sed on the east coast, contained
stores; two big tents, a couple of "Roorkee" chairs, folding-beds and
tables, cork mattresses, cooking utensils, made up the pile, to say
nothing of the guns which had just been taken from their cases.

"What did you bring this thing for?" asked Berselius, pointing to Adams's
elephant gun, which the Zappo Zap headman was just stripping from its
covering.

"To shoot with," said Adams, laughing.

Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gun, and gave a short
laugh.

"Well, bring it," said he; "but I don't envy your gun-bearers."

But Felix, the headman, did not seem of the same opinion. The enormous
rifle evidently appealed to his ferocious heart. It was a god-gun this,
and no mistake, and its lustre evidently spread to Adams, the owner of
it.

Felix was a very big man, almost as big as Adams: a member of the great
cannibal fighting tribe of Zappo Zaps, he had followed Verhaeren, who had
once held a post in the Bena Pianga country, to Yandjali; he had a sort of
attachment for Verhaeren, which showed that he possessed some sort of
heart. All the Zappo Zaps have been enrolled by the Congo Government as
"soldiers"; they have a bad name and cause a lot of heart-searching to the
Brussels administration, for when they are used in punitive expeditions to
burn villages of recalcitrant rubber-getters, they, to use a local
expression, "_will_ eat when they have killed." When they are used _en
masse_, the old cannibal instinct breaks out; when the killing is over
they go for the killed, furious as dogs over bones. God help the man who
would come between them and their food!

Of these men Felix was a fine specimen. A nature man, ever ready to slay,
and cruel as Death. A man from the beginning of the world.

If Felix had possessed a wife, he and she might have stood for the man and
woman mentioned by Thenard in his lecture.

The basic man and woman in whose dim brains Determination had begun to
work, sketching the vague line on either side of which lies the Right and
Left of moral action.

A true savage, never to be really civilized. For it is the fate of the
savage that he will never become one of us. Do what you will and pray how
you will, you will never make up for the million years that have passed
him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which is the basis
of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, or developed only into a
few fantastic and abortive God shape