for,' said the Chief, and he
fixed me with his eye. 'Why,' he added, 'don't you know where you are?
You're in the middle of all the atrocities here.' The others nodded
'That's right. Any amount of atrocities--round here.' It seemed a silly
way of putting it. Here we'd come thousands of miles just to get into
the middle of atrocities! For a moment the word conveyed nothing to me.
I had been getting into the way of thinking the _Corydon_ was by way of
being something of an atrocity, but I knew that was not what my
shipmates meant. I'm not sure even now that there ever had been any
atrocities in that part of the world. I read about them in a book once;
but the things that get into books have always eluded me. Already I had
laid hold of that cardinal fact in my new life. The old ideas, the old
conventional phrases and assumptions, were cumbersome, inadequate or
untrue. Take that word 'atrocity.' Well enough in a radical leading
article; but what core of real truth was there in it when it was used by
a living man at a railhead up the Niger River? To anyone with
imagination it was comic. But my shipmates were not given to much
imagination. In the business of their lives they were alive and original
and racy. They used phrases and turns of thought that sometimes thrilled
me with their vivid power. But outside of that narrow channel they had
nothing but newspaper phrases, like 'atrocities,' mere catchwords that
chill one's soul with their bald, withered and bloodless pretensions.
The Chief gave me an example of this after tea that night. For a brief
spell, by some unforeseen miracle of good fortune, there was nothing to
do for the moment, and the four of us, in clean singlets and dungarees,
were leaning on the off rail of the after well-deck smoking. Port Duluth
was behind us. In front lay a broad, placid sheet of copper-tinted,
forest-rimmed water, the confluence of a number of stagnant creeks and
back-streams, a sort of knot in the interminable loops and windings of
the delta. Here and there in the line of tree-tops was a gap showing
where some waterway came through. Here and there, too, I could descry a
tiny beach of mud a yard or two wide, with a hut and a canoe tied to the
mangrove roots, and black, naked people crouched on their hams in the
shadows cast by the forest, engaged in their--to me--mysterious business
of living. They were far-away and more or less picturesque. So, too,
were the fishermen a mile away on the shini