In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the eight-inch guns; a smal flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech--and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drol ery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives--he cal ed them enemies!--hidden out of sight somewhere. Information prepared by the Project BookishMall.com legal advisor

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"We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We cal ed at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a stil and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; al along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair. Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.

"It was upward of thirty days before I saw the mouth of the big river. We anchored off the seat of the government. But my work would not begin til some two hundred miles farther on. So as soon as I could I made a start for a place thirty miles higher up.

"I had my passage on a little sea-going steamer. Her captain was a Swede, and knowing me for a seaman, invited me on the bridge. He was a young man, lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait. As we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed his head contemptuously at the shore. `Been living there?' he asked. I said, `Yes.' `Fine lot these government chaps--are they not?' he went on, speaking English with great precision and considerable bitterness. Ìt is funny what some people wil do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of that kind when it goes up country?' I said to him I expected to see that soon.

`So-o-o!' he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one eye ahead vigilantly. `Don't be too sure,' he continued. `The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' `Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out watchful y. `Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps.'

"At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hil , others, with iron roofs, amongst a waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants.