“What did you bring this thing for?” asked Berselius, pointing to Adams’s elephant gun, which the Zappo Zap headman was just stripping from its covering.
“To shoot with,” said Adams, laughing.
Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gun, and gave a short laugh.
“Well, bring it,” said he; “but I don’t envy your gun-bearers.”
But Félix, the headman, did not seem of the same opinion. The enormous rifle evidently appealed to his ferocious heart. It was a god-gun this, and no mistake, and its lustre evidently spread to Adams, the owner of it.
Félix was a very big man, almost as big as Adams: a member of the great cannibal fighting tribe of Zappo Zaps, he had followed Verhaeren, who had once held a post in the Bena Pianga country, to Yandjali; he had a sort of attachment for Verhaeren, which showed that he possessed some sort of heart. All the Zappo Zaps have been enrolled by the Congo Government as “soldiers”; they have a bad name and cause a lot of heart-searching to the Brussels administration, for when they are used in punitive expeditions to burn villages of recalcitrant rubber-getters, they, to use a local expression, “will eat when they have killed.” When they are used en masse, the old cannibal instinct breaks out; when the killing is over they go for the killed, furious as dogs over bones. God help the man who would come between them and their food!
Of these men Félix was a fine specimen. A nature man, ever ready to slay, and cruel as Death. A man from the beginning of the world.
If Félix had possessed a wife, he and she might have stood for the man and woman mentioned by Thénard in his lecture.
The basic man and woman in whose dim brains Determination had begun to work, sketching the vague line on either side of which lies the Right and Left of moral action.
A true savage, never to be really civilized. For it is the fate of the savage that he will never become one of us. Do what you will and pray how you will, you will never make up for the million years that have passed him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which is the basis of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, or developed only into a few fantastic and abortive God shapes and devil shapes.