GOD SENDS A GUIDE
To be lost in the desert or in a land like the elephant country is bad, but to be lost in the dense parts of the tropical forest is far worse.
You are in a horrible labyrinth, a maze, not of intricate paths but of blinding curtains. I am speaking now of that arrogant jungle, moist and hot, where life is in full ferment, and where the rubber vine grows and thrives; where you go knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to prevent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, but in the rains it is terrific. Night, then, is black as the inside of a trunk, and day is so feeble that your hand, held before your face at arm’s length, is just a shadow. The westward part of the forest of M’Bonga projects a spur of the pestiferous rubber-bearing land into the isthmus of healthy woods. It was just at the tip of this spur that Berselius and his party were entangled and lost.
The two porters were Yandjali men, they knew nothing of these woods, and were utterly useless as guides; they sat now amidst the leaves near the tent eating their food; dark shadows in the glow-worm light, the glistening black skin of a knee or shoulder showing up touched by the glimmer in which leaf and liana, tree trunk and branch, seemed like marine foliage bathed in the watery light of a sea-cave.
Adams had lit a pipe, and he sat beside Berselius at the opening of the tent, smoking. The glare of the match had shown him the face of Berselius for a moment. Berselius, since his first outcry on finding the path gone, had said little, and there was a patient and lost look on his face, sad but most curious to see. Most curious, for it said fully what a hundred little things had been hinting since their start from the scene of the catastrophe—that the old Berselius had vanished and a new Berselius had taken his place. Adams had at first put down the change in his companion to weakness, but the weakness had passed, the man’s great vitality had reasserted itself, and the change was still there.
This was not the man who had engaged him in Paris; this person might have been a mild twin-brother of the redoubtable Captain of the Avenue Malakoff, of Matadi and Yandjali. When memory came fully back, would it bring with it the old Berselius, or would the new Berselius, mild, inoffensive, and kindly, suddenly find himself burdened with the tremendous past of the man he once had been?
Nothing is more true than that the human mind from accident, from grief, or from that mysterious excitement, during which in half an hour a blaspheming costermonger “gets religion” and becomes a saint of God—nothing is more certain than that the human mind can like this, at a flash, turn topsy-turvy; the good coming to the top, the bad going to the bottom. Mechanical pressure on the cortex of the brain can bring this state of things about, even as it can convert a saint of God into a devil incarnate.
Was Berselius under the influence of forced amendment of this sort?
Adams was not even considering the matter, he was lost in gloomy thoughts.
He was smoking slowly, holding his index and middle fingers over the pipe-bowl to prevent the tobacco burning too quickly, for he had only a couple of pipefuls left. He was thinking that to-morrow evening the pouch would be empty, when, from somewhere in the forest near by, there came a sound which brought him to his feet and the two porters up on hands and knees like listening dogs.