

"I don't mind," said Berselius. "A few days' rest will do the porters no harm. What do you say, Dr. Adams?"

"I'm with you," said Adams. "Anything better than to stay back here alone. How do you find it here, M. Meeus, when you are by yourself?"

"Oh, one lives," replied the Chef de Poste, looking at the cigarette between his fingers with a dreamy expression, and speaking as though he were addressing it. "One lives."

That, thought Adams, must be the worst part about it. But he did not speak the words. He was a silent man, slow of speech but ready with sympathy, and as he lounged comfortably in his chair, smoking his pipe, his pity for Meeus was profound. The man had been for two years in this benighted solitude; two years without seeing a white face, except on the rare occasion of a District Commissioner's visit.

He ought to have been mad by this, thought Adams; and he was a judge, for he had studied madness and its causes.

But Meeus was not mad in the least particular. He was coldly sane. Lust had saved his reason, the lust inspired by Matabiche.

Berselius's cook brought in some coffee, and when they had talked long enough about the Congo trade in its various branches, they went out and smoked their pipes, leaning or sitting on the low wall of the fort.

The first quarter of the moon, low in the sky and looking like a boat-shaped Japanese lantern, lay above the forest. The forest, spectral-pale and misty, lay beneath the moon; the heat was sweltering, and Adams could not keep the palms of his hands dry, rub them with his pocket handkerchief or on his knees as much as he would.

This is the heat that makes a man feel limp as a wet rag; the heat that liquefies morals and manners and temper and nerve force, so that they run with the sweat from the pores. Drink will not "bite" in this heat, and a stiff glass of brandy affects the head almost as little as a glass of water.

"It is over there," said Meeus, pointing to the southeast, "that we are going to-morrow to interview those beasts."

Adams started at the intensity of loathing expressed by Meeus in that sentence. He had spoken almost angrily at rubber and tusks, but his languid, complaining voice had held nothing like this before.

Those beasts! He hated them, and he would not have been human had he not hated them. They were his jailers in very truth, their work was his deliverance.

The revolt of this village would make him short of rubber; probably it would bring a reprimand from his superiors.

A great bat flitted by so close that the smell of it poisoned the air, and from the forest, far away to the west, came the ripping saw-like cry of a leopard on the prowl. Many fierce things were hunting in the forest that night, but nothing fiercer than Meeus, as he stood in the moonlight, cigarette in mouth, staring across the misty forest in the direction of the Silent Pools.



PART THREE

CHAPTER XIII

THE POOLS OF SILENCE

Next morning Berselius ordered Felix to have the tents taken from the go-down and enough stores for two days. Tents and stores would be carried by the "soldiers" of the fort, who were to accompany them on the expedition.

Adams noticed with surprise the childlike interest Meeus took in the belongings of Berselius; the green rot-proof tents, the latest invention of Europe, seemed to appeal to him especially; the Roorkee chairs, the folding baths, the mosquito nets of the latest pattern, the cooking utensils of pure aluminum, filled his simple mind with astonishment. His mind during his sojourn at Fort M'Bassa had, in fact, grown childlike in this particular; nothing but little things appealed to him.

Whilst the expedition was getting ready Adams strolled about outside the fort walls. The black "soldiers," who were to accompany them, were seated in the sun near their hovels, some of them cleaning their rifles, others smoking; but for their rifles and fez caps they might, with a view of Carthage in the distance, have been taken for the black legionaries of Hamilcar, ferocious mercenaries without country or God, fierce as the music of the leopard-skin drums that led them to battle.

Turning, he walked round the west wall till he came to the wall on the north, which was higher than the others. Here, against the north wall, was a sheltered cover like an immense sty, indescribably filthy and evil-smelling; about thirty rings were fastened to the wall, and from each ring depended a big rusty chain ending in a collar.

It was the Hostage House of Fort M'Bassa. It was empty now, but nearly always full, and it stood there like a horrible voiceless witness.

A great disgust filled the mind of Adams; disgust of the niggers who had evidently lately inhabited this place, and disgust of the Belgians who had herded them there. He felt there was something very wrong in the state of Congo. The Hostage House of Yandjali had started the impression; Meeus in some subtle way had deepened it; and now this.

But he fully recognized what difficult people to deal with niggers are. He felt that all this was slavery under a thin disguise, this so-called taxation and "trade," but it was not his affair.

All work is slavery more or less pleasant. The doctor is the slave of his patients, the shopkeeper of his clients. These niggers were, no doubt, slaves of the Belgians, but they were not bought and sold; they had to work, it is true, but all men have to work. Besides, Berselius had told him that the Belgians had stopped the liquor traffic and stopped the Arab raiders. There was good and bad on the side of the Belgians, and the niggers were niggers. So reasoned Adams, and with reason enough, though from insufficient data.

At eight o'clock in the blazing sunshine, that even then was oppressive, the expedition started. The white men leading, Felix coming immediately behind, and eleven of the soldiers, bearing the tents and stores for two days, following after.

They plunged into the forest, taking a dim track, which was the rubber track from the village of the Silent Pools and from half a dozen other villages to the west. The ground here was different from the ground they had traversed in coming to the fort. This was boggy; here and there the foot sank with a sough into the pulp of morass and rotten leaves; the lianas were thinner and more snaky, the greenery, if possible, greener, and the air close and moist as the air of a steam-bath.

The forest of M'Bonga has great tracts of this boggy, pestiferous land, dreadful sloughs of despond caverned with foliage, and by some curse the rubber vines entrench themselves with these. The naked rubber collectors, shivering over their fires, are attacked by the rheumatism and dysentery and fever that lie in these swamps; diseases almost merciful, for the aches and pains they cause draw the mind away from the wild beasts and devils and phantoms that haunt the imagination of the rubber slaves.

It took them three hours to do the ten miles, and then at last the forest cleared away and fairyland appeared.

Here in the very depths of the hopeless jungle, as if laid out and forgotten by some ancient god, lie the Silent Pools of Matabayo and the park-like lands that hold them. Like a beautiful song in some tragic and gloomy opera, a regret of the God who created the hopeless forest, sheltered by the great n'sambya trees, they lie; pools of shadowy and tranquil water, broken by reflections of branches and mirroring speargrass ten feet high and fanlike fern fronds.

All was motionless and silent as a stereoscopic picture; the rocketing palms bursting into sprays of emerald green, the n'sambyas with their trumpet-like yellow blossoms, the fern fronds reduplicating themselves in the water's glass, all and each lent their motionless beauty to the completion of the perfect picture.

In the old days, long ago, before the land was exploited and the forest turned into a hunting ground for rubber, the lovely head of the oryx would push aside the long green blades of the speargrass; then, bending her lips to the lips of the oryx gazing up at her from the water, she would drink, shattering the reflection into a thousand ripples. The water-buck came here in herds from the elephant country away south, beyond the hour-glass-like constriction which divided the great forest, and the tiny dik-dik, smallest of all antelopes, came also to take its sip. But all that is past. The rifle and the trap, at the instigation of the devouring Government that eats rubber and antelope, ivory and palm-oil, cassava and copal, has thinned out the herds and driven them away. The "soldier" must be fed. Even the humble bush pig of the forest knows that fact.

It was four years since Berselius had hunted in this country, and even in that short time he found enormous change. But he could not grumble. He was a shareholder in the company, and in twenty industries depending on it.

Close up to the forest, where the m'bina trees showed their balls of scarlet blossom, lay the village they had come to reason with. There were twenty-five or more low huts of wattle and mud, roofed with leaves and grass. No one was visible but an old woman, naked, all but for a slight covering about the loins. She was on all fours, grinding something between two stones, and as she sighted the party she looked backward over her shoulder at them like a frightened cat.

She cried out in a chattering voice, and from the huts six others, naked as herself, came, stared at the whites, and then, as if driven by the same impulse, and just like rabbits, darted into the forest.

But Meeus had counted on this, and had detached seven of his men to crawl round and post themselves at the back of the huts amidst the trees.

A great hullaballoo broke out, and almost immediately the soldiers appeared, driving the seven villagers before them with their rifle-butts.

They were not hurting them, just pushing them along, for this was, up to the present, not a punitive expedition but a fatherly visitation to point out the evils of laziness and insubordination, and to get, if possible, these poor wretches to communicate with the disaffected ones and make them return to their work.

Adams nearly laughed outright at the faces of the villagers; black countenances drawn into all the contortions of fright, but the contortions of their bodies were more laughable still, as they came forward like naughty children, driven by the soldiers, putting their hands out behind to evade the prods of the gun-butts.

Berselius had ordered the tents to be raised on the sunlit grass, for the edge of the forest, though shady, was infested by clouds of tiny black midges—midges whose bite was as bad, almost, as the bite of a mosquito.

Meeus spoke to the people in their own tongue, telling them not to be afraid, and when the tents were erected he and Berselius and Adams, sitting in the shelter of the biggest tent, faced the seven villagers, all drawn up in a row and backed by the eleven soldiers in their red fez caps.

The villagers, backed by the soldiers and fronted by Meeus, formed a picture which was the whole Congo administration in a nutshell. In a sentence, underscored by the line of blood-red fezzes.

These seven undersized, downtrodden, hideously frightened creatures, with eyeballs rolling and the marks of old chain scars on their necks, were the representatives of all the humble and meek tribes of the Congo, the people who for thousands of years had lived a lowly life, humble as the coneys of Scripture; people who had cultivated the art of agriculture and had carried civilization as far as their weak hands would carry it in that benighted land. Literally the salt of that dark earth. Very poor salt, it is true, but the best they could make of themselves.

These eleven red-tipped devils, gun-butting the others to make them stand erect and keep in line, were the representatives of the warlike tribes who for thousands of years had preyed on each other and made the land a hell. Cannibals most of them, ferocious all of them, heartless to a man.

Meeus was the white man who, urged by the black lust of money, had armed and drilled and brought under good pay all the warlike tribes of the Congo State and set them as task-masters over the humble tribes.

By extension, Berselius and Adams were the nations of Europe looking on, one fully knowing, the other not quite comprehending the tragedy enacted before their eyes.

I am not fond of parallels, but as these people have ranged themselves thus before my eyes, I cannot help pointing out the full meaning of the picture. A picture which is photographically true.

There was a little pot-bellied boy amongst the villagers, the old woman of the grindstone was holding him by the hand; he, of all the crowd, did not look in the least frightened. His eyeballs rolled, but they rolled in wonder.

The tent seemed to take his fancy immensely; then the big Adams struck his taste, and he examined him from tip to toe.

Adams, greatly taken with the blackamoor, puffed out his cheeks, closed one eye, and instantly, as if at the blow of a hatchet, the black face split, disclosing two white rows of teeth, and then hid itself, rubbing a snub nose against the old woman's thigh.

But a rolling white eyeball reappeared in a moment, only to vanish again as Adams, this time, sucked in his cheeks and worked his nose, making, under his sun hat, a picture to delight and terrify the heart of any child.

All this was quite unobserved by the rest, and all this time Meeus gravely and slowly was talking to the villagers in a quiet voice. They were to send one of their number into the forest to find the defaulters and urge them to return. Then all would be well. That was the gist of his discourse; and the wavering line of niggers rolled their eyes and answered, "We hear, we hear," all together and like one person speaking, and they were nearly tumbling down with fright, for they knew that all would not be well, and that what the awful white man with the pale, grave face said to them was lies, lies, lies—all lies.

Besides the old woman and the child there were two young girls, an old man, a boy of fifteen or so, with only one foot, and a pregnant woman very near her time.

Adams had almost forgotten the nigger child when a white eyeball gazing at him from between the old woman's legs recalled its existence.

He thought he had never seen a jollier animal of the human tribe than that. The creature was so absolutely human and full of fun that it was difficult to believe it the progeny of these downtrodden, frightened looking folk. And the strange thing was, it had all the tricks of an English or American child.

The hiding and peeping business, the ready laugh followed by bashfulness and self-effacement, the old unalterable impudence, which is not least amidst the prima mobilia of the childish mind. In another moment, he felt, the thing would forget its respect and return his grimaces, so he ignored it and fixed his attention on Meeus and the trembling wretches he was addressing.

When the lecture was over they were dismissed, and the boy with the amputated foot was sent off to the forest to find the delinquents and bring them back. Till sunrise on the following day was the term given him.

If the others did not begin to return by that time there would be trouble.



CHAPTER XIV

BEHIND THE MASK

The Silent Pools and the woods around were the haunts of innumerable birds. Rose-coloured flamingoes and gorgeous ducks, birds arrayed in all the jewellery of the tropics, birds not much bigger than dragon-flies, and birds that looked like flying beetles.

When they had dined, Adams, leaving the others to smoke and take their siesta, went off by the water's edge on a tour of the pools. They were three in number; sheets of water blue and tranquil and well-named, for surely in all the world nowhere else could such perfect peace be found. Perhaps it was the shelter of the forest protecting these windless sheets of water; perhaps it was the nature of the foliage, so triumphantly alive yet so motionless; perhaps beyond these some more recondite reason influenced the mind and stirred the imagination. Who knows? The spirit of the scene was there. The spirit of deep and unalterable peace. The peace of shadowy lagoons, the peace of the cedar groves where the sheltering trees shaded the loveliness of Merope, the peace of the heart which passes all understanding and which men have named the Peace of God.

It was the first time since leaving Yandjali that Adams had found himself alone and out of sight of his companions. He breathed deeply, as if breathing in the air of freedom, and as he strode along, tramping through the long grass, his mind, whilst losing no detail of the scene around him, was travelling far away, even to Paris, and beyond.

Suddenly, twenty yards ahead, bounding and beautiful in its freedom and grace, a small antelope passed with the swiftness of an arrow; after it, almost touching it, came another form, yellow and fierce and flashing through the grass and vanishing, like the antelope, amidst the high grasses on the edge of the pool.

The antelope had rushed to the water for protection, and the leopard had followed, carried forward by its impetus and ferocity, for Adams could hear its splash following the splash of the quarry; then a roar split the silence, echoed from the trees, and sent innumerable birds fluttering and crying from the edge of the forest and the edge of the pool.

Adams burst through the long speargrass to see what was happening, and, standing on the boggy margin, holding the grasses aside, gazed.

The antelope had vanished as if it had never been, and a few yards from the shore, in the midst of a lather of water that seemed beaten up with a great swizzle-stick, the leopard's head, mouth open, roaring, horrified his eyes for a moment and then was jerked under the surface.

The water closed, eddied, and became still, and Silence resumed her sway over the Silent Pools.

Something beneath the water had devoured the antelope; something beneath the water had dragged the leopard to its doom, and swish! a huge flail tore the speargrass to ribbons and sent Adams flying backward with the wind of its passage.

Another foot and the crocodile's tail would have swept him to the fate of the antelope and leopard.

The place was alive with ferocity and horror, and it seemed to Adams that the Silent Pools had suddenly slipped the mask of silence and beauty and shown to him the face of hideous death.

He wiped the sweat from his brow. He was unarmed, and it seemed that a man, to walk in safety through this Garden of Eden, ought to be armed to the teeth. He turned back to the camp, walking slowly and seeing nothing of the beauties around him, nothing but the picture of the leopard's face, the paws frantically beating the water, and a more horrible picture still, the water resuming its calmness and its peace.

When he reached the camp, he found Berselius and Meeus absent. After their siesta they had gone for a stroll by the water's edge in the opposite direction to that which he had taken. The soldiers were on duty, keeping a watchful eye on the villagers; all were seated, the villagers in front of their huts and the soldiers in the shade, with their rifles handy; all, that is to say, except the nigger child, who was trotting about here and there, and who seemed quite destitute of fear or concern.

When this creature saw the gigantic Adams who looked even more gigantic in his white drill clothes, it laughed and ran away, with hands outspread and head half slewed round. Then it hid behind a tree. There is nothing more charming than the flight of a child when it wishes to be pursued. It is the instinct of women and children to run away, so as to lead you on, and it is the instinct of a rightly constituted man to follow. Adams came toward the tree, and the villagers seated before their huts and the soldiers seated in the shade all turned their heads like automata to watch.

"Hi there, you ink-bottle!" cried Adams. "Hullo there, you black dogaroo! Out you come, Uncle Remus!" Then he whistled.

He stood still, knowing that to approach closer would drive the dogaroo to flight or to tree climbing.

There was nothing visible but two small black hands clutching the tree bole; then the gollywog face, absolutely split in two with a grin, appeared and vanished.

Adams sat down.

The old, old village woman who was, in fact, the child's grandmother, had been looking on nervously, but when the big man sat down she knew he was only playing with the child, and she called out something in the native, evidently meant to reassure it. But she might have saved her breath, for the black bundle behind the tree suddenly left cover and stood with hands folded, looking at the seated man.

He drew his watch from his pocket and held it up. It approached. He whistled, and it approached nearer. Two yards away it stopped dead.

"Tick-tick," said Adams, holding up the watch.

"Papeete N'quong," replied the other, or words to that effect.

It spoke in a hoarse, crowing voice not at all unpleasant. If you listen to English children playing in the street you will often hear this croaking sort of voice, like the voice of a young rook.

Papeete struck Adams as a good name for the animal and, calling him by it, he held out the watch as a bait.

The lured one approached closer, held out a black claw, and next moment was seized by the foot.

It rolled on the ground like a dog, laughing and kicking, and Adams tickled it; and the grim soldiers laughed, showing their sharp white teeth, and the old grandmother beat her hands together, palm to palm, as if pleased, and the other villagers looked on without the ghost of an expression on their black faces.

Then he jumped it on its feet and sent it back to its people with a slap on its behind, and returned to his tent to smoke till Berselius and Meeus returned.

But he had worked his own undoing, for, till they broke camp, Papeete haunted him like a buzz-fly, peeping at him, sometimes from under the tent, trotting after him like a dog, watching him from a distance, till he began to think of "haunts" and "sendings" and spooks.

When Berselius and his companion returned, the three men sat and smoked till supper time.

At dark the villagers were driven into their huts and at the door of each hut lay a sentry.

A big fire was lit, and by its light two more sentries kept watch over the others and their prisoners. Then the moon rose, spreading silver over the silence of the pools and the limitless foliage of the forest.



CHAPTER XV

THE PUNISHMENT

The sun rose, bringing with it a breeze. Above the stir and bustle of the birds you could hear the gentle wind in the tree-tops like the sound of a sea on a low-tide beach.

The camp was still in gloom, but the whole arc of sky above the pools was thrilled and filled with living light. Sapphire blue, dazzling and pale, but deep with infinite distance, it had an intrinsic brilliancy as though filled with sunbeams brayed to dust.

The palm tops had caught the morning splendour and then, rapidly, as though the armies of light were moving to imperious trumpet-calls, charging with golden spears, legion on legion, a hurricane of brightness, Day broke upon the pools.

We call it Day, but what is it, this splendour that comes from nowhere, and vanishes to nowhere, that strikes our lives rhythmically like the golden wing of a vast and flying bird, bearing us along with it in the wind of its flight?

The rotation of the earth? But in the desert, on the sea, in the spaces of the forest you will see in the dawn a vision divorced from time, a recurring glance of a beauty that is eternal, a ray as if from the bright world toward which the great bird Time is flying, caught and reflected to our eyes by every lift of the wing.

The dawn had not brought the truants back from the forest.

This point Meeus carefully verified. Even the boy who had been sent to communicate with them had not returned.

"No news?" said Berselius, as he stepped from his tent-door and glanced around him.

"None," replied Meeus.

Adams now appeared, and the servants who had been preparing breakfast laid it on the grass. The smell of coffee filled the air; nothing could be more pleasant than this out-of-doors breakfast in the bright and lovely morning, the air fresh with the breeze and the voices of birds.

The villagers were all seated in a group, huddled together at the extreme left of the row of huts. They were no longer free, but tied together ankle to ankle by strips of n'goji. Only Papeete was at liberty, but he kept at a distance. He was seated near the old woman, and he was exploring the interior of an empty tomato tin flung away by the cook.

"I will give them two hours more," said Meeus, as he sipped his coffee.

"And then?" said Adams.

Meeus was about to reply when he caught a glance from Berselius.

"Then," he said, "I will knock those mud houses of theirs to pieces. They require a lesson."

"Poor devils!" said Adams.

Meeus during the meal did not display a trace of irritation. From his appearance one might have judged that the niggers had returned to their work, and that everything was going well. At times he appeared absent-minded, and at times he wore a gloomy but triumphant look, as though some business which had unpleasant memories attached to it had at last been settled to his satisfaction.

After breakfast he drew Berselius aside, and the two men walked away in the direction of the pools, leaving Adams to smoke his pipe in the shade of the tent.

They came back in about half an hour, and Berselius, after speaking a few words to Felix, turned to Adams.

"I must ask you to return to Fort M'Bassa and get everything in readiness for our departure. Felix will accompany you. I will follow in a couple of hours with M. Meeus. I am afraid we will have to pull these people's houses down. It's a painful duty, but it has to be performed. You will save yourself the sight of it."

"Thanks," said Adams. Not for a good deal of money would he have remained to see those wretched hovels knocked to pieces. He could perceive plainly enough that the thing had to be done. Conciliation had been tried, and it was of no avail. He was quite on the side of Meeus; indeed, he had admired the self-restraint of this very much tried Chef de Poste. Not a hard word, not a blow, scarcely a threat had been used. The people had been spoken to in a fatherly manner, a messenger had been sent to the truants, and the messenger had joined them. At all events he had not returned. Then, certainly, pull their houses down. But he did not wish to see the sight. He had nothing to do with the affair, so filling and lighting another pipe, and leaving all his belongings to be brought on by Berselius, he turned with Felix and, saying good-bye to his companions, started.

They had nearly reached the edge of the forest when shouts from behind caused Adams to turn his head.

The soldiers were shouting to Papeete to come back.

The thing had trotted after Adams like a black dog. It was within a few yards of him.

"Go back," shouted Adams.

"Tick-tick," replied Papeete. It was the only English the creature knew.

It stood frying in the sun, grinning and glistening, till Adams, with an assumption of ferocity, made for it, then back it went, and Adams, laughing, plunged under the veil of leaves.

Berselius, seated at his tent door, looked at his watch. Meeus, seated beside Berselius, was smoking cigarettes.

"Give him an hour," said Berselius. "He will be far away enough by that. Besides, the wind is blowing from there."

"True," said Meeus. "An hour." And he continued to smoke. But his hand was shaking, and he was biting the cigarette, and his lips were dry so that he had to be continually licking them.

Berselius was quite calm, but his face was pale, and he seemed contemplating something at a distance.

When half an hour had passed, Meeus rose suddenly to his feet and began to walk about, up and down, in front of the tent, up and down, up and down, as a man walks when he is in distress of mind.

The black soldiers also seemed uneasy, and the villagers huddled closer together like sheep. Papeete alone seemed undisturbed. He was playing now with the old tomato tin, out of which he had scraped and licked every vestige of the contents.

Suddenly Meeus began crying out to the soldiers in a hard, sharp voice like the yelping of a dog.

The time was up, and the soldiers knew. They ranged up, chattering and laughing, and all at once, as if produced from nowhere, two rhinoceros hide whips appeared in the hands of two of the tallest of the blacks. Rhinoceros hide is more than an inch thick; it is clear and almost translucent when properly prepared. In the form of a whip it is less an instrument of punishment than a weapon. These whips were not the smoothly prepared whips used for light punishment; they had angles that cut like sword edges. One wonders what those sentimental people would say—those sentimental people who cry out if a burly ruffian is ordered twenty strokes with the cat—could they see a hundred chicotte administered with a whip that is flexible as india-rubber, hard as steel.

Two soldiers at the yelping orders of Meeus cut the old woman apart from her fellows and flung her on the ground.

The two soldiers armed with whips came to her, and she did not speak a word, nor cry out, but lay grinning at the sun.

Papeete, seeing his old grandmother treated like this, dropped his tomato tin and screamed, till a soldier put a foot on his chest and held him down.

"Two hundred chicotte," cried Meeus, and like the echo of his words came the first dull, coughing blow.

The villagers shrieked and cried altogether at each blow, but the victim, after the shriek which followed the first blow, was dumb.

Free as a top which is being whipped by a boy, she gyrated, making frantic efforts to escape, and like boys whipping a top, the two soldiers with their whips pursued her, blow following blow.

A semicircle of blood on the ground marked her gyrations. Once she almost gained her feet, but a blow in the face sent her down again. She put her hands to her poor face, and the rhinoceros whips caught her on the hands, breaking them. She flung herself on her back and they beat her on the stomach, cutting through the walls of the abdomen till the intestines protruded. She flung herself on her face and they cut into her back with the whips till her ribs were bare and the fat bulged through the long slashes in the skin.

Verily it was a beating to the bitter end, and Meeus, pale, dripping with sweat, his eyes dilated to a rim, ran about laughing, shouting—

"Two hundred chicotte. Two hundred chicotte."

* * * * *

He cried the words like a parrot, not knowing what he said.

And Berselius?

Berselius, also dripping with sweat, his eyes also dilated to a rim, tottering like a drunken man, gazed, drinking, drinking the sight in.

Down, away down in the heart of man there is a trapdoor. Beyond the instincts of murder and assassination, beyond the instincts that make a Count Cajus or a Marquis de Sade, it lies, and it leads directly into the last and nethermost depths of hell, where sits in eternal damnation Eccelin de Romano.

Cruelty for cruelty's sake: the mad pleasure of watching suffering in its most odious form: that is the passion which hides demon-like beneath this door, and that was the passion that held Berselius now in its grip.

He had drunk of all things, this man, but never of such a potent draught as this demon held now to his lips—and not for the first time. The draught would have been nothing but for the bitterness of it, the horror of it, the mad delight of knowing the fiendishness of it, and drinking, drinking, drinking, till reason, self-respect, and soul, were overthrown.

The thing that had been a black woman and, now, seemed like nothing earthly except a bundle of red rags, gave up the miserable soul it contained and, stiffening in the clutches of tetanus, became a hoop.

* * * * *

What happened then to the remaining villagers could be heard echoing for miles through the forest in the shrieks and wails of the tortured ones.

One cannot write of unnamable things, unprintable deeds. The screams lasted till noon.

At one o'clock the punitive expedition had departed, leaving the Silent Pools to their silence. The houses of the village had been destroyed and trampled out. The sward lay covered with shapeless remains, and scarcely had the last of the expedition departed, staggering and half drunk with the delirium of their deeds, than from the blue above, like a stone, dropped a vulture.

A vulture drops like a stone, with wings closed till it reaches within a few yards of the ground; then it spreads its wings and, with wide-opened talons, lights on its prey.

Then, a marabout with fore-slanting legs and domed-out wings, came sailing silently down to the feast, and another vulture, and yet another.



CHAPTER XVI

DUE SOUTH

When Berselius and Meeus returned to Fort M'Bassa Adams, who met them, came to the conclusion that Berselius had been drinking. The man's face looked stiff and bloated, just as a man's face looks after a terrible debauch. Meeus looked cold and hard and old, but his eyes were bright and he was seemingly quite himself.

"To-morrow I shall start," said Berselius. "Not to-day. I am tired and wish to sleep." He went off to the room where his bed was, and cast himself on it and fell instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The innocent may wonder how such a man would dare to sleep—dare to enter that dark country so close to the frontier of death. But what should the innocent know of a Berselius, who was yet a living man and walked the earth but a few years ago, and whose prototype is alive to-day. Alive and powerful and lustful, great in mind, body, and estate.

* * * * *

Before sunrise next morning the expedition was marshalled in the courtyard for the start.

A great fire burned in the space just before the house, and by its light the stores and tents were taken from the go-down. The red light of the fire lit up the black glistening skins of the porters as they loaded themselves with the chop boxes and tents and guns; lit up the red fez caps of the onlooking "soldiers," their glittering white teeth, their white eyeballs, and the barrels of their rifles.

Beyond and below the fort the forest stretched in the living starlight like an infinite white sea. The tree-tops were roofed with a faint mist, no breath of wind disturbed it, and in contrast to the deathly stillness of all that dead-white world the sky, filled with leaping stars, seemed alive and vocal.

It was chill up here just before dawn. Hence the fire. Food had been served out to the porters, and they ate it whilst getting things ready and loading up. Berselius and his companions were breakfasting in the guest house and the light of the paraffin lamp lay on the veranda yellow as topaz in contrast with the red light of the fire in the yard.

Everything was ready for the start. They were waiting now for the sun.

Then, away to the east, as though a vague azure wind had blown up under the canopy of darkness, the sky, right down to the roof of the forest, became translucent and filled with distance.

A reef of cloud like a vermilion pencil-line materialized itself, became a rose-red feather tipped with dazzling gold, and dissolved as if washed away by the rising sea of light.

A great bustle spread through the courtyard. The remaining stores were loaded up, and under the direction of Felix, the porters formed in a long line, their loads on their heads.

As the expedition left the compound it was already day. The edge of the sun had leaped over the edge of the forest, the world was filled with light, and the sky was a sparkling blue.

What a scene that was! The limitless sea of snow-white mist rippled over by the sea of light, the mist billowed and spiralled by the dawn wind, great palm tops bursting through the haze, glittering effulgent with dew, birds breaking to the sky in coloured flocks, snow, and light, and the green of tremendous vegetation, and over all, new-built and beautiful, the blue, tranquil dome of sky.

It was song materialized in colour and form, the song of the primeval forests breaking from the mists of chaos, tremendous, triumphant, joyous, finding day at last, and greeting him with the glory of the palms, with the rustle of the n'sambyas tossing their golden bugles to the light, the drip and sigh of the euphorbia trees, the broad-leaved plantains and the thousand others whose forms hold the gloom of the forest in the mesh of their leaves.

"I have awakened, O God! I have awakened. Behold me, O Lord! I am Thine!"

Thus to the splendour of the sun and led by the trumpet of the wind sang the forest. A hundred million trees lent their voices to the song. A hundred million trees—acacia and palm, m'bina and cottonwood, thorn and mimosa; in gloom, in shine, in valley and on rise, mist-strewn and sun-stricken, all bending under the deep sweet billows of the wind.

At the edge of the forest Berselius and Adams took leave of Meeus. Neither Berselius nor Meeus showed any sign of the past day. They had "slept it off." As for Adams, he knew nothing, except that the villagers had been punished and their houses destroyed.

The way lay due south. They were now treading that isthmus of woods which connects the two great forests which, united thus, make the forest of M'Bonga. The trees in this vast connecting wood are different from the trees in the main forests. You find here enormous acacias, monkey-bread trees, raphia palms and baobabs; less gloom, and fewer creeping and hanging plants.

Berselius, as a rule, brought with him a taxidermist, but this expedition was purely for sport. The tusks of whatever elephants were slain would be brought back, but no skins; unless, indeed, they were fortunate enough to find some rare or unknown species.



CHAPTER XVII

SUN-WASHED SPACES

A two days' march brought them clear of the woods and into a broken country, vast, sunstrewn and silent; a beautiful desolation where the tall grass waved in the wind, and ridge and hollow, plain and mimosa tree, led the eye beyond, and beyond, to everlasting space.

Standing here alone, and listening, the only sound from all that great sunlit country was the sound of the wind in the grasses near by.

Truly this place was at the very back of the world, the hinterland of the primeval forests. Strike eastward far enough and you would sight the snow-capped crest of Kilimanjaro, King of African mountains, sitting snow-crowned above the vast territory to which he has given his name, and which stretches from Lake Eyasi to the Pare Mountains. The hunters of Kilimanjaro, which once was the home of elephants, have thinned the herds and driven them to wander. Elephants that a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, were almost fearless of man, have altered their habits from the bitter lessons they have received, and now are only to be found in the most inaccessible places. Should they cling to more inhabited districts, they come out of the sheltered places only by night. A man may spend years in an elephant district without once seeing an elephant. Driven by the necessity of food and the fear of man, the great herds wander in their wonderful and mysterious journeys for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Never lying down, sleeping as they stand, always on guard, dim of sight yet keen of smell, they pass where there are trees, feeding as they go, stripping branches of leaves. Alarmed, or seeking a new feeding place, a herd moves in the rainy season, when the ground is soft, with the silence and swiftness of a cloud shadow; in the dry season when the ground is hard, the sound of them stampeding is like the drums of an army.

"Elephants," said Berselius, pointing to some bundles of dried stuff lying near a vangueria bush. "That stuff is a bundle of bowstring hemp. They chew it and drop it. Oh, that has been dropped a long time ago; see, there you have elephants again."

A tree standing alone showed half its bark ripped off, tusked off by some old bull elephant, and above the tusk marks, some fifteen feet up, could be seen the rubbing mark where great shoulders had scratched themselves.

As they marched, making due south, Berselius in that cold manner which never left him, and which made comradeship with the man impossible and reduced companionship to the thinnest bond, talked to Adams about the game they were after, telling in a few graphic sentences and not without feeling the wonderful story of the moving herds, to whom distance is nothing, to whom mountains are nothing, to whom the thickest jungle is nothing. The poem of the children of the mammoth who have walked the earth with the mastodon, who have stripped the trees wherein dwelt arboreal man, who have wandered under the stars and suns of a million years, seen rivers change their courses and hills arise where plains had been, and yet remain, far strewn and thinned out, it is true, but living still. At noon they halted and the tents were pitched for a four hours' rest.

Adams, whilst dinner was preparing, walked away by himself till the camp was hidden by a ridge, then he stood and looked around him.

Alone, like this, the spirit of the scene appeared before him: the sun, and wind, and sky; the vast, vast spaces of waving grass, broken by the beds of dried-up streams, strewn here and there with mimosas and thorns, here dim with the growth of vangueria bushes, here sharp and gray-green with cactus; this giant land, infinite, sunlit, and silent, spoke to him in a new language.

It seemed to Adams that he had never known freedom before.

A shadow swept by him on the grass. He looked up and watched the great bird that had cast the shadow sailing away on the wind, dwindling to a point, and vanishing in the dazzling blue.



CHAPTER XVIII

FAR INTO ELEPHANT LAND

They sighted a small herd of giraffe two days later, but so far off as to be beyond pursuit; but before evening, just as they were about to camp by some pools, they came across rhino.

Berselius's quick eye spotted the beasts, a bull and a cow. They were in the open, under shelter of some thick grass; the bull was half sitting up, and his head and horn in the evening light might have been taken for the stump of a broken tree. The cow was not visible at first, but almost immediately after they sighted the bull, she heaved herself up and stood a silhouette against the sky.

The wind was blowing from the beasts, so it was quite possible to get close up to them. The meat would be useful, so Berselius and his companion started, with Felix carrying the guns.

As they drew close Adams noticed that the back of the great cow seemed alive and in motion. Half a dozen rhinoceros birds, in fact, were upon it, and almost immediately, sighting the hunters, they rose chattering and fluttering in the air.

These birds are the guardians of the half-blind rhinoceros. They live on the parasites that infest his skin. It is a partnership. The birds warn the rhinoceros of danger, and he, vicariously, feeds the birds. Scarcely had the birds given warning than the bull heaved himself up. Berselius's rifle rang out, but the light was uncertain, and the brute wounded, but not mortally, charged forward took a half circle, swung his head from side to side in search of his assailant, and sighted the cow. Instantly, horn down and squealing, he charged her. She met him horn to horn, and the smash could be heard at the camp where the porters and the soldiers stood gazing open-mouthed at the battle between the two great brutes charging each other in the low evening light, fighting with the ferocity of tigers and the agility of cats.

Adams, close up as he was, had a better view, and unless he had seen with his own eyes, he could not have believed that two animals so heavy and unwieldy could display such nimbleness and such quickness of ferocity.

It was the wickedest sight, and it was brought to an end at last by the rifle of Berselius.

Curiously enough, neither brute had injured the other very much. The horns which, had they been of ivory, must have been shivered, were intact, for the horn of a rhinoceros is flexible; it is built up of a conglomeration of hairs, and though, perhaps, the most unbreakable thing in the universe, it bends up to a certain point just as a rapier does.

Next morning, two hours after daybreak, Felix, who was scouting just ahead of the column, came running back with news he had struck elephant spoor. Every tooth in his head told the tale. Not only spoor, but the spoor of a vast herd cutting right across the line of march.

Berselius came forward to examine, and Adams came with him.

The dry ground and wire grass was not the best medium for taking the track of the beasts, but to the experienced eyes of Berselius and the Zappo Zap everything was clear. A herd of elephant had passed not long ago, and they were undisturbed and unsuspicious. When elephants are suspicious they march in lines, single file, one stepping in the tracks of another. This herd was spread wide and going easy of mind, but at what pace it would be impossible to say.

The long boat-shaped back feet of the bulls leave a print unmistakable in the rainy season when the ground is soft, but still discernible to the trained eye in the dry season. Felix declared that there were at least twenty bulls in the herd, and some of huge size.

"How long is it since they passed here?" asked Berselius.

Felix held up the fingers of one hand. From certain indications he came to the conclusion they had passed late in the night, three hours or so before daybreak. They numbered forty or fifty, leaving aside the calves that might be with them. He delivered these opinions, speaking in the native, and Berselius instantly gave the order, "Left wheel!" to the crowd of porters; and at the word the long column turned at right angles to the line of march and struck due west, treading the track of the herd.

Nothing is more exciting than this following in the track of a mammoth army whose tactics you cannot foresee. This herd might be simply moving a few miles in search of a new feeding ground, or it might be making one of those great sweeping marches covering hundreds of miles that the mysterious elephant people make at the dictates of their mysterious instinct. It might be moving at a gentle pace, or swifter than a man could run. A mile on the new route they came on a broken tree, a great tree broken down as if by a storm; the fractures were quite recent. The elephant folk had done this. They came across another tree whose sides, facing north and south, had been clearly barked, and the pieces of the bark, farther on, that had been chewed and flung away.

With one stroke of a tusk passing a tree, and without stopping, an elephant will tear off a strip of bark; and it was curious to see how the bark of this tree to east and west was intact. The moving herd had not stopped. Just in passing, an elephant on either side of the tree had taken his slice of bark, chewed it and flung it away. There were also small trees trodden down mercilessly under foot. Thus the great track of the herd lay before the hunters, but not a sign in all the sunlit, silent country before them of the herd itself.

It was Berselius's aim to crowd up his men as quickly as a forced march could do it, camp and then pursue the herd with a few swift followers, the barest possible amount of stores and one tent.

The calabashes and the water bottles had been filled at the last halt, but it was desirable to find water for the evening's camping place.

It was now that Berselius showed his capacity as a driver and his own enormous store of energy.

He took the tail of the column, and woe to the porters who lagged behind! Felix was with him, and Adams, who was heading the column, could hear the shouts of the Zappo Zap. The men with their loads went at a quick walk, sometimes breaking into a trot, urged forward by the gun-butt of Felix.

The heat was sweltering, but there was no rest. On, on, on, ever on through a country that changed not at all; the same breaks and ridges, the same limitless plains of waving grass, the same scant trees, the same heat-shaken horizon toward which the elephant road led straight, unwavering, endless.

The brain reeled with the heat and the dazzle, but the column halted not nor stayed. The energy of Berselius drove it forward as the energy of steam drives an engine. His voice, his very presence, put life into flagging legs and sight into dazzled eyes. He spared neither himself nor others; the game was ahead, the spoor was hot, and the panther in his soul drove him forward.

Toward noon they halted for two hours where some bushes spread their shade. The porters lay down on their bellies, with arms outspread, having taken a draught of water and a bite of food; they lay in absolute and profound slumber. Adams, nearly as exhausted, lay on his back. Even Felix showed signs of the journey, but Berselius sat right back into the bushes, with his knees drawn up and, with eyes fixed on the eastern distance, brooded.

He was always like this on a great hunt, when the game was near. Silent and brooding, and morose to the point of savagery.

One might almost have fancied that in far distant days this man had been a tiger, and that the tiger still lived slumbering in his soul, triumphant over death, driving him forth at intervals from civilization to wander in the wild places of the earth and slay.

Two hours past noon they resumed their journey: on, on, on, treading the elephant track which still went due east straight as an arrow to the blue horizon. The frightful tiredness they had felt before the noonday halt had passed, giving place to a dull, dreamy feeling, such as comes after taking opium. The column marched mechanically and without thought, knowing only two things, the feel of the hard ground and grass beneath their feet, and the smiting of the sun on their backs.

Thus the galley slaves of old laboured at their oars and the builders of the pyramids beneath their loads, all moving like one man. But here was no tune of flutes to set the pace, or monotonous song to help the lifting; only the voice of Berselius like a whip-lash, and the gun-butt of Felix drumming on the ribs of laggards.

A light, hot wind was blowing in their faces. Adams, still at the head of the column, had suffered severely during the morning march, and the re-start after the noon rest was painful to him as a beating; but the reserve forces of a powerful constitution that had never been tampered with were now coming into play, and, after a time, he felt little discomfort. His body, like a wound-up mechanism, did all the work; his mind became divorced from it; he experienced a curious exaltation, like that which comes from drink, only finer far and more ethereal. The column seemed marching far swifter than it was marching in reality, the vast sunlit land seemed vaster even than it was; the wind-blown grass, the far distant trees, the circling skyline, all spoke of freedom unknown to man: the freedom of the herd they were pursuing; the freedom of the bird flying overhead; the freedom of the wind blowing in the grass; the freedom of the limitless, endless, sunlit country. Meridians of silence, and light, and plains, and trees, and mountains, and forests. Parallels of virgin land.

He was feeling what the bird knows and feels when it beats up the mountains or glides down the vales of air; what the elephant herd knows and feels when it moves over mountains and across plains; what the antelopes know when distance calls them.

A shout from Felix, and the Zappo Zap came running up the line; his head was flung up and he was sniffing the air. Then, walking beside Adams, he stared ahead right away over the country before them to the far skyline.

"Elephant smell," he replied, when Adams asked him what was the matter; then, turning, he shouted some words in the native back to Berselius, and tramped on beside Adams, his nose raised to the wind, of which each puff brought the scent stronger.

Adams could smell nothing, but the savage could tell that right ahead there were elephants; close up, too, yet not a sign of them could be seen.

This puzzled him, and what puzzles a savage frightens him.

His nose told him that here were elephants in sight of his eyes; his eyes told him that there were none.

All at once the column came to a dead halt. Porters flung down their loads and cried out in fright. Even Berselius stood stock-still in astonishment.

From the air, blown on the wind from no visible source, came the shrill trumpeting of an elephant.

There, in broad daylight, close up to them, the sound came with the shock of the supernatural. Nothing stirred in all the land but the grass bending to the wind. There was not even a bird in the air; yet close to them an elephant was trumpeting shrilly and fiercely as elephants trumpet when they charge.

Again came the sound, and once again, but this time it broke lamentably to a complaint that died away to silence.

Instantly the Zappo Zap came to himself. He knew that sound. An elephant was dying somewhere near by, caught in a trap possibly. He rushed down the line, gun-butting the porters back to their places, shouting to Berselius, helping loads up on the heads of the men who had dropped them, so that in a minute the column was in motion again and going swiftly to make up for lost time.

Five minutes brought them to a slight rise in the ground, beyond which, deep-cut, rock-strewn and skeleton-dry, lay the bed of a river.

In the rains this would be scarcely fordable, but now not even a trickle of water could be seen. On the floor of this river-bed, like a huge dark rock, lay the body of an elephant.

An African elephant is the biggest creature on earth, far bigger than his Indian cousin, and far more formidable looking. Adams could scarcely believe that the thing before him was the body of an animal, as he contrasted its size with Felix, who had raced down the slope and was examining the carcass.

"Dead!" cried Felix, and the porters, taking heart, descended, but not without groaning and lamentations, for it is well-known to the natives that whoever comes across an elephant lying down must die, speedily and by violent means; and this elephant was lying down in very truth, his tusks humbly lowered to the ground, his great ears motionless, just as death had left him.

It was a bull and surely, from his size, the father of the herd. Berselius considered the beast to be of great age. One tusk was decayed badly and the other was chipped and broken, and on the skin of the side were several of those circular sores one almost always finds on the body of a rhinoceros, "dundos," as the natives call them; old scars and wounds told their tale of old battles and the wanderings of many years.

It might have been eighty or a hundred years since the creature had first seen the light and started on its wonderful journey over mountains and plains through jungle and forest, lying down maybe only twenty times in all those years, wandering hither and thither, and knowing not that every step of its journey was a step closer to here.

Just this little piece of ground on which it lay had been plotted out for it a hundred years ago, and it had come to it by a million mazy paths, but not less surely than had it followed the leading of a faultlessly directed arrow.

The herd had left it here to die. Berselius, examining the body closely, could find no wound. He concluded that it had come to its end just as old men come to their end at last—the mechanism had failed, hindered, perhaps, by some internal disease, and it had lain down to wait for death.

The tusks were not worth taking, and the party pursued its way up the eastern bank of the river, where the herd had also evidently pursued its way, and then on, on, across the country due east, in the track they had followed since morning.

As they left the river-bed a tiny dot in the sky above, which they had not noticed, enlarged, and like a stone from the blue fell a vulture. It lit on the carcass; then came a kite slanting down to the feast, and then from the blue, like stones dropped from the careless hand of a giant, vulture after vulture.



CHAPTER XIX

THE GREAT HERD

Felix kept his place beside Adams at the head of the column. The black seemed morose, and at the same time, excited.

Two things had disturbed him: the bad luck of meeting a lying-down elephant and the fact that a giraffe was with the herd. He had spotted giraffe spoor in the river-bed where the ground was sandy and showed up the impression well.

Now, the giraffe has the keen eyesight of a bird, and when he throws in his lot with the elephant folk who, though half-blind, have the keen scent of hounds, the combination is bad for the hunter.

An hour before sundown they struck some pools beside which grew a tree, the biggest they had yet come across, and here Berselius gave the order, halt and camp.

To half of the porters it was an order to fall down flat, their loads beside them, their arms outspread absolutely broken with the weariness of the march, broken, and speechless, and motionless, and plunged into such a depth of slumber that had you kicked them they would not have moved.

Berselius, himself, was nearly exhausted. He sat with his back against the tree and gave his orders in a languid voice, and it was very curious to see the tents going up, wielded by men who seemed working in their sleep, slowly and with fumbling fingers, tripping over each other, pausing, hesitating, yet working all the same, and all in the still level light of evening that lent unreality to the scene.

Luck was against Berselius. It was quite within the bounds of probability that the herd might have halted here by the water for the night; but they had not. They had drunk here, for the pool was all trodden up and still muddy, and then gone on.

They were evidently making one of their great marches, and it was probable now that they would never be caught up with. Under these circumstances, Berselius determined to halt for the night.

Some small trees and bushes were cut to make a camp fire, and when they had finished supper Berselius, still with his back to the tree, sat talking to Adams by the light of the crackling branches.

He did not seem in the least put out with his failure.

"The rains will be on us in a week or two," said he. "Then you will see elephants all over this place. They lie up in the inaccessible places in the dry season, but when the wet weather comes the herds spread over the plains. Not such herds as the one we have been following—it is rarely one comes across one like that. However, to-morrow we may have better luck with them. Felix tells me that forty miles beyond there, where they have gone, there are a lot of trees. They may stop and feed, and if they do, we will have them. To-morrow I shall start light. Leave the main camp here. You and I and Felix, and four of the best of those men, and the smallest tent, enough stores for three or four days. Yes, to-morrow——" The man dozed off, sleep-stricken, the pipe between his teeth.

"To-morrow!" Portentous word!

They retired to their tents. Two sentries were posted to keep the fire going and to keep watch. The porters lay about, looking just like men who had fallen in battle, and after awhile the sentries, having piled the fire with wood, sat down, and the moon rose, flooding the whole wide land with light.

She had scarcely lifted her own diameter above the horizon when the sentries, flat on their backs, with arms extended, were sleeping as soundly as the others. Brilliant almost as daylight, still and peaceful as death, the light of the great moon flooded the land, paling the stars and casting the shadows of the tents across the sleepers, and the wind, which was now blowing from the west, shook the twigs of the tree, like skeleton fingers, over the flicker of the red burning camp-fire.

Now, the great herd of elephants had been making, as Berselius imagined possible, for the forest that lay forty miles to the east.

They had reached it before sundown, and had begun to feed, stripping branches of their leaves, the enormous trunks reaching up like snakes and whirling the leaves Catherine-wheellike down enormous throats; the purring and grumbling of their cavernous bellies, the rubbing of rough shoulders against the bark, the stamping of feet crushing the undergrowth, resounded in echoes amongst the trees. The big bull giraffe that had cast its lot in with the herd was busy, too, tearing and snapping down twigs and leaves, feeding like the others, who were all feeding like one, even to the eighteen-month-old calves busy at the teats of their enormous dams.

The sunlight, level and low, struck the wonderful picture. Half the herd were in the wood, and you could see the tree branches bending and shaking to the reaching trunks. Half the herd were grazing on the wood's edge, the giraffe amidst them, its clouded body burning in the sunset against the green of the trees.

The wind was blowing steadily along the edge of the wood and against a band of hunters of the Congo State, blacks armed with rifles, who were worming their way along from tree bole to tree bole, till within shooting distance of the bull elephant nearest to them.

The creatures feeding knew nothing of their danger till three shots, that sounded like one, rang out, and the bull, struck in the neck, the shoulder, and between the ear and eye, fell, literally all of a heap, as though some giant's scimitar had swept its legs away from under it.

At this moment the sun's lower edge had just touched the horizon. The whole visible herd on the edge of the wood, at the sound of the shots and the crash of the falling bull, wheeled, trumpeted wildly, and with trunks swung up, ears spread wide, swept away toward the sunset, following the track by which they had come; whilst, bursting from the woods, leaf-strewn, with green branches tangled in their tusks, furious and mad with fright, came the remainder, following in the same track, sweeping after the others, and filling the air with the thunder of their stampede.