“What thing?”

“That!” said the Coaster.  He threw out his arm at the brooding mountains, the dark lagoons, the glaring coast-line against which the waves shot into the air with the shock and roar of twelve-inch guns.

“The first white man came to Sierra Leone five hundred years before Christ,” said the Coaster.  “And, in twenty-two hundred years, he’s got just twenty miles inland.  The native didn’t need forts, or a navy, to stop him.  He had three allies:  those waves, the fever, and the sun.  Especially the sun.  The black man goes bare-headed, and the sun lets him pass.  The white man covers his head with an inch of cork, and the sun strikes through it and kills him.  When Jameson came down the river from Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat.  He waved his helmet at them for three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe.  Three minutes was all the sun wanted.  Jameson died in two days.  Where you are going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him:  it drives him mad.  It keeps the fear of death in his heart; and that takes away his nerve and his sense of proportion.  He flies into murderous fits, over silly, imaginary slights; he grows morbid, suspicious, he becomes a coward, and because he is a coward with authority, he becomes a bully.

“He is alone, we will suppose, at a station three hundred miles from any other white man.  One morning his house-boy spills a cup of coffee on him, and in a rage he half kills the boy.  He broods over that, until he discovers, or his crazy mind makes him think he has discovered, that in revenge the boy is plotting to poison him.  So he punishes him again.  Only this time he punishes him as the black man has taught him to punish, in the only way the black man seems to understand; that is, he tortures him.  From that moment the fall of that man is rapid.  The heat, the loneliness, the fever, the fear of the black faces, keep him on edge, rob him of sleep, rob him of his physical strength, of his moral strength.  He loses shame, loses reason; becomes cruel, weak, degenerate.  He invents new, bestial tortures; commits new, unspeakable ‘atrocities,’ until, one day, the natives turn and kill him, or he sticks his gun in his mouth and blows the top of his head off.”

The Coaster smiled tolerantly at the wide-eyed eager young man at his side.

“And you,” he mocked, “think you can reform that man, and that hell above ground called the Congo, with an article in Lowell’s Weekly?”

Undismayed, Everett grinned cheerfully.

“That’s what I’m here for!” he said.