ernally damning the Congo and wishing himself
back in Antwerp.

They transhipped to a smaller boat, the _Couronne_, and one morning
shortly after breakfast three strokes on the steamer bell announced their
approach to Yandjali.

Imagine a rough landing-stage, a handful of houses, mostly mud-built, the
funereal heat-green of palm and banana, a flood of tropical sunshine
lighting the little wharf, crammed with bales of merchandise.

Such was Yandjali, and beyond Yandjali lay the forest, and in front of
Yandjali flowed the river, and years ago _boom-boom_ down the river's
shining surface, from away up there where the great palms gave place to
reeds and water-grass, you might have heard the sound of the hippopotami
bellowing to the sun, a deep organ note, unlike the sound emitted by any
other creature on earth. You do not hear it now. The great brutes have
long ago been driven away by man.

On the wharf to greet the steamer stood the District Commissioner,
Commander Verhaeren; behind him six or seven half-naked, savage-looking
blacks, each topped with a red fez and armed with an Albini rifle, stood
gazing straight before them with wrinkled eyes at the approaching boat.

Verhaeren and Berselius were seemingly old friends; they shook hands and
Berselius introduced Adams; then the three left the wharf and walked up to
the District Commissioner's house, a frame building surrounded by palm
trees and some distance from the mud huts of the soldiers and porters.

The Yandjali of this story, not to be confounded with Yandjali notorious
in Congo history for its massacre, is not in a rubber district, though on
the fringe of one; it is a game district and produces cassava. The Congo
State has parcelled out its territory. There are the rubber districts, the
gum copal districts, the food districts, and the districts where ivory is
obtained. In each of these districts the natives are made to work and
bring in rubber, gum copal, food, or ivory, as a tax. The District
Commissioner, or _Chef de Poste_, in each district draws up a schedule of
what is required. Such and such a village must produce and hand over so
many kilos of rubber, or copal, so much cassava, so many tusks, etc.

Verhaeren was a stout, pale-faced man, with a jet-black beard, a
good-tempered looking man, with that strange, lazy, semi-Oriental look
which the Belgian face takes when the owner of it is fixed to a post, with
nothing to do but oversee trade, and when the po