This great river flooding from Stanley Pool and far away beyond, draws with it, like a moving dream, the pictures of the roaring rapids and the silent pools, the swamps filled with darkness of vegetation and murderous life; the unutterable loneliness of vast forests. The water brook of the hartbeest and antelope, it brings with it their quiet reflections, just as it brings the awful horn and the pig-like face of the rhinoceros. What things have not slaked their thirst in this quiet water flooding past Matadi—and wallowed in it? Its faint perfume hints at that.
On the deck of the yacht, under the double awning, Berselius was seated, and, close to him, Adams. They had arrived only yesterday, and to-morrow they were proceeding by rail to Leopoldville, which was to be the real base of the expedition, leaving La Joconde behind at Matadi.
The yacht would return to France.
“What a lot of stuff they are loading on those ships,” said Adams, turning in his chair as the roar and rattle of the winch chains, that had ceased for a moment, flared up again like a flame of sound. “What are the exports here?”
“Gum copal—nuts—rubber—tusks—everything you can get out of there,” answered Berselius, lazily waving a hand to indicate the Congo basin.
Adams, leaning back in his deck chair, followed with his eyes the sweep of Berselius’s hand, “over there”; little did he dream of what those words held in their magic.
Then Berselius went below.
The moon rose; lights speckled the misty wharf and a broad road of silver lay stretched across the moving water to the other bank that, under the moonlight, lay like a line of cotton-wool. It was the mist tangled by and tangling the trees.
Adams paced the deck, smoking and occasionally pausing to flip off his cigar-ash on the bulwark rail. He was thinking of Maxine Berselius. She had come to Marseilles to see them off, and——
Not a word had been exchanged between them that a third person did not hear or might not have heard, yet they had told each other the whole of that delightful story in which the hero is I and the heroine You.