THE VOICE OF THE CONGO FOREST
Just after daybreak next morning the expedition started.
Berselius, Adams, the gun-bearers and Félix headed the line; a long way
after came the porters and their loads, shepherded by half a dozen
soldiers of the state specially hired for the business.
Before they had gone a mile on their route the sun was blazing strongly,
sharp bird-calls came from the trees, and from the porters tramping under
their loads a hum like the hum of an awakened beehive. These people will
talk and chatter when the sun rises; club them, or threaten them, or load
them with burdens as much as you please, the old instinct of the birds and
beasts remains.
At first the way led through cassava and manioc fields and past clumps of
palms; then, all at once, and like plunging under a green veil or into the
heart of a green wave, they entered the forest.
The night chill was just leaving the forest, the great green gloom,
festooned with fantastic rope-like tendrils, was drinking the sunlight
with a million tongues; you could hear the rustle and snap of branches
straightening themselves and sighing toward heaven after the long, damp,
chilly night. The tropical forest at daybreak flings its arms up to the
sun as if to embrace him, and all the teeming life it holds gives tongue.
Flights of coloured and extraordinary birds rise like smoke wreaths from
the steaming leaves, and the drone of a million, million insects from the
sonorous depths comes like the sound of life in ferment.
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. Here and there the forest thinned out and a riot of umbrella
thorns, vicious, sword-like grass and tall, dull purple flowers, like
hollyhocks made a scrub that choked the way and tangled the foot; then the
trees would thicken up, and with the green gloom of a mighty wave the
forest would fall upon the travellers and swallow them up.
Adams, tramping beside Berselius, tried vainly to analyze the
extraordinary and new sensations to which this place gave birth in him.
The forest had taken him. It seemed to him, on entering it, that he had
died to all the things he had ever known. At Yandjali he had felt himself
in a foreign country, but still in touch with Europe and the past; a mile
deep in the forest and Yandjali itself, savage as it was, seemed part of
the civilization and the life he had left behind him.
The forests of the old world may be vast, but their trees are familiar.
One may lose one's direction, but one can never lose _oneself_ amidst the
friendly pines, the beeches, the oaks, whose forms have been known to us
from childhood.
But here, where the beard-moss hangs from unknown trees, as we tramp
through the sweltering sap-scented gloom, we feel ourselves not in a
forest but under a cover.
There is nothing of the perfume of the pine, nothing of the breeze in the
branches, nothing of the beauty of the forest twilight here. We are in a
great green room, festooned with vines and tendrils and hung about with
leaves. Nothing is beautiful here, but everything is curious. It is a
curiosity shop, where one pays with the sweat of one's brow, with the
languor of one's body, and the remembrance of one's past, for the sight of
an orchid shaped like a bird, or a flower shaped like a jug, or a bird
whose flight is a flash of sapphire dust.
A great green room, where echo sounds of things unknown.
You can see nothing but the foliage, and the tree boles just around, yet
the place is full of life and war and danger.
That crash followed by the shrieking of birds--you cannot tell whether it
is half a mile away or quite close, or to the right, or to the left, or
whether it is caused by a branch torn from a tree by some huge hand, or a
tree a hundred years old felled at last by Time.
Time is the woodman of the Congo forests. Nobody else could do the work,
and he works in his own lazy fashion, leaving things to right themselves
and find their own salvation.
Just as there is eternal war to the death between the beasts of this
jungle, so there is war to the death between the trees, the vines, and the
weeds. A frightful battle between the vegetable things is going on; we
scarcely recognize it, because the processes are so slow, but if five
years of the jungle could be photographed week by week, and the whole
series be run rapidly off on some huge cinematograph machine, you would
see a heaving and rending struggle for existence, vegetation fed by the
roaring tropical rains rising like a giant and flinging itself on the
vegetation of yesterday; vines lengthening like snakes, tree felling tree,
and weed choking weed.
Even in the quietude of a moment, standing and looking before one at the
moss-bearded trees and the python-like loops of the lianas, one can see
the struggle crystallized, just as in the still marble of the Laocoon one
sees the struggle of life with death.
In this place which covers an unthinkable area of the earth, a vast
population has dwelt since the beginning of time. Think of it. Shut off
from the world which has progressed toward civilization, alone with the
beasts and the trees, they have lived here without a guide and without a
God. The instinct which teaches the birds to build nests taught them to
build huts; the herd-instinct drove them into tribes.
Then, ages ago, before Christ was crucified, before Moses was born, began
the terrible and pathetic attempt of a predamned people to raise their
heads and walk erect. The first lifting of purblind eyes destined never to
see even the face of Art.
Yet there was a germ of civilization amongst them. They had villages and
vague laws and art of a sort; the ferocious tribes drew to one side,
hunting beasts and warring with each other, and the others, the milder and
kindlier tribes, led their own comparatively quiet life; and Mohammed was
born somewhere in the unknown North, and they knew nothing of the fact
till the Arab slavers raided them, and robbed them of men and women and
children, just as boys rob an orchard.
But the birth of Christ and the foundation of Christendom was the event
which in far distant years was destined to be this unhappy people's last
undoing.
They had known the beasts of the forests, the storms, the rains, the Arab
raiders, but Fate had reserved a new thing for them to know. The
Christians. Alas! that one should have to say it, but here the fact is,
that white men, Christian men, have taken these people, have drawn under
the banner of Christianity and under Christian pay all the warlike tribes,
armed them, and set them as task-masters over the humble and meek. And
never in the history of the world has such a state of servitude been known
as at present exists in the country of this forlorn people.
They had been marching some three hours when, from ahead came a sound as
of some huge animal approaching. Berselius half turned to his gun-bearer
for his rifle, but Félix reassured him.
"Cassava bearers," said Félix.
It was, in fact, a crowd of natives; some thirty or forty, bearing loads
of Kwanga (cassava cakes) to Yandjali. They were coming along the forest
path in single file, their burdens on their heads, and when the leaders
saw the white men they stopped dead. A great chattering broke out. One
could hear it going back all along the unseen line, a rattlesnake of
sound. Then Félix called out to them; the gun-bearers and the white men
stood aside, and the cassava bearers, taking heart, advanced.
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.
The people of this village were a lazy lot, and if you have ever collected
taxes in England, you can fancy the trouble of making such people--savages
living in a tropical forest, who have no count of time and scarcely an
idea of numbers--pay up.
Especially when one takes into consideration the fact that to produce
three hundred cakes of cassava every eight days, the whole village must
work literally like a beehive, the men gathering and the women grinding
the stuff from dawn till dark.
Only by the heaviest penalties could such a desirable state of things be
brought about, and the heavier and sharper the punishments inflicted at
any one time, the easier was it for Verhaeren to work these people.
Adams watched the cassava bearers as they passed at a trot. They went by
like automatic figures, without raising their eyes from the ground. There
were some old women amongst them who looked more like shrivelled monkeys
than human beings; extraordinary anatomical specimens, whose muscles,
working as they ran, were as visible as though no skin covered them. There
were young women, young children, and women far advanced in pregnancy; and
they all went by like automatic figures, clockwork marionettes.
It was a pitiable spectacle enough, these laden creatures, mute looking as
dumb beasts; but there was nothing especially to shock the eye of the
European, for it is the long-prepared treason against this people, devised
and carried out by nature, that their black mask covers a multitude of
other people's sins and their own untold sufferings.
Had they been white, the despairing look, the sunken eyes, the hundred
signs that tell of suffering and slavery would have been visible, would
have appealed to the heart; but the black mass could not express these
things fully. They were niggers, uglier looking and more depressed looking
than other niggers--that was all.
And so Adams passed on, without knowing what he had seen and the only
impression the sight made on his mind was one of disgust.
One fact his professional eye noticed as the crowd passed by. Four of the
women had lost their left hands.
The hands had been amputated just above the wrist in three cases, and one
woman had suffered amputation at the middle of the forearm.
He spoke of this to Berselius, who did not seem to hear his remark.
At noon they halted for a three hours' rest, and then pushed on, camping
for the night, after a twenty-five miles' journey, in a break of the
forest.