distilled and stored for hundreds of years, and where the windows
have seldom been opened. In the dazzling heat that still held

undisputed sway over the scene, insects and birds seemed
preposterously alive and active, flitting their gay colours through

the sunbeams, and crawling over the baked dust in the full swing
and pursuit of their several businesses; the flies engaged in

Heaven knows what, and the fly-catchers busy with the flies.
Beasts and humans showed no such indifference to the temperature;

the sun would have to slant yet further downward before the earth
would become a fit arena for their revived activities. In the

sheltered basement of a wayside rest-house a gang of native
hammock-bearers slept or chattered drowsily through the last hours

of the long mid-day halt; wide awake, yet almost motionless in the
thrall of a heavy lassitude, their European master sat alone in an

upper chamber, staring out through a narrow window-opening at the
native village, spreading away in thick clusters of huts girt

around with cultivatedvegetation. It seemed a vast human ant-
hill, which would presently be astir with its teeming human life,

as though the Sun God in his last departing stride had roused it
with a careless kick. Even as Comus watched he could see the

beginnings of the evening's awakening. Women, squatting in front
of their huts, began to pound away at the rice or maize that would

form the evening meal, girls were collecting their water pots
preparatory to a walk down to the river, and enterprising goats

made tentative forays through gaps in the ill-kept fences of
neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that here

at least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil. Behind a hut
perched on a steep hill-side, just opposite to the rest-house, two

boys were splitting wood with a certain languid industry; further
down the road a group of dogs were leisurelyworking themselves up

to quarrelling pitch. Here and there, bands of evil-looking pigs
roamed about, busy with foraging excursions that came unpleasantly

athwart the border-line of scavenging. And from the trees that
bounded and intersected the village rose the horrible, tireless,

spiteful-sounding squawking of the iron-throated crows.
Comus sat and watched it all with a sense of growing aching

depression. It was so utterly trivial to his eyes, so devoid of
interest, and yet it was so real, so serious, so implacable in its

continuity. The brain grew tired with the thought of its unceasing
reproduction. It had all gone on, as it was going on now, by the

side of the great rushing swirling river, this tilling and planting
and harvesting, marketing and store-keeping, feast-making and

fetish-worship and love-making, burying and giving in marriage,
child-bearing and child-rearing, all this had been going on, in the

shimmering, blistering heat and the warm nights, while he had been
a youngster at school, dimly recognising Africa as a division of

the earth's surface that it was advisable to have a certain nodding
acquaintance with.

It had been going on in all its trifling detail, all its serious
intensity, when his father and his grandfather in their day had

been little boys at school, it would go on just as intently as ever
long after Comus and his generation had passed away, just as the

shadows would lengthen and fade under the mulberry trees in that
far away English garden, round the old stone fountain where a

leaden otter for ever preyed on a leaden salmon.
Comus rose impatiently from his seat, and walked wearily across the

hut to another window-opening which commanded a broad view of the
river. There was something which fascinated and then depressed one

in its ceaseless hurrying onward sweep, its tons of water rushing
on for all time, as long as the face of the earth should remain

unchanged. On its further shore could be seen spread out at
intervals other teeming villages, with their cultivated plots and

pasture clearings, their moving dots which meant cattle and goats
and dogs and children. And far up its course, lost in the forest

growth that fringed its banks, were hidden away yet more villages,
human herding-grounds where men dwelt and worked and bartered,

squabbled and worshipped, sickened and perished, while the river
went by with its endless swirl and rush of gleaming waters. One

could well understand primitive early races making propitiatory
sacrifices to the spirit of a great river on whose shores they

dwelt. Time and the river were the two great forces that seemed to
matter here.

It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and watch
the village life that was now beginning to wake in earnest. The

procession of water-fetchers had formed itself in a long chattering
line that stretched river-wards. Comus wondered how many tens of

thousands of times that procession had been formed since first the
village came into existence. They had been doing it while he was

playing in the cricket-fields at school, while he was spending
Christmas holidays in Paris, while he was going his careless round

of theatres, dances, suppers and card-parties, just as they were
doing it now; they would be doing it when there was no one alive

who remembered Comus Bassington. This thought recurred again and
again with painful persistence, a morbid growth arising in part

from his loneliness.
Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill Comus

marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully at the
work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown accretions

of fatherly parochial benevolence, in this heat-blistered, fever-
scourged wilderness, where men lived like groundbait and died like

flies. Demons one might believe in, if one did not hold one's
imagination in healthy check, but a kindly all-managing God, never.

Somewhere in the west country of England Comus had an uncle who
lived in a rose-smothered rectory and taught a wholesome gentle-

hearted creed that expressed itself in the spirit of "Little lamb,
who made thee?" and faithfully reflected the beautiful homely

Christ-child sentiment of Saxon Europe. What a far away, unreal
fairy story it all seemed here in this West African land, where the

bodies of men were of as little account as the bubbles that floated
on the oily froth of the great flowing river, and where it required

a stretch of wild profitless imagination to credit them with
undying souls. In the life he had come from Comus had been

accustomed to think of individuals as definite masterful
personalities, making their several marks on the circumstances that

revolved around them; they did well or ill, or in most cases
indifferently, and were criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or

tolerated, or given way to. In any case, humdrum or outstanding,
they had their spheres of importance, little or big. They

dominated a breakfast table or harassed a Government, according to
their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely had

irritating mannerisms. At any rate it seemed highly probable that
they had souls. Here a man simply made a unit in an unnumbered

population, an inconsequent dot in a loosely-compiled deathroll.
Even his own position as a white man exalted conspicuously above a

horde of black natives did not save Comus from the depressing sense
of nothingness which his first experience of fever had thrown over

him. He was a lost, soulless body in this great uncaring land; if
he died another would take his place, his few effects would be

inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish
off any tea or whisky that he left behind - that would be all.

It was nearly time to be starting towards the next halting place
where he would dine or at any rate eat something. But the

lassitude which the fever had bequeathed him made the tedium of
travelling through interminable forest-tracks a weariness to be

deferred as long as possible. The bearers were nothing loth to let
another half-hour or so slip by, and Comus dragged a battered

paper-covered novel from the pocket of his coat. It was a story
dealing with the elaborately tangled love affairs of a surpassingly

uninteresting couple, and even in his almost bookless state Comus
had not been able to plough his way through more than two-thirds of

its dull length; bound up with the cover, however, were some pages
of advertisement, and these the exile scanned with a hungry

intentness that the romance itself could never have commanded. The