s and devil shapes.

He will never become one of us. Extraordinary paradox--he never can become
a Leopold or a Felix Fuchs!

Berselius disbanded the porters with a wave of the hand, and he and his
companions began a round of the station. Verhaeren, with a cigar in his
mouth, led the way.

He opened the door of a go-down, and Adams in the dim light, saw bale upon
bale of stuff; gum copal it proved to be, for Yandjali tapped a huge
district where this stuff is found, and which lies forty miles to the
south. There was also cassava in large quantities, and the place had a
heady smell, as if fermentation were going on amidst the bales.

Verhaeren shut the door and led on till, rounding a corner, a puff of hot
air brought a stench which caused Adams to choke and spit.

Verhaeren laughed.

It was the Hostage House that sent its poisonous breath to meet them.

A native corporal and two soldiers stood at the palisade which circled the
Hostage House. The women and children had just been driven back from the
fields where they had been digging and weeding, and they had been served
with their wretched dinners. They were eating these scraps of food like
animals, some in the sun amidst the tufts of grass and mounds of ordure in
the little yard, some in the shadow of the house.

There were old, old women like shrivelled monkeys; girls of twelve and
fifteen, some almost comely; middle-aged women, women about to become
mothers, and a woman who had become a mother during the past night lying
there in the shelter of the Hostage House. There were little pot-bellied
nigger children, tiny black dots, who had to do their bit of work in the
fields with the others; and when the strangers appeared and looked over
the rail, these folk set up a crying and chattering, and ran about
distractedly, not knowing what new thing was in store for them. They were
the female folk and children of a village, ten miles away south; they were
here as "hostages," because the village had not produced its full tale of
cassava. They had been here over a month.

The soldiers laughed, and struck with the butts of their rifles on the
palisading, as if to increase the confusion. Adams noticed that the young
girls and women were of all the terrified crowd seemingly the most
terrified. He did not know the reason; he could not even guess it. A good
man himself, and believing in a God in heaven, he could not guess the
truth. He knew nothing of the reason of these wom