The day after the next, two hours before noon, they passed an object which Adams remembered well.

It was the big tree which Berselius had pointed out to him as having been tusked by an elephant; and an hour after they had started from the mid-day rest, the horizon to the north changed and grew dark.

It was the forest.

The sky immediately above the dark line, from contrast, was extraordinarily bright and pale, and, as they marched, the line lifted and the trees grew.

“Look!” said Berselius.

“I see,” replied Adams.

A question was troubling his mind. Would Berselius be able to guide them amidst the trees? Here in the open he had a hundred tiny indications on either side of him, but amidst the trees how could he find his way? Was it possible that memory could lead him through that labyrinth once it grew dense?

It will be remembered that it was a two days’ march from Fort M’Bassa through the isthmus of woods to the elephant country. At the edge of the forest the trees were very thinly set, but for the rest, and a day’s march from the fort, it was jungle.

Would Berselius be able to penetrate that jungle? Time would tell. Berselius knew nothing about it; he only knew what lay before his sight.

Toward evening the trees came out to meet them, baobab and monkey-bread, set widely apart; and they camped by a pool and lit their fire, and slept as men sleep in the pure air of the woods and the desert.

Next morning they pursued their journey, Berselius still confident. At noon, however, he began to exhibit slight signs of agitation and anxiety. The trees were thickening around them; he still knew the way, but the view before him was getting shorter and shorter as the trees thickened; that is to say, the mist was coming closer and closer. He knew nothing of the dense jungle before them; he only knew that the clear road in front of him was shortening up rapidly and horribly, and that if it continued to do so it would inevitably vanish.

The joy that had filled his heart became transformed to the grief which the man condemned to blindness feels when he sees the bright world fading from his sight, slowly but surely as the expiring flame of a lamp.

He walked more rapidly, and the more rapidly he went the shorter did the road before him grow.

All at once the forest—which had been playing, up to this, with Berselius as a cat plays with a mouse—all at once the forest, like a great green Sphinx, put down its great green paw and spoke from its cavernous heart—

“I am the Forest.”

They had passed almost at a step into the labyrinths. Plantain leaves hit them insolently in the face, lianas hung across their path like green ropes placed to bar them out, weeds tangled the foot.

Berselius, like an animal that finds itself trapped, plunged madly forward. Adams following closely behind heard him catching back his breath with a sob. They plunged on for a few yards, and then Berselius stood still.

The forest was very silent, and seemed listening. The evening light and the shade of the leaves cast gloom around them. Adams could hear his own heart thumping and the breathing of the porters behind him. If Berselius had lost his way, then they were lost indeed.

After a moment Berselius spoke, as a man speaks whose every hope in life is shattered.

“The path is gone.”

Adams’s only reply was a deep intake of the breath.

“There is nothing before me. I am lost.”

“Shall we try back?” said Adams, speaking in that hard tone which comes when a man is commanding his voice.

“Back? Of what use? I cannot go back; I must go forward. But here there is nothing.”

The unhappy man’s voice was terrible to hear. He had marched so triumphantly all day, drawing nearer at each step to himself, to that self which memory had hidden from him and which memory was disclosing bit by bit. And now the march was interrupted as if by a wall set across his path.

But Adams was of a type of man to whom despondency may be known, but never despair.

They had marched all day; they were lost, it is true, but they were not far, now, from Fort M’Bassa. The immediate necessity was rest and food.

There was a little clearing amidst the trees just here, and with his own hands he raised the tent. They had no fire, but the moon when she rose, though in her last quarter, lit up the forest around them with a green glow-worm glimmer. One could see the lianas and the trees, the broad leaves shining with dew, some bright, some sketched in dimly, and all bathed in gauze green light; and they could hear the drip and patter of dew on leaf and branch.

This is a mournful sound—the most mournful of all the sounds that fill the great forests of the Congo. It is so casual, so tearful. One might fancy it the sound of the forest weeping to itself in the silence of the night.