"No," said Ross. "Is it interesting?"
"Interesting?" I replied. "Hardly interesting...."
"The monastery," continued Ross placidly, "would spread its single—or double-storied—length parallel to the lie of the lake. The roof would be low-pitched with a wide overhang supported on brick pillars, to form a dark spacious verandah from whose centre a double flight of steps descended to the courtyard. At right angles on one wing lay stores and outbuildings; and on the other stood the church with narrow unglazed windows, round brick columns, scanty fittings, and the ornaments of Latin Catholicism, when humble so devotional, so secular when rich.
Gardens were dug, fruit trees planted, crops cultivated. All the time proceeded the less material work of tending the sick, teaching and preaching. Permanganate of potassium and epsom salts, sermons and hymns, reading, writing and the other queer things they teach the heathen—Christian philosophy and the geography of the Holy Land.
By how much the black man profited, I shouldn't care to say, but I don't doubt that the community grew and multiplied. The birth-rate increased; famines were averted; refugee relatives from raided villages came in, and the blessings of the first chapter of Genesis seemed to rest on the devoted labours of the Fathers, until ...
The first 'fly' may have been brought by one of the refugees or carried by game or spread naturally up the lakeshore. At the beginning the presence of the destroyer would not be suspected. The increased death-rate would be attributed to an unhealthy summer; the wasting of the sufferers to fever; their fits to epilepsy; their madness to insanity.
But as the buryings increased, the fear of an epidemic must have gripped the hearts of the Fathers. Their slight medical knowledge was as unavailing as their prayers. Bells will have sounded, masses been said, and litanies sung for defence from the arrow that flieth in darkness and the pestilence that destroyeth at noonday. But the mortality did not stay.
Finding the new God did not help them, some of the people will have relapsed into heathendom. At first frightened, they would settle into a mute endurance, nearer apathy than stoicism. The more energetic would flee from the doomed villages ... and spread the sickness with them. The rest awaited the end with fatalism.
One by one the Fathers buried their people, mourning the loss now of some favourite convert, now of some skilful workman.
Whether the sickness ultimately struck all the white men, or whether, since they could not help, they took the resolution of abandoning the stricken settlement and their lives' work, one does not know. Alibaba's words, a later discovery of Norah's, and the French Fathers' tradition of self-sacrifice, suggest that death found them at their work. The end was the same in either case: Africa took back its own, and the insatiable forest swallowed up villages, buildings, and every sign of life, as relentlessly as it had always engulfed every trace of human endeavour."