CHAPTER X
M’BASSA
Seven days’ march took them one hundred and twenty miles east of Yandjali and into the heart of the great rubber district of M’Bonga.
Twenty miles a day ought to have been covered on an average, but they had delayed here and there to shoot, and the extra porters, whose duty it was to carry the trophies, were already in requisition.
It had been forest most of the way, but forest broken by open spaces; they had crossed two great swards of park-like country where the antelope herds moved like clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have been English but for the tropic haze and heat and the great n’sambya trees with their yellow bell-like blossoms, the m’binas with their bursts of scarlet bloom, the tall feather-palms, and the wild papaws of the adjoining woods.
But in the last two days of the march the forest had thickened and taken a more sombre note; nothing they had come upon heretofore had been quite so wild as this, so luxuriant and tropical. It was the haunt of the rubber vine, that mysterious plant which requires a glass-house atmosphere and a soil especially rich. The great rubber forest of M’Bonga, thousands of square miles in extent, is really composed of two forests joined by an isthmus of woods. Dimly, it is shaped like an hourglass; south of the constriction where the two forests join lies the elephant country for which Berselius was making, and Félix had led them so craftily and well, that they struck into the rubber district only fifty miles from the constriction.
In the forest, thirty miles from the elephant ground, lies the Belgian fort M’Bassa. They were making for this place now, which was to be the base from which they would start on the great hunt.
The fort of M’Bassa is not used to-day as a fort, only as a collecting-place for rubber. In the early days it was a very necessary entrenchment for the Belgians, as a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo Zaps terrorized the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been brought under the blue flag with the white star. They are now “soldiers,” and their savagery, like a keen tool, has been turned to good account by the Government.
In the great forest of M’Bonga the rubber vines are not equally distributed. Large areas occur in which they are not found; only in the most desolate places do they grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the rubber vine into subjection; it will have nothing to do with the vineyard and the field; it chooses to grow alone.
Everything else comes to its harvest with a joyous face, but the rubber vine, like a dark green snake, fearful of death, has to be hunted for.