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This gnome had explained without speaking what the gloom and the quagmire, and the rope-like lianas had hinted, what the Silent Pools had shouted, what the vulture and the kite had laid bare, what the heart had whispered: There is no God in the forest of M'Bonga, no law but the law of the leopard, no mercy but the mercy of Death.
The faintest breathing of air took the place of the strong puffs that had sent the flame of the lamp half up the glass chimney. As Meeus listened, on this faint breath from the forest he heard a sound "Boom boom" very faint, and as if someone were striking a drum in a leisurely manner. "Boom boom." A great man-ape haunted this part of the forest of M'Bonga like an evil spirit.
The great rubber forest of M'Bonga, thousands of square miles in extent, is really composed of two forests joined by an isthmus of woods.
The only plan in Adams's head was to march straight west toward the sunset for a distance roughly equivalent to the forced march they had made in pursuit of the herd, and then to strike at right angles due north and try to strike the wood isthmus of the two great forests making up the forest of M'Bonga. But the sunset is a wide mark and only appears at sunset.
The westward part of the forest of M'Bonga projects a spur of the pestiferous rubber-bearing land into the isthmus of healthy woods. It was just at the tip of this spur that Berselius and his party were entangled and lost.
In the storms and under the rains the great rubber forest of M'Bonga would roar like a reef-tormented sea, but on a day like this, when, gazing from the high ground of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms, the sombre green of the n'sambyas, to the haze that veiled all things beyond, on a day like this, silence gazed at one Sphinx-like, and from the distance of a million years.
Away here in the lonely fort, in the midst of the great M'Bonga rubber forest that was now speechless as a Sphinx, now roaring at him like a sea in torment; here in the endless sunlight of the dry seasons and the endless misery of the rains, Meeus driven in upon himself, had time to think. There is no prison so terrible as a limitless prison.
In the great forest of M'Bonga the rubber vines are not equally distributed. Large areas occur in which they are not found; only in the most desolate places do they grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the rubber vine into subjection; it will have nothing to do with the vineyard and the field; it chooses to grow alone.
Seven days' march took them one hundred and twenty miles east of Yandjali and into the heart of the great rubber district of M'Bonga. Twenty miles a day ought to have been covered on an average, but they had delayed here and there to shoot, and the extra porters, whose duty it was to carry the trophies, were already in requisition.
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.
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