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.