YANDJALI
The _Leopold_ was officered entirely by Belgians, and it would have been
almost impossible to find a pleasanter set of men. Tilkins, the captain,
especially, won Adams's regard. He was a huge man, with a wife and family
in Antwerp, and he was eternally damning the Congo and wishing himself
back in Antwerp.
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.
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. You do not hear it now. The great brutes have
long ago been driven away by man.
On the wharf to greet the steamer stood the District Commissioner,
Commander Verhaeren; behind him six or seven half-naked, savage-looking
blacks, each topped with a red fez and armed with an Albini rifle, stood
gazing straight before them with wrinkled eyes at the approaching boat.
Verhaeren and Berselius were seemingly old friends; they shook hands and
Berselius introduced Adams; then the three left the wharf and walked up to
the District Commissioner's house, a frame building surrounded by palm
trees and some distance from the mud huts of the soldiers and porters.
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. In each of these districts the natives are made to work and
bring in rubber, gum copal, food, or ivory, as a tax. The District
Commissioner, or _Chef de Poste_, in each district draws up a schedule of
what is required. Such and such a village must produce and hand over so
many kilos of rubber, or copal, so much cassava, so many tusks, etc.
Verhaeren was a stout, pale-faced man, with a jet-black beard, a
good-tempered looking man, with that strange, lazy, semi-Oriental look
which the Belgian face takes when the owner of it is fixed to a post, with
nothing to do but oversee trade, and when the post is on the confines of
civilization.
Away up country, lost in the dim, green, heat-laden wilderness, you will
find a different type of man; more alert and nervy, a man who never
smiles, a preoccupied looking man who, ten years or five years ago, lost
his berth in an office for misconduct, or his commission in the army. A
_déclassé_. He is the man who really drives the Congo machine, the last
wheel in the engine, but the most important; the man whose deeds are not
to be written.
Verhaeren's living room in the frame house was furnished with steamer deck
chairs, a table and some shelves. Pinned to the wall and curling up at the
corners was a page torn from _La Gaudriole_, the picture of a girl in
tights; on one of the shelves lay a stack of old newspapers, on another a
stack of official papers, reports from subordinates, invoices, and those
eternal "official letters," with which the Congo Government deluges its
employees, and whose everlasting purport is "Get more ivory, get more
rubber, get more copal."
Verhaeren brought out some excellent cigars and a bottle of Vanderhum, and
the three men smoked and talked. He had acted as Berselius's agent for the
expedition, and had collected all the gun-bearers and porters necessary,
and a guide. It was Berselius's intention to strike a hundred miles west
up river almost parallel to the Congo, and then south into the heart of
the elephant country. They talked of the expedition, but Verhaeren showed
little knowledge of the work and no enthusiasm. The Belgians of the Congo
have no feeling for sport. They never hunt the game at their doors, except
for food.
When they had discussed matters, Verhaeren led the way out for Berselius
to inspect his arrangements.
The porters were called up. There were _forty_ of them, and Adams thought
that he had never before seen such a collection of depressed looking
individuals; they were muscular enough, but there was something in their
faces, their movements and their attitude, that told a tale of spirits
broken to servitude by terror.
The four gun-bearers and the headman were very different. The headman was
a Zappo Zap, a ferocious looking nigger, fez-tipped, who could speak
twenty words of French, and who was nicknamed Félix. The gun-bearers were
recruited from the "soldiers" of the state by special leave from
headquarters.
Adams looked with astonishment at the immense amount of luggage they were
bringing. "Chop boxes," such as are used on the east coast, contained
stores; two big tents, a couple of "Roorkee" chairs, folding-beds and
tables, cork mattresses, cooking utensils, made up the pile, to say
nothing of the guns which had just been taken from their cases.
"What did you bring this thing for?" asked Berselius, pointing to Adams's
elephant gun, which the Zappo Zap headman was just stripping from its
covering.
"To shoot with," said Adams, laughing.
Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gun, and gave a short
laugh.
"Well, bring it," said he; "but I don't envy your gun-bearers."
But Félix, the headman, did not seem of the same opinion. The enormous
rifle evidently appealed to his ferocious heart. It was a god-gun this,
and no mistake, and its lustre evidently spread to Adams, the owner of
it.
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. All the Zappo Zaps have been enrolled by the Congo Government as
"soldiers"; they have a bad name and cause a lot of heart-searching to the
Brussels administration, for when they are used in punitive expeditions to
burn villages of recalcitrant rubber-getters, they, to use a local
expression, "_will_ eat when they have killed." When they are used _en
masse_, the old cannibal instinct breaks out; when the killing is over
they go for the killed, furious as dogs over bones. God help the man who
would come between them and their food!
Of these men Félix was a fine specimen. A nature man, ever ready to slay,
and cruel as Death. A man from the beginning of the world.
If Félix had possessed a wife, he and she might have stood for the man and
woman mentioned by Thénard in his lecture.
The basic man and woman in whose dim brains Determination had begun to
work, sketching the vague line on either side of which lies the Right and
Left of moral action.
A true savage, never to be really civilized. For it is the fate of the
savage that he will never become one of us. Do what you will and pray how
you will, you will never make up for the million years that have passed
him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which is the basis
of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, or developed only into a
few fantastic and abortive God shapes and devil shapes.
He will never become one of us. Extraordinary paradox--he never can become
a Leopold or a Félix Fuchs!
Berselius disbanded the porters with a wave of the hand, and he and his
companions began a round of the station. Verhaeren, with a cigar in his
mouth, led the way.
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.
Verhaeren shut the door and led on till, rounding a corner, a puff of hot
air brought a stench which caused Adams to choke and spit.
Verhaeren laughed.
It was the Hostage House that sent its poisonous breath to meet them.
A native corporal and two soldiers stood at the palisade which circled the
Hostage House. The women and children had just been driven back from the
fields where they had been digging and weeding, and they had been served
with their wretched dinners. They were eating these scraps of food like
animals, some in the sun amidst the tufts of grass and mounds of ordure in
the little yard, some in the shadow of the house.
There were old, old women like shrivelled monkeys; girls of twelve and
fifteen, some almost comely; middle-aged women, women about to become
mothers, and a woman who had become a mother during the past night lying
there in the shelter of the Hostage House. There were little pot-bellied
nigger children, tiny black dots, who had to do their bit of work in the
fields with the others; and when the strangers appeared and looked over
the rail, these folk set up a crying and chattering, and ran about
distractedly, not knowing what new thing was in store for them. They were
the female folk and children of a village, ten miles away south; they were
here as "hostages," because the village had not produced its full tale of
cassava. They had been here over a month.
The soldiers laughed, and struck with the butts of their rifles on the
palisading, as if to increase the confusion. Adams noticed that the young
girls and women were of all the terrified crowd seemingly the most
terrified. He did not know the reason; he could not even guess it. A good
man himself, and believing in a God in heaven, he could not guess the
truth. He knew nothing of the reason of these women's terror, and he
looked with disgust at the scene before him, not entirely comprehending.
Those creatures, so filthy, so animal-like, created in his mind such
abhorrence that he forgot to make allowances for the fact that they were
penned like swine, and that perchance in their own native state, free in
their own villages, they might be cleaner and less revolting. He could not
hear the dismal cry of the "Congo niggers," who of all people on the earth
are the most miserable, the most abused, the most sorrow-stricken, the
most dumb. He did not know that he was looking at one of the filthy acts
in the great drama that a hundred years hence will be read with horror by
a more enlightened world.
They turned from the degrading sight and went back to Verhaeren's house
for dinner.