There is no prison so terrible as a limitless prison. Far better for a man to inhabit a cell in Dartmoor than a post in the desert of the forest. The walls are companionable things, but there is no companionship in distance.
Meeus knew what it was to look over the walls of the fort and watch another sun setting on another day, and another darkness heralding another night. He knew what it was to watch infinite freedom and to know it for his captor and jailer. He knew what it was to wake from his noonday siesta and see the same great awful splash of sunlight striking the same old space of arid yard, where the empty tomato tin lay by the rotten plantain cast over by some nigger child. He knew what it was to lie and hear the flies buzzing and wonder what tune of the devil it was they were trying to imitate. He knew what it was to think of death with the impotent craving of a sick child for some impossible toy.
Look into your own life and see all the tiny things that save you from ennui and devilment, and give you heart to continue the journey from hour to hour in this world where we live. Your morning paper, the new book from the library you have just got to read, the pipe you hope to smoke when you return from work, the very details of your work; a hundred and one petty things that make up the day of an ordinary man, breaking the monotony and breaking the prospect before him into short views.
Meeus had none of these. Without literature or love, without a woman to help him through, without a child to care for or a dog to care for him, there at Fort M’Bassa in the glaring sunshine he faced his fate and became what he was.
CHAPTER XII
NIGHT AT THE FORT
The night was hot and close and the paraffin lamp in the guest house mixed its smell with the tobacco smoke and with a faint, faint musky odour that came from the night outside. Every now and then a puff of hot wind blew through the open doorway, hot and damp as though a great panther were breathing into the room.
The nights in the forest were chill, but up here at Fort M’Bassa they were stewing in a heat wave.