Turning from the enclosure and looking across the fort wall to the distance, one saw a world as far from civilization as the world that Romulus looked at when he gazed across the wall outlining the first dim sketch of Rome.
To the north, forest; to the south, forest; to the east, forest; and to the west, eternal and illimitable forest. Blazing sun, everlasting haze that in the rainy season would become mist and silence.
In the storms and under the rains the great rubber forest of M’Bonga would roar like a reef-tormented sea, but on a day like this, when, gazing from the high ground of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms, the sombre green of the n’sambyas, to the haze that veiled all things beyond, on a day like this, silence gazed at one Sphinx-like, and from the distance of a million years. Silence that had brooded upon Africa before Africa had a name, before Pharaoh was born, before Thebes was built.
Meeus led the way into the guest house, which contained only two rooms—rooms spacious enough, but bare of everything except the ordinary necessities of life. In the living room there was a table of white deal-like wood and three or four chairs evidently made by natives from a European design. A leopard skin, badly dried and shrivelling at the edges, hung on one wall, presumably as an ornament; on another wall some Congo bows and arrows—bows with enormously thick strings and arrows poisoned so skilfully that a scratch from one would kill you, though they had been hanging there for many years. They were trophies of the early days when Fort M’Bassa was really a fort, and from those woods down there clouds of soot-black devils, with filed teeth, raided the place, only to be swept away by rifle fire.
There was no picture torn from an illustrated paper adorning the place, as in Verhaeren’s abode, but on a rudely constructed shelf there lay just the same stack of “official letters,” some of these two years old, some of last month, all dealing with trade.
Meeus brought out cigarettes and gin, but Berselius, safe now at his base of operations, to make a little festival of the occasion sent to the stores, which his porters had deposited in the go-down, for a magnum of champagne. It was Cliquot, and as Meeus felt the glow of the wine in his veins, a flush came into his hollow cheeks and a brightness into his dull eyes; forgotten things stirred again in his memory, with the shadows of people he had known—the glitter of lamplit streets in Brussels, the glare of the Café de Couronne—all the past, such as it was, lay in the wine.
Meeus was one of the “unfortunate men.” He had held a small clerkship under the Belgian Government, from which he had been dismissed through a fault of his own.
This was five years ago. Up to his dismissal he had led the peddling and sordid life that a small government clerk on the Continent leads if he has nothing to save him from himself and from his fellows: the dry rot of official life had left him useless for anything but official life. A sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the day of his dismissal, when he found himself cut off from work and adrift in the world, with five hundred francs in his pocket. In one glorious debauch, which lasted a week, he spent the five hundred francs, and then he settled down to live on a maiden aunt.
He called it looking for work.
She lasted for a year and nine months, and then she died, and her annuity died with her. He felt her loss deeply, for not only had her money helped to support him, but she was his only real friend, and he had a heart in those days that seemed so far distant from him now.