“Shall we try back?” said Adams, speaking in that hard tone which comes when a man is commanding his voice.
“Back? Of what use? I cannot go back; I must go forward. But here there is nothing.”
The unhappy man’s voice was terrible to hear. He had marched so triumphantly all day, drawing nearer at each step to himself, to that self which memory had hidden from him and which memory was disclosing bit by bit. And now the march was interrupted as if by a wall set across his path.
But Adams was of a type of man to whom despondency may be known, but never despair.
They had marched all day; they were lost, it is true, but they were not far, now, from Fort M’Bassa. The immediate necessity was rest and food.
There was a little clearing amidst the trees just here, and with his own hands he raised the tent. They had no fire, but the moon when she rose, though in her last quarter, lit up the forest around them with a green glow-worm glimmer. One could see the lianas and the trees, the broad leaves shining with dew, some bright, some sketched in dimly, and all bathed in gauze green light; and they could hear the drip and patter of dew on leaf and branch.
This is a mournful sound—the most mournful of all the sounds that fill the great forests of the Congo. It is so casual, so tearful. One might fancy it the sound of the forest weeping to itself in the silence of the night.