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They transhipped to a smaller boat, the Couronne, and one morning shortly after breakfast three strokes on the steamer bell announced their approach to Yandjali. Imagine a rough landing-stage, a handful of houses, mostly mud-built, the funereal heat-green of palm and banana, a flood of tropical sunshine lighting the little wharf, crammed with bales of merchandise.
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.
The two porters were Yandjali men, they knew nothing of these woods, and were utterly useless as guides; they sat now amidst the leaves near the tent eating their food; dark shadows in the glow-worm light, the glistening black skin of a knee or shoulder showing up touched by the glimmer in which leaf and liana, tree trunk and branch, seemed like marine foliage bathed in the watery light of a sea-cave.
"Yes, there was a porter, a Yandjali man. He had run away." De Wiart pulled his blond beard meditatively, and looked at the river. From the office where he was sitting the river, great with the rains and lit by the sun which had broken through the clouds, looked like a moving flood of gold.
Félix was a very big man, almost as big as Adams: a member of the great cannibal fighting tribe of Zappo Zaps, he had followed Verhaeren, who had once held a post in the Bena Pianga country, to Yandjali; he had a sort of attachment for Verhaeren, which showed that he possessed some sort of heart.
Such was Yandjali, and beyond Yandjali lay the forest, and in front of Yandjali flowed the river, and years ago boom-boom down the river's shining surface, 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, a deep organ note, unlike the sound emitted by any other creature on earth.
A hundred thousand streams from Tanganyika to Yandjali were leaping to form rivers flowing for one destination, the Congo and the sea. On the second day of their journey, an accident happened; one of the porters, released for a spell from bearing the litter, and loitering behind, was bitten by a snake.
If a poisoned arrow could sing or a stabbing spear, it would sing what Félix sang as he went, his long morning shadow stalking behind him; he as soulless and as heartless as it. What motive of attachment had driven him to follow Verhaeren to Yandjali from the Bena Pianga country heaven knows, for the man was quite beyond the human pale.
They were heavily laden, for most of them had from ten to twenty Kwanga on their heads, and besides this burden they were mostly women several of them had babies slung on their backs. These people belonged to a village which lay within Verhaeren's district. The tax laid on this village was three hundred cakes of cassava to be delivered at Yandjali every eight days.
He told of the Hostage House at Yandjali, and the wretched creatures penned like animals eating their miserable food; he told of M'Bassa and the Hostage House there, with its iron rings and chains; he told how all over that vast country these places were dotted, not by the hundred but by the thousand; he told of the misery of the men who were driven into the dismal forests, slaves of masters worse than tigers, and of a task that would never end as long as rubber grew and Christ was a name in Europe and not a power; he told the awful fact that murder there was used every day as an agricultural implement, that people were operated upon, and suffered amputation of limbs, not because of disease; and that their sex and age those two last appeals of Nature to brutality had no voice; he told the whole bitter tale of tears and blood, but he could not tell her all, for she was a girl, and it would be hard to speak even before a man of the crimes against Nature, the crimes against men, against women, and against children, that even if the Congo State were swept away to-morrow, will leave Belgium's name in the world's history more detestable than the names of the unspeakable cities sunk in the Dead Sea.
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