All these African memories stand by themselves. It was for me an
expedition into the realms of undisciplined nature out of the world
that is ruled by men, my first bout with that hot side of our mother
that gives you the jungle—that cold side that gives you the air-eddy I
was beginning to know passing well. They are memories woven upon a
fabric of sunshine and heat and a constant warm smell of decay. They
end in rain—such rain as I had never seen before, a vehement, a frantic
downpouring of water, but our first slow passage through the channels
behind Mordet’s Island was in incandescent sunshine.
There we go in my memory still, a blistered dirty ship with patched
sails and a battered mermaid to present _Maud Mary_, sounding and
taking thought between high ranks of forest whose trees come out
knee-deep at last in the water. There we go with a little breeze on our
quarter, Mordet Island rounded and the quap, it might be within a day
of us.
Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of green with
a trumpet call of colour. Things crept among the jungle and peeped and
dashed back rustling into stillness. Always in the sluggishly drifting,
opaque water were eddyings and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came
chuckling up light-heartedly from this or that submerged conflict and
tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of logs
basking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness broken only
by insect sounds and the creaking and flapping of our progress, by the
calling of the soundings and the captain’s confused shouts; but in the
night as we lay moored to a clump of trees the darkness brought a
thousand swampy things to life and out of the forest came screaming and
howlings, screaming and yells that made us glad to be afloat. And once
we saw between the tree stems long blazing fires. We passed two or
three villages landward, and brown-black women and children came and
stared at us and gesticulated, and once a man came out in a boat from a
creek and hailed us in an unknown tongue; and so at last we came to a
great open place, a broad lake rimmed with a desolation of mud and
bleached refuse and dead trees, free from crocodiles or water birds or
sight or sound of any living thing, and saw far off, even as Nasmyth
had described, the ruins of the deserted station, and hard by two
little heaps of buff-hued rubbish under a great rib of rock, the quap!
The forest receded. The land to the right of us fell away and became
barren, and far on across notch in its backbone was surf and the sea.
We took the ship in towards those heaps and the ruined jetty slowly and
carefully. The captain came and talked.
“This is eet?” he said.
“Yes,” said I.
“Is eet for trade we have come?”
This was ironical.
“No,” said I.
“Gordon-Nasmyth would haf told me long ago what it ees for we haf
come.”
“I’ll tell you now,” I said. “We are going to lay in as close as we can
to those two heaps of stuff—you see them?—under the rock. Then we are
going to chuck all our ballast overboard and take those in. Then we’re
going home.”
“May I presume to ask—is eet gold?”
“No,” I said incivilly, “it isn’t.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s stuff—of some commercial value.”
“We can’t do eet,” he said.
“We can,” I answered reassuringly.
“We can’t,” he said as confidently. “I don’t mean what you mean. You
know so liddle—But—dis is forbidden country.”
I turned on him suddenly angry and met bright excited eyes. For a
minute we scrutinised one another. Then I said, “That’s our risk. Trade
is forbidden. But this isn’t trade.... This thing’s got to be done.”
His eyes glittered and he shook his head....
The brig stood in slowly through the twilight toward this strange
scorched and blistered stretch of beach, and the man at the wheel
strained his ears to listening the low-voiced angry argument that began
between myself and the captain, that was presently joined by Pollack.
We moored at last within a hundred yards of our goal, and all through
our dinner and far into the night we argued intermittently and fiercely
with the captain about our right to load just what we pleased. “I will
haf nothing to do with eet,” he persisted. “I wash my hands.” It seemed
that night as though we argued in vain. “If it is not trade,” he said,
“it is prospecting and mining. That is worse. Any one who knows
anything—outside England—knows that is worse.”
We argued and I lost my temper and swore at him. Pollack kept cooler
and chewed his pipe watchfully with that blue eye of his upon the
captain’s gestures. Finally I went on deck to cool. The sky was
overcast I discovered all the men were in a knot forward, staring at
the faint quivering luminosity that had spread over the heaps of quap,
a phosphorescence such as one sees at times on rotting wood. And about
the beach east and west there were patches and streaks of something
like diluted moonshine....
In the small hours I was still awake and turning over scheme after
scheme in my mind whereby I might circumvent the captain’s opposition.
I meant to get that quap aboard if I had to kill some one to do it.
Never in my life had I been so thwarted! After this intolerable voyage!
There came a rap at my cabin door and then it opened and I made out a
bearded face. “Come in,” I said, and a black voluble figure I could
just see obscurely came in to talk in my private ear and fill my cabin
with its whisperings and gestures. It was the captain. He, too, had
been awake and thinking things over. He had come to explain—enormously.
I lay there hating him and wondering if I and Pollack could lock him in
his cabin and run the ship without him. “I do not want to spoil dis
expedition,” emerged from a cloud of protestations, and then I was able
to disentangle “a commission—shush a small commission—for special
risks!” “Special risks” became frequent. I let him explain himself out.
It appeared he was also demanding an apology for something I had said.
No doubt I had insulted him generously. At last came definite offers. I
broke my silence and bargained.
“Pollack!” I cried and hammered the partition.
“What’s up?” asked Pollack.