white star. They are now "soldiers,"
and their savagery, like a keen tool, has been turned to good account by
the Government.

In the great forest of M'Bonga the rubber vines are not equally
distributed. Large areas occur in which they are not found; only in the
most desolate places do they grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the
rubber vine into subjection; it will have nothing to do with the vineyard
and the field; it chooses to grow alone.

Everything else comes to its harvest with a joyous face, but the rubber
vine, like a dark green snake, fearful of death, has to be hunted for.

Even in the areas of the forest which it frequents, it is only to be found
in patches, so the harvesters cannot go in a body, as men do to the
harvesting of the corn, or the cotton, or the grape; they have to break up
into small parties and these again subdivide, leaving a single individual
here and there where the vines are thickest. He, entirely alone, at the
mercy of the evil spirits that are in his imagination and the beasts that
are in the forest, makes a rude shelter out of boughs and leaves, and sets
to work making incisions in the vine and draining them drop by drop of
their viscous sap.

Sometimes he sings over this monotonous work, and in the long rains
between the intervals of the shower-bath roarings you can hear the
ululations of these folk through the drip of the leaves, and at night the
spark-like glimmer of their fires dots the reeking gloom.

These are the conditions of the rubber collector's task, and it is not a
task that ever can be finished; year in, year out, it never ceases.

These woods through which Felix led them were to the woods near Yandjali
what the music of Beethoven is to the music of Mozart.

Immense and gloomy symphonies. The trees were huge, and groaned beneath
the weight of lianas cable-thick. At times they had to burst their way
through the veils of leaves and vines, the porters losing themselves and
calling one to the other, and the head of the expedition halting till the
stragglers were collected; at times the ground they trod on was like
grease from the cast-down fruit of the plantains that grew here enormous,
and sodden, and dismal, showering their fruit in such quantities that the
bush-pigs, devour as they might, could never dispose of it all.

On some of the trees, like huge withered leaves, hung bats, and from some
of the trees the beard-moss hung yards long, and of a spectral gray;