The Pools of Silence Part 7

"What did you bring this thing for?" asked Berselius, pointing to Adams's elephant gun, which the Zappo Zap headman was just stripping from its covering.

"To shoot with," said Adams, laughing.

Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gun, and gave a short laugh.

"Well, bring it," said he; "but I don't envy your gun-bearers."

But Felix, the headman, did not seem of the same opinion. The enormous rifle evidently appealed to his ferocious heart. It was a G.o.d-gun this, and no mistake, and its l.u.s.tre evidently spread to Adams, the owner of it.

Felix was a very big man, almost as big as Adams: a member of the great cannibal fighting tribe of Zappo Zaps, he had followed Verhaeren, who had once held a post in the Bena Pianga country, to Yandjali; he had a sort of attachment for Verhaeren, which showed that he possessed some sort of heart. All the Zappo Zaps have been enrolled by the Congo Government as "soldiers"; they have a bad name and cause a lot of heart-searching to the Brussels administration, for when they are used in punitive expeditions to burn villages of recalcitrant rubber-getters, they, to use a local expression, "_will_ eat when they have killed." When they are used _en ma.s.se_, the old cannibal instinct breaks out; when the killing is over they go for the killed, furious as dogs over bones. G.o.d help the man who would come between them and their food!

Of these men Felix was a fine specimen. A nature man, ever ready to slay, and cruel as Death. A man from the beginning of the world.

If Felix had possessed a wife, he and she might have stood for the man and woman mentioned by Thenard in his lecture.

The basic man and woman in whose dim brains Determination had begun to work, sketching the vague line on either side of which lies the Right and Left of moral action.

A true savage, never to be really civilized. For it is the fate of the savage that he will never become one of us. Do what you will and pray how you will, you will never make up for the million years that have pa.s.sed him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which is the basis of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, or developed only into a few fantastic and abortive G.o.d shapes and devil shapes.

He will never become one of us. Extraordinary paradox--he never can become a Leopold or a Felix Fuchs!

Berselius disbanded the porters with a wave of the hand, and he and his companions began a round of the station. Verhaeren, with a cigar in his mouth, led the way.

He opened the door of a go-down, and Adams in the dim light, saw bale upon bale of stuff; gum copal it proved to be, for Yandjali tapped a huge district where this stuff is found, and which lies forty miles to the south. There was also ca.s.sava in large quant.i.ties, and the place had a heady smell, as if fermentation were going on amidst the bales.

Verhaeren shut the door and led on till, rounding a corner, a puff of hot air brought a stench which caused Adams to choke and spit.

Verhaeren laughed.

It was the Hostage House that sent its poisonous breath to meet them.

A native corporal and two soldiers stood at the palisade which circled the Hostage House. The women and children had just been driven back from the fields where they had been digging and weeding, and they had been served with their wretched dinners. They were eating these sc.r.a.ps of food like animals, some in the sun amidst the tufts of gra.s.s and mounds of ordure in the little yard, some in the shadow of the house.

There were old, old women like shrivelled monkeys; girls of twelve and fifteen, some almost comely; middle-aged women, women about to become mothers, and a woman who had become a mother during the past night lying there in the shelter of the Hostage House. There were little pot-bellied n.i.g.g.e.r children, tiny black dots, who had to do their bit of work in the fields with the others; and when the strangers appeared and looked over the rail, these folk set up a crying and chattering, and ran about distractedly, not knowing what new thing was in store for them. They were the female folk and children of a village, ten miles away south; they were here as "hostages," because the village had not produced its full tale of ca.s.sava. They had been here over a month.

The soldiers laughed, and struck with the b.u.t.ts of their rifles on the palisading, as if to increase the confusion. Adams noticed that the young girls and women were of all the terrified crowd seemingly the most terrified. He did not know the reason; he could not even guess it. A good man himself, and believing in a G.o.d in heaven, he could not guess the truth. He knew nothing of the reason of these women's terror, and he looked with disgust at the scene before him, not entirely comprehending.

Those creatures, so filthy, so animal-like, created in his mind such abhorrence that he forgot to make allowances for the fact that they were penned like swine, and that perchance in their own native state, free in their own villages, they might be cleaner and less revolting. He could not hear the dismal cry of the "Congo n.i.g.g.e.rs," who of all people on the earth are the most miserable, the most abused, the most sorrow-stricken, the most dumb. He did not know that he was looking at one of the filthy acts in the great drama that a hundred years hence will be read with horror by a more enlightened world.

They turned from the degrading sight and went back to Verhaeren's house for dinner.

CHAPTER VIII

THE VOICE OF THE CONGO FOREST

Just after daybreak next morning the expedition started.

Berselius, Adams, the gun-bearers and Felix headed the line; a long way after came the porters and their loads, shepherded by half a dozen soldiers of the state specially hired for the business.

Before they had gone a mile on their route the sun was blazing strongly, sharp bird-calls came from the trees, and from the porters tramping under their loads a hum like the hum of an awakened beehive. These people will talk and chatter when the sun rises; club them, or threaten them, or load them with burdens as much as you please, the old instinct of the birds and beasts remains.

At first the way led through ca.s.sava and manioc fields and past clumps of palms; then, all at once, and like plunging under a green veil or into the heart of a green wave, they entered the forest.

The night chill was just leaving the forest, the great green gloom, festooned with fantastic rope-like tendrils, was drinking the sunlight with a million tongues; you could hear the rustle and snap of branches straightening themselves and sighing toward heaven after the long, damp, chilly night. The tropical forest at daybreak flings its arms up to the sun as if to embrace him, and all the teeming life it holds gives tongue.

Flights of coloured and extraordinary birds rise like smoke wreaths from the steaming leaves, and the drone of a million, million insects from the sonorous depths comes like the sound of life in ferment.

The river lay a few miles to their left, and faintly from it, m.u.f.fled by the trees, they could hear the shrill whistling of the river steamboat. It was like the "good-bye" of civilization.

The road they were pursuing through the forest was just a dim track beaten down by the feet of the copal and ca.s.sava gatherers bearing their loads to Yandjali. Here and there the forest thinned out and a riot of umbrella thorns, vicious, sword-like gra.s.s and tall, dull purple flowers, like hollyhocks made a scrub that choked the way and tangled the foot; then the trees would thicken up, and with the green gloom of a mighty wave the forest would fall upon the travellers and swallow them up.

Adams, tramping beside Berselius, tried vainly to a.n.a.lyze the extraordinary and new sensations to which this place gave birth in him.

The forest had taken him. It seemed to him, on entering it, that he had died to all the things he had ever known. At Yandjali he had felt himself in a foreign country, but still in touch with Europe and the past; a mile deep in the forest and Yandjali itself, savage as it was, seemed part of the civilization and the life he had left behind him.

The forests of the old world may be vast, but their trees are familiar.

One may lose one's direction, but one can never lose _oneself_ amidst the friendly pines, the beeches, the oaks, whose forms have been known to us from childhood.

But here, where the beard-moss hangs from unknown trees, as we tramp through the sweltering sap-scented gloom, we feel ourselves not in a forest but under a cover.

There is nothing of the perfume of the pine, nothing of the breeze in the branches, nothing of the beauty of the forest twilight here. We are in a great green room, festooned with vines and tendrils and hung about with leaves. Nothing is beautiful here, but everything is curious. It is a curiosity shop, where one pays with the sweat of one's brow, with the languor of one's body, and the remembrance of one's past, for the sight of an orchid shaped like a bird, or a flower shaped like a jug, or a bird whose flight is a flash of sapphire dust.

A great green room, where echo sounds of things unknown.

You can see nothing but the foliage, and the tree boles just around, yet the place is full of life and war and danger.

That crash followed by the shrieking of birds--you cannot tell whether it is half a mile away or quite close, or to the right, or to the left, or whether it is caused by a branch torn from a tree by some huge hand, or a tree a hundred years old felled at last by Time.

Time is the woodman of the Congo forests. n.o.body else could do the work, and he works in his own lazy fashion, leaving things to right themselves and find their own salvation.

Just as there is eternal war to the death between the beasts of this jungle, so there is war to the death between the trees, the vines, and the weeds. A frightful battle between the vegetable things is going on; we scarcely recognize it, because the processes are so slow, but if five years of the jungle could be photographed week by week, and the whole series be run rapidly off on some huge cinematograph machine, you would see a heaving and rending struggle for existence, vegetation fed by the roaring tropical rains rising like a giant and flinging itself on the vegetation of yesterday; vines lengthening like snakes, tree felling tree, and weed choking weed.

Even in the quietude of a moment, standing and looking before one at the moss-bearded trees and the python-like loops of the lianas, one can see the struggle crystallized, just as in the still marble of the Laoc.o.o.n one sees the struggle of life with death.

In this place which covers an unthinkable area of the earth, a vast population has dwelt since the beginning of time. Think of it. Shut off from the world which has progressed toward civilization, alone with the beasts and the trees, they have lived here without a guide and without a G.o.d. The instinct which teaches the birds to build nests taught them to build huts; the herd-instinct drove them into tribes.

Then, ages ago, before Christ was crucified, before Moses was born, began the terrible and pathetic attempt of a pred.a.m.ned people to raise their heads and walk erect. The first lifting of purblind eyes destined never to see even the face of Art.

Yet there was a germ of civilization amongst them. They had villages and vague laws and art of a sort; the ferocious tribes drew to one side, hunting beasts and warring with each other, and the others, the milder and kindlier tribes, led their own comparatively quiet life; and Mohammed was born somewhere in the unknown North, and they knew nothing of the fact till the Arab slavers raided them, and robbed them of men and women and children, just as boys rob an orchard.

But the birth of Christ and the foundation of Christendom was the event which in far distant years was destined to be this unhappy people's last undoing.

They had known the beasts of the forests, the storms, the rains, the Arab raiders, but Fate had reserved a new thing for them to know. The Christians. Alas! that one should have to say it, but here the fact is, that white men, Christian men, have taken these people, have drawn under the banner of Christianity and under Christian pay all the warlike tribes, armed them, and set them as task-masters over the humble and meek. And never in the history of the world has such a state of servitude been known as at present exists in the country of this forlorn people.

They had been marching some three hours when, from ahead came a sound as of some huge animal approaching. Berselius half turned to his gun-bearer for his rifle, but Felix rea.s.sured him.