The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

It was the Hostage House of Fort M’Bassa. It was empty now, but nearly always full, and it stood there like a horrible voiceless witness.

A great disgust filled the mind of Adams; disgust of the niggers who had evidently lately inhabited this place, and disgust of the Belgians who had herded them there. He felt there was something very wrong in the state of Congo. The Hostage House of Yandjali had started the impression; Meeus in some subtle way had deepened it; and now this.

But he fully recognized what difficult people to deal with niggers are. He felt that all this was slavery under a thin disguise, this so-called taxation and “trade,” but it was not his affair.

All work is slavery more or less pleasant. The doctor is the slave of his patients, the shopkeeper of his clients. These niggers were, no doubt, slaves of the Belgians, but they were not bought and sold; they had to work, it is true, but all men have to work. Besides, Berselius had told him that the Belgians had stopped the liquor traffic and stopped the Arab raiders. There was good and bad on the side of the Belgians, and the niggers were niggers. So reasoned Adams, and with reason enough, though from insufficient data.

At eight o’clock in the blazing sunshine, that even then was oppressive, the expedition started. The white men leading, Félix coming immediately behind, and eleven of the soldiers, bearing the tents and stores for two days, following after.

They plunged into the forest, taking a dim track, which was the rubber track from the village of the Silent Pools and from half a dozen other villages to the west. The ground here was different from the ground they had traversed in coming to the fort. This was boggy; here and there the foot sank with a sough into the pulp of morass and rotten leaves; the lianas were thinner and more snaky, the greenery, if possible, greener, and the air close and moist as the air of a steam-bath.

The forest of M’Bonga has great tracts of this boggy, pestiferous land, dreadful sloughs of despond caverned with foliage, and by some curse the rubber vines entrench themselves with these. The naked rubber collectors, shivering over their fires, are attacked by the rheumatism and dysentery and fever that lie in these swamps; diseases almost merciful, for the aches and pains they cause draw the mind away from the wild beasts and devils and phantoms that haunt the imagination of the rubber slaves.

It took them three hours to do the ten miles, and then at last the forest cleared away and fairyland appeared.

Here in the very depths of the hopeless jungle, as if laid out and forgotten by some ancient god, lie the Silent Pools of Matabayo and the park-like lands that hold them. Like a beautiful song in some tragic and gloomy opera, a regret of the God who created the hopeless forest, sheltered by the great n’sambya trees, they lie; pools of shadowy and tranquil water, broken by reflections of branches and mirroring speargrass ten feet high and fanlike fern fronds.

All was motionless and silent as a stereoscopic picture; the rocketing palms bursting into sprays of emerald green, the n’sambyas with their trumpet-like yellow blossoms, the fern fronds reduplicating themselves in the water’s glass, all and each lent their motionless beauty to the completion of the perfect picture.