Next morning Berselius ordered FÉlix 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, FÉlix 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.