The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Even in the areas of the forest which it frequents, it is only to be found in patches, so the harvesters cannot go in a body, as men do to the harvesting of the corn, or the cotton, or the grape; they have to break up into small parties and these again subdivide, leaving a single individual here and there where the vines are thickest. He, entirely alone, at the mercy of the evil spirits that are in his imagination and the beasts that are in the forest, makes a rude shelter out of boughs and leaves, and sets to work making incisions in the vine and draining them drop by drop of their viscous sap.

Sometimes he sings over this monotonous work, and in the long rains between the intervals of the shower-bath roarings you can hear the ululations of these folk through the drip of the leaves, and at night the spark-like glimmer of their fires dots the reeking gloom.

These are the conditions of the rubber collector’s task, and it is not a task that ever can be finished; year in, year out, it never ceases.

These woods through which Félix led them were to the woods near Yandjali what the music of Beethoven is to the music of Mozart.

Immense and gloomy symphonies. The trees were huge, and groaned beneath the weight of lianas cable-thick. At times they had to burst their way through the veils of leaves and vines, the porters losing themselves and calling one to the other, and the head of the expedition halting till the stragglers were collected; at times the ground they trod on was like grease from the cast-down fruit of the plantains that grew here enormous, and sodden, and dismal, showering their fruit in such quantities that the bush-pigs, devour as they might, could never dispose of it all.

On some of the trees, like huge withered leaves, hung bats, and from some of the trees the beard-moss hung yards long, and of a spectral gray; the very weeds trodden underfoot were sappy, and the smell of their squirting juice mixed itself with the smell of decay.

It was not even ground, either; the whole forest would dip down into an unseen valley; you felt yourself going down hill, down, down, and then you knew you were at the bottom of a sub-arboreal valley by the deeper stagnation of the air. Open spaces, when they came, showed little sky, and they were less open spaces than rooms in the surrounding prison.

Félix was not leading them through the uttermost depths of this place; he was following the vague indications of a road by which the rubber from M’Bassa was carted to the river.

They were travelling along a highway, in fact, and the dimmest indication of a track where other men have been before is a thing which robs the wilderness of much of its terror.

The loneliness of the forest beyond track or way, in those vast depths where the rubber collectors have to go alone, I leave you to imagine.