He ought to have been mad by this, thought Adams; and he was a judge, for he had studied madness and its causes.
But Meeus was not mad in the least particular. He was coldly sane. Lust had saved his reason, the lust inspired by Matabiche.
Berselius’s cook brought in some coffee, and when they had talked long enough about the Congo trade in its various branches, they went out and smoked their pipes, leaning or sitting on the low wall of the fort.
The first quarter of the moon, low in the sky and looking like a boat-shaped Japanese lantern, lay above the forest. The forest, spectral-pale and misty, lay beneath the moon; the heat was sweltering, and Adams could not keep the palms of his hands dry, rub them with his pocket handkerchief or on his knees as much as he would.
This is the heat that makes a man feel limp as a wet rag; the heat that liquefies morals and manners and temper and nerve force, so that they run with the sweat from the pores. Drink will not “bite” in this heat, and a stiff glass of brandy affects the head almost as little as a glass of water.
“It is over there,” said Meeus, pointing to the southeast, “that we are going to-morrow to interview those beasts.”
Adams started at the intensity of loathing expressed by Meeus in that sentence. He had spoken almost angrily at rubber and tusks, but his languid, complaining voice had held nothing like this before.
Those beasts! He hated them, and he would not have been human had he not hated them. They were his jailers in very truth, their work was his deliverance.
The revolt of this village would make him short of rubber; probably it would bring a reprimand from his superiors.
A great bat flitted by so close that the smell of it poisoned the air, and from the forest, far away to the west, came the ripping saw-like cry of a leopard on the prowl. Many fierce things were hunting in the forest that night, but nothing fiercer than Meeus, as he stood in the moonlight, cigarette in mouth, staring across the misty forest in the direction of the Silent Pools.