In Darkest England and The Way Out | Page 6

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 100 to 180 feet 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