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This is possibly a misguided heathen thing of him to do, and it is generally held in European circles that the under-world such an individual as he will go to is neither damp, nor chilly. But granting this, no one can contest but that the world he spends his life here in is damp, and that the natives of the Niger Delta live in a saturated forest swamp region that reeks with malaria.
'For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet, the faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing and the throb of the blood-vessels in my ears. Then I seemed to know of a pattering about me. I pushed on grimly. The pattering grew more distinct, and then I caught the same queer sound and voices I had heard in the Under-world.
Over all the vast under-world the mountain Gnome Rübezahl was lord; and busy enough the care of his dominions kept him. There were the endless treasure chambers to be gone through, and the hosts of gnomes to be kept to their tasks.
Here he dismounted, and bidding his horse go home, he pushed forward on foot. Having nothing to guide him as to where he was likely to find the entrance of the under-world, the king wandered hither and thither for a long while, till, one day, while he was resting under a tree, a voice spoke to him.
"Some make-up, eh kid?" she demanded of the taller detective, who was now nursing a bad "shiner," as a black eye is known in the under-world, and whose face was battered to a bleeding pulp. "Believe me, as a job, this is some job! From start to finish, a pippin. He was bound to fall for it though. No help for him.
"See how big they grow, and what strong colors they have." He pointed to the port, against which some of the blooms were nodding in the wind that had sprung up, for, in spite of the many differences, the under-world was in some respects like the upper one. "Probably the difference in the atmosphere accounts for that," the professor said. "It enables things to grow larger.
Late camels coming into the town to seek the security of some fandak would pad noiselessly past me; weird creatures from the under-world they seemed, on whom the ghostlike Arabs in their white djellabas were ordered to attend. Children would flit to and fro like shadows, strangely quiet, as though held in thrall even in the season of their play by the solemn aspect of the surroundings.
Over a bed of gravel, white as scattered pearls, the sequined lengths coiled on; and the snake-green water, the strange burnt-coral vegetation like a trail of blood among the pearls, the young foliage of trees, filmy as wisps of blowing gauze, were the only vestiges of colour that the moon allowed to live in the under-world which we had reached.
People who have been brought up in households where there is an organized under-world of servants are incurably different in their social outlook from those who have passed a servantless childhood. They never quite emancipate themselves from the conception of an essential class difference, of a class of beings inferior to themselves. They may theorise about equality but theory is not belief.
Grasping his grandson's right hand in his, he pointed with his left to the necropolis, exclaiming in tremulous tones: "The dead are too great a multitude. The under-world is overflowing, as the river does when its bed is not wide enough for the waters from the south. How they swarm and surge and roll onward! How they scatter and sway to and fro.
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