第3章 WHY "DARKEST ENGLAND"?(1)

This summer the attention of the civilised world has been arrested by the story which Mr.Stanley has told of Darkest Africa and his journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent.In all that spirited narrative of heroic endeavour,nothing has so much impressed the imagination,as his deion of the immense forest,which offered an almost impenetrable barrier to his advance.The intrepid explorer,in his own phrase,"marched,tore,ploughed,and cut his way for one hundred and sixty days through this inner womb of the true tropical forest."The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realise this immensity of wooded wilderness,covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France,where the rays of the sun never penetrate,where in the dark,dank air,filled with the steam of the heated morass,human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die.Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring home to us the full horror of that awful gloom.He says:

Take a thick Scottish copse dripping with rain;imagine this to be mere undergrowth nourished under the impenetrable shade of ancient trees ranging from 100to 180feet high;briars and thorns abundant;lazy creeks meandering through the depths of the jungle,and sometimes a deep affluent of a great river.Imagine this forest and jungle in all stages of decay and growth,rain pattering on you every other day of the year;an impure atmosphere with its dread consequences,fever and dysentery;gloom throughout the day and darkness almost palpable throughout the night;and then if you can imagine such a forest extending the entire distance from Plymouth to Peterhead,you will have a fair idea of some of the inconveniences endured by us in the Congo forest.

The denizens of this region are filled with a conviction that the forest is endless--interminable.In vain did Mr.Stanley and his companions endeavour to convince them that outside the dreary wood were to be found sunlight,pasturage and peaceful meadows.

They replied in a manner that seemed to imply that we must be strange creatures to suppose that it would be possible for any world to exist save their illimitable forest."No,"they replied,shaking their heads compassionately,and pitying our absurd questions,"all like this,"and they moved their hand sweepingly to illustrate that the world was all alike,nothing but trees,trees and trees--great trees rising as high as an arrow shot to the sky,lifting their crowns intertwining their branches,pressing and crowding one against the other,until neither the sunbeam nor shaft of light can penetrate it.

"We entered the forest,"says Mr.Stanley,"with confidence;forty pioneers in front with axes and bill hooks to clear a path through the obstructions,praying that God and good fortune would lead us."But before the conviction of the forest dwellers that the forest was without end,hope faded out of the hearts of the natives of Stanley's company.The men became sodden with despair,preaching was useless to move their brooding sullenness,their morbid gloom.

The little religion they knew was nothing more than legendary lore,and in their memories there dimly floated a story of a land which grew darker and darker as one travelled towards the end of the earth and drew nearer to the place where a great serpent lay supine and coiled round the whole world.Ah!then the ancients must have referred to this,where the light is so ghastly,and the woods are endless,and are so still and solemn and grey;to this oppressive loneliness,amid so much life,which is so chilling to the poor distressed heart;and the horror grew darker with their fancies;the cold of early morning,the comfortless grey of dawn,the dead white mist,the ever-dripping tears of the dew,the deluging rains,the appalling thunder bursts and the echoes,and the wonderful play of the dazzling lightning.And when the night comes with its thick palpable darkness,and they lie huddled in their damp little huts,and they hear the tempest overhead,and the howling of the wild winds,the grinding an groaning of the storm-tost trees,and the dread sounds of the falling giants,and the shock of the trembling earth which sends their hearts with fitful leaps to their throats,and the roaring and a rushing as of a mad overwhelming sea--oh,then the horror is intensified!When the march has begun once again,and the files are slowly moving through the woods,they renew their morbid broodings,and ask themselves:How long is this to last?

Is the joy of life to end thus?Must we jog on day after day in this cheerless gloom and this joyless duskiness,until we stagger and fall and rot among the toads?Then they disappear into the woods by twos,and threes,and sixes;and after the caravan has passed they return by the trail,some to reach Yambuya and upset the young officers with their tales of woe and war;some to fall sobbing under a spear-thrust;some to wander and stray in the dark mazes of the woods,hopelessly lost;and some to be carved for the cannibal feast.And those who remain compelled to it by fears of greater danger,mechanically march on,a prey to dread and weakness.

That is the forest.But what of its denizens?They are comparatively few;only some hundreds of thousands living in small tribes from ten to thirty miles apart,scattered over an area on which ten thousand million trees put out the sun from a region four times as wide as Great Britain.Of these pygmies there are two kinds;one a very degraded specimen with ferretlike eyes,close-set nose,more nearly approaching the baboon than was supposed to be possible,but very human;the other very handsome,with frank open innocent features,very prepossessing.They are quick and intelligent,capable of deep affection and gratitude,showing remarkable industry and patience.