kfulness.

Turning from the enclosure and looking across the fort wall to the
distance, one saw a world as far from civilization as the world that
Romulus looked at when he gazed across the wall outlining the first dim
sketch of Rome.

To the north, forest; to the south, forest; to the east, forest; and to
the west, eternal and illimitable forest. Blazing sun, everlasting haze
that in the rainy season would become mist and silence.

In the storms and under the rains the great rubber forest of M'Bonga would
roar like a reef-tormented sea, but on a day like this, when, gazing from
the high ground of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes
and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms,
the sombre green of the n'sambyas, to the haze that veiled all things
beyond, on a day like this, silence gazed at one Sphinx-like, and from the
distance of a million years. Silence that had brooded upon Africa before
Africa had a name, before Pharaoh was born, before Thebes was built.

Meeus led the way into the guest house, which contained only two
rooms--rooms spacious enough, but bare of everything except the ordinary
necessities of life. In the living room there was a table of white
deal-like wood and three or four chairs evidently made by natives from a
European design. A leopard skin, badly dried and shrivelling at the edges,
hung on one wall, presumably as an ornament; on another wall some Congo
bows and arrows--bows with enormously thick strings and arrows poisoned so
skilfully that a scratch from one would kill you, though they had been
hanging there for many years. They were trophies of the early days when
Fort M'Bassa was really a fort, and from those woods down there clouds of
soot-black devils, with filed teeth, raided the place, only to be swept
away by rifle fire.

There was no picture torn from an illustrated paper adorning the place, as
in Verhaeren's abode, but on a rudely constructed shelf there lay just the
same stack of "official letters," some of these two years old, some of
last month, all dealing with trade.

Meeus brought out cigarettes and gin, but Berselius, safe now at his base
of operations, to make a little festival of the occasion sent to the
stores, which his porters had deposited in the go-down, for a magnum of
champagne. It was Cliquot, and as Meeus felt the glow of the wine in his
veins, a flush came into his hollow cheeks and a brightness into his dull
eyes;