Verhaeren and Berselius were seemingly old friends; they shook hands and Berselius introduced Adams; then the three left the wharf and walked up to the District Commissioner’s house, a frame building surrounded by palm trees and some distance from the mud huts of the soldiers and porters.
The Yandjali of this story, not to be confounded with Yandjali notorious in Congo history for its massacre, is not in a rubber district, though on the fringe of one; it is a game district and produces cassava. The Congo State has parcelled out its territory. There are the rubber districts, the gum copal districts, the food districts, and the districts where ivory is obtained. In each of these districts the natives are made to work and bring in rubber, gum copal, food, or ivory, as a tax. The District Commissioner, or Chef de Poste, in each district draws up a schedule of what is required. Such and such a village must produce and hand over so many kilos of rubber, or copal, so much cassava, so many tusks, etc.
Verhaeren was a stout, pale-faced man, with a jet-black beard, a good-tempered looking man, with that strange, lazy, semi-Oriental look which the Belgian face takes when the owner of it is fixed to a post, with nothing to do but oversee trade, and when the post is on the confines of civilization.
Away up country, lost in the dim, green, heat-laden wilderness, you will find a different type of man; more alert and nervy, a man who never smiles, a preoccupied looking man who, ten years or five years ago, lost his berth in an office for misconduct, or his commission in the army. A déclassé. He is the man who really drives the Congo machine, the last wheel in the engine, but the most important; the man whose deeds are not to be written.
Verhaeren’s living room in the frame house was furnished with steamer deck chairs, a table and some shelves. Pinned to the wall and curling up at the corners was a page torn from La Gaudriole, the picture of a girl in tights; on one of the shelves lay a stack of old newspapers, on another a stack of official papers, reports from subordinates, invoices, and those eternal “official letters,” with which the Congo Government deluges its employees, and whose everlasting purport is “Get more ivory, get more rubber, get more copal.”
Verhaeren brought out some excellent cigars and a bottle of Vanderhum, and the three men smoked and talked. He had acted as Berselius’s agent for the expedition, and had collected all the gun-bearers and porters necessary, and a guide. It was Berselius’s intention to strike a hundred miles west up river almost parallel to the Congo, and then south into the heart of the elephant country. They talked of the expedition, but Verhaeren showed little knowledge of the work and no enthusiasm. The Belgians of the Congo have no feeling for sport. They never hunt the game at their doors, except for food.
When they had discussed matters, Verhaeren led the way out for Berselius to inspect his arrangements.
The porters were called up. There were forty of them, and Adams thought that he had never before seen such a collection of depressed looking individuals; they were muscular enough, but there was something in their faces, their movements and their attitude, that told a tale of spirits broken to servitude by terror.
The four gun-bearers and the headman were very different. The headman was a Zappo Zap, a ferocious looking nigger, fez-tipped, who could speak twenty words of French, and who was nicknamed Félix. The gun-bearers were recruited from the “soldiers” of the state by special leave from headquarters.
Adams looked with astonishment at the immense amount of luggage they were bringing. “Chop boxes,” such as are used on the east coast, contained stores; two big tents, a couple of “Roorkee” chairs, folding-beds and tables, cork mattresses, cooking utensils, made up the pile, to say nothing of the guns which had just been taken from their cases.