ed his tired eyes to those
of the white man. Still, dumbly, they begged the answer to the same
question.

During the five months Everett spent up the river he stopped at many
missions, stations, one-man wood posts. He talked to Jesuit fathers,
to inspecteurs, to collectors for the State of rubber, taxes, elephant
tusks, in time, even in Bangalese, to chiefs of the native villages.
According to the point of view, he was told tales of oppression, of
avarice, of hideous crimes, of cruelties committed in the name of trade
that were abnormal, unthinkable. The note never was of hope, never of
cheer, never inspiring. There was always the grievance, the spirit of
unrest, of rebellion that ranged from dislike to a primitive, hot hate.
Of his own land and life he heard nothing, not even when his face was
again turned toward the east. Nor did he think of it. As now he saw
them, the rules and principles and standards of his former existence
were petty and credulous. But he assured himself he had not abandoned
those standards. He had only temporarily laid them aside, as he had left
behind him in London his frock-coat and silk hat. Not because he would
not use them again, but because in the Congo they were ridiculous.

For weeks, with a missionary as a guide, he walked through forests into
which the sun never penetrated, or, on the river, moved between banks
where no white man had placed his foot; where, at night, the elephants
came trooping to the water, and, seeing the lights of the boat, fled
crashing through the jungle; where the great hippos, puffing and
blowing, rose so close to his elbow that he could have tossed his
cigarette and hit them. The vastness of the Congo, toward which he
had so jauntily set forth, now weighed upon his soul. The immeasurable
distances; the slumbering disregard of time; the brooding, interminable
silences; the efforts to conquer the land that were so futile, so
puny, and so cruel, at first appalled and, later, left him unnerved,
rebellious, childishly defiant.

What health was there, he demanded hotly, in holding in a dripping
jungle to morals, to etiquette, to fashions of conduct? Was he, the
white man, intelligent, trained, disciplined in mind and body, to be
judged by naked cannibals, by chattering monkeys, by mammoth primeval
beasts? His code of conduct was his own. He was a law unto himself.

He came down the river on one of the larger steamers of the State, and,
on this voyage, with many fe