isgust 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, Felix 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 lai