The Pools of Silence

easanter set of men. Tilkins, the captain, especially, won Adams's regard. He was a huge man, with a

one morning shortly after breakfast three strokes on

, the funereal heat-green of palm and banana, a flood of tropical su

e, from away up there where the great palms gave place to reeds and water-grass, you might have heard the sound of the hippopotami bellowing to the sun,

him six or seven half-naked, savage-looking blacks, each topped with a red fez and armed with

ams; then the three left the wharf and walked up to the District Commissioner's house, a frame b

out its territory. There are the rubber districts, the gum copal districts, the food districts, and the districts where ivory is obtained. In each of these districts the natives are made to work and bring in rubber, gum copal, food, or iv

at strange, lazy, semi-Oriental look which the Belgian face takes when the owner of it is fixed to

, a preoccupied looking man who, ten years or five years ago, lost his berth in an office for misconduct, or his commission in the army. A déclassé

m La Gaudriole, the picture of a girl in tights; on one of the shelves lay a stack of old newspapers, on another a stack of official papers, reports from subordinates, invoices,

and porters necessary, and a guide. It was Berselius's intention to strike a hundred miles west up river almost parallel to the Congo, and then south into the heart of the elephant country. They talke

Verhaeren led the way out for Ber

h a collection of depressed looking individuals; they were muscular enough, but there was something in th

looking nigger, fez-tipped, who could speak twenty words of French, and who was nicknamed Félix.

on the east coast, contained stores; two big tents, a couple of "Roorkee" chairs, folding-beds and tables, cork mat

s, pointing to Adams's elephant gun, which the Zapp

th," said Ad

ig man handling the big g

d he; "but I don't en

ifle evidently appealed to his ferocious heart. It was a god-gun this, a

d 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-ge

ture man, ever ready to slay, and cruel as D

he might have stood for the man and wom

on had begun to work, sketching the vague line on eithe

y how you will, you will never make up for the million years that have passed him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which i

xtraordinary paradox-he never can

d, and he and his companions began a round of the stat

for Yandjali tapped a huge district where this stuff is found, and which lies forty miles to the south. There was a

nding a corner, a puff of hot air brought a

ren la

e that sent its poisono

from the fields where they had been digging and weeding, and they had been served with their wretched dinners. They were eating these scrap

e. There were little pot-bellied nigger 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 distracte

ew 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, the

ing sight and went back to