Next morning they left by rail for Leopoldville, where they found waiting for them the Leopold, a shallow-draught steamer of some two hundred tons.
CHAPTER VII
YANDJALI
The Leopold was officered entirely by Belgians, and it would have been almost impossible to find a pleasanter set of men. Tilkins, the captain, especially, won Adams’s regard. He was a huge man, with a wife and family in Antwerp, and he was eternally damning the Congo and wishing himself back in Antwerp.
They transhipped to a smaller boat, the Couronne, and one morning shortly after breakfast three strokes on the steamer bell announced their approach to Yandjali.
Imagine a rough landing-stage, a handful of houses, mostly mud-built, the funereal heat-green of palm and banana, a flood of tropical sunshine lighting the little wharf, crammed with bales of merchandise.
Such was Yandjali, and beyond Yandjali lay the forest, and in front of Yandjali flowed the river, and years ago boom-boom down the river’s shining surface, from away up there where the great palms gave place to reeds and water-grass, you might have heard the sound of the hippopotami bellowing to the sun, a deep organ note, unlike the sound emitted by any other creature on earth. You do not hear it now. The great brutes have long ago been driven away by man.
On the wharf to greet the steamer stood the District Commissioner, Commander Verhaeren; behind him six or seven half-naked, savage-looking blacks, each topped with a red fez and armed with an Albini rifle, stood gazing straight before them with wrinkled eyes at the approaching boat.