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Updated: June 19, 2025
At last, at noon, on the third day of their journey to this place they struck rising ground where the trees fell away till no trees were left, and the blue sky of heaven lay above their heads, and before them on the highest point of the rise, Fort M'Bassa burning in the sun.
Without literature or love, without a woman to help him through, without a child to care for or a dog to care for him, there at Fort M'Bassa in the glaring sunshine he faced his fate and became what he was. The night was hot and close and the paraffin lamp in the guest house mixed its smell with the tobacco smoke and with a faint, faint musky odour that came from the night outside.
All sorts of things from the Hostage House of Yandjali to the Hostage House of M'Bassa, from Mass to Papeete's skull connected themselves up and made a skeleton, from which he constructed that great and ferocious monster, the Congo State.
At M'Bassa he would be put upon the road again the only road to the thing he craved for as burning Dives craved for water himself. But it was ordained that he should find that questionably desirous person before reaching M'Bassa.
They had marched all day; they were lost, it is true, but they were not far, now, from Fort M'Bassa. The immediate necessity was rest and food. There was a little clearing amidst the trees just here, and with his own hands he raised the tent. They had no fire, but the moon when she rose, though in her last quarter, lit up the forest around them with a green glow-worm glimmer.
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.
Dimly, it is shaped like an hourglass; south of the constriction where the two forests join lies the elephant country for which Berselius was making, and Félix had led them so craftily and well, that they struck into the rubber district only fifty miles from the constriction. In the forest, thirty miles from the elephant ground, lies the Belgian fort M'Bassa.
They came back in about half an hour, and Berselius, after speaking a few words to Félix, turned to Adams. "I must ask you to return to Fort M'Bassa and get everything in readiness for our departure. Félix will accompany you. I will follow in a couple of hours with M. Meeus. I am afraid we will have to pull these people's houses down. It's a painful duty, but it has to be performed.
His fingers became crooked and a dull hunger for money filled his soul. His success in working the niggers was so great that he was moved to a more difficult post at higher pay, and then right on to M'Bassa. He was not naturally a cruel man. In his childhood he had been fond of animals, but Matabiche, the god-devil of the Congo, changed all that.
His voice was not an unpleasant voice, altogether, yet there was that in it, as he greeted Berselius, which struck Adams sharply and strangely; for the voice of Andreas Meeus, Chef de Poste at M'Bassa, was the voice of a man who for two years had been condemned to talk the language of the natives.
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