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.