So if you ask me to foretell the change that Africa would work in any given individual, I say, 'Take his ruling weakness, his Lowest Common Failing: cube it. The result will be the man when Africa has done with him.'"
Ross re-lit his atrocious cigar.
"By now," he said, "you must regret that you asked for the beginning of my story.
Are you not convinced that it is better to let me start in the middle of the story and incidentally in the middle of a lake in the middle of Africa?"
"Suppose yourself dead," he continued, taking my silence for assent, "and seeking variety from twanging harps round a glassy sea or banging tambourines in a medium's cabinet, you look down from the upper air, one day in October, 1921. Suppose your eye falls on Tanganyika—that sapphire coloured cleft which runs eight hundred miles long by fifty wide through the endless forests of Central Africa, with the old German Colony to the right, Belgian Congo to the left, North Eastern Rhodesia at the near end.
Not much humanity for you to patronise: every thirty miles or so along the edge of the water a cluster of thatched huts providing a measure of shelter for a handful of savages who live on fish and mangoes, careless of the future, indifferent to the past. Every 300 miles or so, at a Catholic Mission, a couple of white-robed Fathers issue rosaries to their less enlightened neighbours, who until the missionaries came had to rely on amulets made of python hearts. Between these centres of human endeavour, an uncharted belt of forest fringes the lake, and climbs the sides of the great cold crater, until these slope so steep that not even a creeper can catch hold. For the last thousand feet the rock is bare.
Forest rings the crater, stretching further than even you from your advantageous position can see. Nor can you see through the peacock-blue water to the bottom of the lake. They say it hasn't one.
On this particular day of your ethereal view, there is even a bit of human interest in that splendid but desolate vista. At the southern end of the lake a herald of European culture, a broad-beamed steam tug, lies black and ugly on the fantastically blue water. In the bows you may see two figures; from your remote standpoint, insignificant enough. You can discern the features no more than you can read the passions of the tiny puppets holding each other close, as if for defence against the indifferent majesty of nature.
From your elevation you can see a third figure. It is thrusting its way through the forest that borders the lake at the head of a train of diminutive black carriers. Ignorant of each other, the two groups of marionettes are drawn by wires of Fate, invisible even to you, into a contact all but fatal to both."