e ship that brought you south, he might sell you a
piece of ice.

Matadi was a great rock, blazing with heat. Its narrow, perpendicular
paths seemed to run with burning lava. Its top, the main square of the
settlement, was of baked clay, beaten hard by thousands of naked feet.
Crossing it by day was an adventure. The air that swept it was the
breath of a blast-furnace.

Everett found a room over the shop of a Portuguese trader. It was caked
with dirt, and smelled of unnamed diseases and chloride of lime. In it
was a canvas cot, a roll of evil-looking bedding, a wash-basin filled
with the stumps of cigarettes. In a corner was a tin chop-box, which
Everett asked to have removed. It belonged, the landlord told him, to
the man who, two nights before, had occupied the cot and who had died
in it. Everett was anxious to learn of what he had died. Apparently
surprised at the question, the Portuguese shrugged his shoulders.

"Who knows?" he exclaimed. The next morning the English trader across
the street assured Everett there was no occasion for alarm. "He didn't
die of any disease," he explained. "Somebody got at him from the
balcony, while he was in his cot, and knifed him."

The English trader was a young man, a cockney, named Upsher. At home he
had been a steward on the Channel steamers. Everett made him his most
intimate friend. He had a black wife, who spent most of her day in a
four-post bed, hung with lace curtains and blue ribbon, in which she
resembled a baby hippopotamus wallowing in a bank of white sand.

At first the black woman was a shock to Everett, but after Upsher
dismissed her indifferently as a "good old sort," and spent one evening
blubbering over a photograph of his wife and "kiddie" at home, Everett
accepted her. His excuse for this was that men who knew they might die
on the morrow must not be judged by what they do to-day. The excuse did
not ring sound, but he dismissed the doubt by deciding that in such heat
it was not possible to take serious questions seriously. In the fact
that, to those about him, the thought of death was ever present, he
found further excuse for much else that puzzled and shocked him. At
home, death had been a contingency so remote that he had put it aside as
something he need not consider until he was a grandfather. At Matadi,
at every moment of the day, in each trifling act, he found death must be
faced, conciliated, conquered. At home he might ask himself, "If I eat
this wi