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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 cassava in large quantities, and the place had a heady smell, as if fermentation were going on amidst the bales.
This was not the man who had engaged him in Paris; this person might have been a mild twin-brother of the redoubtable Captain of the Avenue Malakoff, of Matadi and Yandjali. When memory came fully back, would it bring with it the old Berselius, or would the new Berselius, mild, inoffensive, and kindly, suddenly find himself burdened with the tremendous past of the man he once had been?
The peace of shadowy lagoons, the peace of the cedar groves where the sheltering trees shaded the loveliness of Merope, the peace of the heart which passes all understanding and which men have named the Peace of God. It was the first time since leaving Yandjali that Adams had found himself alone and out of sight of his companions.
The Hostage House of Yandjali had started the impression; Meeus in some subtle way had deepened it; and now this. But he fully recognized what difficult people to deal with niggers are. He felt that all this was slavery under a thin disguise, this so-called taxation and "trade," but it was not his affair. All work is slavery more or less pleasant.
The river lay a few miles to their left, and faintly from it, muffled 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 cassava gatherers bearing their loads to Yandjali.
These are the conditions of the rubber collector's task, and it is not a task that ever can be finished; year in, year out, it never ceases. These woods through which Félix led them were to the woods near Yandjali what the music of Beethoven is to the music of Mozart. Immense and gloomy symphonies. The trees were huge, and groaned beneath the weight of lianas cable-thick.
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.
I think the post on the river which we will reach is called M'Bina, it is a hundred miles above Yandjali; we can get a boat from there to Leopoldsville. I have been thinking it all out this morning." "How about a guide?" "These soldiers here know the rubber track, for they often escort the loads." "Good," said Adams. "I will have some sort of litter rigged up and we will carry you.
Pugin felt almost as great a revulsion toward the negroes upon whom these things were done as toward the doers. He could not see the vast drama in its true proportions and its poetical setting of forest, plain, and sky. The outlandish names revolted him; he could not see Yandjali and its heat-stricken palms or M'Bassa burning in the sun.
The Yandjali of this story, not to be confounded with Yandjali notorious in Congo history for its massacre, is not in a rubber district, though on the fringe of one; it is a game district and produces cassava. The Congo State has parcelled out its territory. There are the rubber districts, the gum copal districts, the food districts, and the districts where ivory is obtained.
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