M'BASSA
Seven days' march took them one hundred and twenty miles east of Yandjali
and into the heart of the great rubber district of M'Bonga.
Twenty miles a day ought to have been covered on an average, but they had
delayed here and there to shoot, and the extra porters, whose duty it was
to carry the trophies, were already in requisition.
It had been forest most of the way, but forest broken by open spaces; they
had crossed two great swards of park-like country where the antelope herds
moved like clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have been
English but for the tropic haze and heat and the great n'sambya trees with
their yellow bell-like blossoms, the m'binas with their bursts of scarlet
bloom, the tall feather-palms, and the wild papaws of the adjoining
woods.
But in the last two days of the march the forest had thickened and taken a
more sombre note; nothing they had come upon heretofore had been quite so
wild as this, so luxuriant and tropical. It was the haunt of the rubber
vine, that mysterious plant which requires a glass-house atmosphere and a
soil especially rich. The great rubber forest of M'Bonga, thousands of
square miles in extent, is really composed of two forests joined by an
isthmus of woods. 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 were making for this place now, which was to be the
base from which they would start on the great hunt.
The fort of M'Bassa is not used to-day as a fort, only as a
collecting-place for rubber. In the early days it was a very necessary
entrenchment for the Belgians, as a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo
Zaps terrorized the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been
brought under the blue flag with the white star. They are now "soldiers,"
and their savagery, like a keen tool, has been turned to good account by
the Government.
In the great forest of M'Bonga the rubber vines are not equally
distributed. Large areas occur in which they are not found; only in the
most desolate places do they grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the
rubber vine into subjection; it will have nothing to do with the vineyard
and the field; it chooses to grow alone.
Everything else comes to its harvest with a joyous face, but the rubber
vine, like a dark green snake, fearful of death, has to be hunted for.
Even in the areas of the forest which it frequents, it is only to be found
in patches, so the harvesters cannot go in a body, as men do to the
harvesting of the corn, or the cotton, or the grape; they have to break up
into small parties and these again subdivide, leaving a single individual
here and there where the vines are thickest. He, entirely alone, at the
mercy of the evil spirits that are in his imagination and the beasts that
are in the forest, makes a rude shelter out of boughs and leaves, and sets
to work making incisions in the vine and draining them drop by drop of
their viscous sap.
Sometimes he sings over this monotonous work, and in the long rains
between the intervals of the shower-bath roarings you can hear the
ululations of these folk through the drip of the leaves, and at night the
spark-like glimmer of their fires dots the reeking gloom.
These are the conditions of the rubber collector's task, and it is not a
task that ever can be finished; year in, year out, it never ceases.
These woods through which Félix led them were to the woods near Yandjali
what the music of Beethoven is to the music of Mozart.
Immense and gloomy symphonies. The trees were huge, and groaned beneath
the weight of lianas cable-thick. At times they had to burst their way
through the veils of leaves and vines, the porters losing themselves and
calling one to the other, and the head of the expedition halting till the
stragglers were collected; at times the ground they trod on was like
grease from the cast-down fruit of the plantains that grew here enormous,
and sodden, and dismal, showering their fruit in such quantities that the
bush-pigs, devour as they might, could never dispose of it all.
On some of the trees, like huge withered leaves, hung bats, and from some
of the trees the beard-moss hung yards long, and of a spectral gray; the
very weeds trodden underfoot were sappy, and the smell of their squirting
juice mixed itself with the smell of decay.
It was not even ground, either; the whole forest would dip down into an
unseen valley; you felt yourself going down hill, down, down, and then you
knew you were at the bottom of a sub-arboreal valley by the deeper
stagnation of the air. Open spaces, when they came, showed little sky, and
they were less open spaces than rooms in the surrounding prison.
Félix was not leading them through the uttermost depths of this place; he
was following the vague indications of a road by which the rubber from
M'Bassa was carted to the river.
They were travelling along a highway, in fact, and the dimmest indication
of a track where other men have been before is a thing which robs the
wilderness of much of its terror.
The loneliness of the forest beyond track or way, in those vast depths
where the rubber collectors have to go alone, I leave you to imagine.
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.