d out and
forgotten by some ancient god, lie the Silent Pools of Matabayo and the
park-like lands that hold them. Like a beautiful song in some tragic and
gloomy opera, a regret of the God who created the hopeless forest,
sheltered by the great n'sambya trees, they lie; pools of shadowy and
tranquil water, broken by reflections of branches and mirroring speargrass
ten feet high and fanlike fern fronds.

All was motionless and silent as a stereoscopic picture; the rocketing
palms bursting into sprays of emerald green, the n'sambyas with their
trumpet-like yellow blossoms, the fern fronds reduplicating themselves in
the water's glass, all and each lent their motionless beauty to the
completion of the perfect picture.

In the old days, long ago, before the land was exploited and the forest
turned into a hunting ground for rubber, the lovely head of the oryx would
push aside the long green blades of the speargrass; then, bending her lips
to the lips of the oryx gazing up at her from the water, she would drink,
shattering the reflection into a thousand ripples. The water-buck came
here in herds from the elephant country away south, beyond the
hour-glass-like constriction which divided the great forest, and the tiny
dik-dik, smallest of all antelopes, came also to take its sip. But all
that is past. The rifle and the trap, at the instigation of the devouring
Government that eats rubber and antelope, ivory and palm-oil, cassava and
copal, has thinned out the herds and driven them away. The "soldier" must
be fed. Even the humble bush pig of the forest knows that fact.

It was four years since Berselius had hunted in this country, and even in
that short time he found enormous change. But he could not grumble. He was
a shareholder in the company, and in twenty industries depending on it.

Close up to the forest, where the m'bina trees showed their balls of
scarlet blossom, lay the village they had come to reason with. There were
twenty-five or more low huts of wattle and mud, roofed with leaves and
grass. No one was visible but an old woman, naked, all but for a slight
covering about the loins. She was on all fours, grinding something between
two stones, and as she sighted the party she looked backward over her
shoulder at them like a frightened cat.

She cried out in a chattering voice, and from the huts six others, naked
as herself, came, stared at the whites, and then, as if driven by the same
impulse, and just like rabbit