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"No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere;
a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land,
through long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets,
down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze
with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut.
The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well, if a lot
of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons
suddenly took to traveling on the road between Deal and Gravesend,
catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads
for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would
get empty very soon. Only here the dwellings were gone too.
Still I passed through several abandoned villages.
There's something pathetically childish in the ruins of grass walls.
Day after day, with the stamp and shuffle of sixty pair
of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb. load.
Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier
dead in harness, at rest in the long grass near the path,
with an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his side.
A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night
the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint;
a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild--and perhaps with as
profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.
Once a white man in an unbuttoned uniform, camping on the path
with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris, very hospitable and festive--
not to say drunk. Was looking after the upkeep of the road,
he declared. Can't say I saw any road or any upkeep,
unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole
in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles
farther on, may be considered as a permanent improvement.
I had a white companion too, not a bad chap, but rather too fleshy
and with the exasperating habit of fainting on the hot hillsides,
miles away from the least bit of shade and water. Annoying, you know,
to hold your own coat like a parasol over a man's head
while he is coming-to. I couldn't help asking him once what
he meant by coming there at all. `To make money, of course.
What do you think?' he said, scornfully. Then he got fever,
and had to be carried in a hammock slung under a pole.
As he weighed sixteen stone I had no end of rows with the carriers.
They jibbed, ran away, sneaked off with their loads in the night--
quite a mutiny. So, one evening, I made a speech in English
with gestures, not one of which was lost to the sixty pairs of eyes
before me, and the next morning I started the hammock off in front
all right. An hour afterwards I came upon the whole concern
wrecked in a bush--man, hammock, groans, blankets, horrors.
The heavy pole had skinned his poor nose. He was very anxious for me
to kill somebody, but there wasn't the shadow of a carrier near.
I remembered the old doctor,--'It would be interesting for science
to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.'
I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.
However, all that is to no purpose. On the fifteenth day
I came in sight of the big river again, and hobbled into
the Central Station. It was on a back water surrounded by scrub
and forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud on one side,
and on the three others inclosed by a crazy fence of rushes.
A neglected gap was all the gate it had, and the first glance
at the place was enough to let you see the flabby devil was
running that show. White men with long staves in their hands
appeared languidly from amongst the buildings, strolling up
to take a look at me, and then retired out of sight somewhere.
One of them, a stout, excitable chap with black mustaches,
informed me with great volubility and many digressions, as soon as I
told him who I was, that my steamer was at the bottom of the river.
I was thunderstruck. What, how, why? Oh, it was `all right.'
The `manager himself' was there. All quite correct.
`Everybody had behaved splendidly! splendidly!'--'you must,'
he said in agitation, `go and see the general manager at once.
He is waiting!'
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