God.

All else was vast and of tragic proportions. The very rainbow was titanic;
it seemed primeval as the land over which it stretched and the people to
whom it bore no promise.

But the forest was the thing which filled Adams's heart with a craving for
freedom and escape that rose to a passion.

He had seen it silent in the dry season; he had seen it divided by the
great rain-wall and answering the downpour with snow-white billows of mist
and spray; he had heard it roaring in the dark; it had trapped him, beaten
him with its wet, green hands, sucked him down in its quagmires, shown him
its latent, slow, but unalterable ferocity, its gloom, its devilment.

The rubber collector who had helped to carry Berselius to the fort had
gone back to his place and task--the forest had sucked him back. This
gnome had explained without speaking what the gloom and the quagmire, and
the rope-like lianas had hinted, what the Silent Pools had shouted, what
the vulture and the kite had laid bare, what the heart had whispered:
_There is no God in the forest of M'Bonga, no law but the law of the
leopard, no mercy but the mercy of Death._

The forest had become for Adams a living nightmare--his one desire in life
now was to win free of it, and never did it look more sinister than when,
rainbow-arched and silently fuming, it lay passive, sun-stricken, the
palms bursting above the mist and the great clouds rolling away in
billows, as if to expose fully the wonder of those primeval leagues of
tree-tops sunlit, mist-strewn, where the feathery fingers of the palms
made banners of the wrack and the baobabs held fog-banks in their
foliage.

At the end of the third week Berselius showed signs of amendment. He could
raise himself now in bed and speak. He said little, but it was evident
that his memory had completely returned, and it was evident that he was
still the changed man. The iron-hearted Berselius, the man of daring and
nerve, was not here, he had been left behind in the elephant country in
the immeasurable south.

The mist had departed entirely from his mind; his whole past was clear
before him, and with his new mind he could reckon it up and see the bad
and the good. The extraordinary fact was that in reviewing this past he
did not feel terrified--it seemed a dead thing and almost as the past of
some other man. All those acts seemed to Berselius to have been committed
by a man who was now dead.

He could regret the acts of that m