covered with rank vegetation--mile after mile without variety,
without hope. The glassy surface of the water was broken here and
there by certain black forms floating like logs half hidden beneath
the wave. These were crocodiles. The river was the Ogowe, and the
man who cursed it was Victor Durnovo, employe of the Loango Trading
Association, whose business it was at that season to travel into the
interior of Africa to buy, barter, or steal ivory for his masters.

He was a small-faced man, with a squarely aquiline nose and a black
moustache, which hung like a valance over his mouth. From the
growth of that curtain-like moustache Victor Durnovo's worldly
prosperity might have been said to date. No one seeing his mouth
had before that time been prevailed upon to trust him. Nature has a
way of hanging out signs and then covering them up, so that the
casual fail to see. He was a man of medium height, with abnormally
long arms and a somewhat truculent way of walking, as if his foot
was ever ready to kick anything or any person who might come in his
way.

His movements were nervous and restless, although he was tired out
and half-starved. The irritability of Africa was upon him--had hold
over him--gripped him remorselessly. No one knows what it is, but
it is there, and sometimes it is responsible for murder. It makes
honourable European gentlemen commit crimes of which they blush to
think in after days. The Powers may draw up treaties and sign the
same, but there will never be a peaceful division of the great
wasted land so near to Southern Europe. There may be peace in
Berlin, or Brussels, or London, but because the atmosphere of Africa
is not the same as that of the great cities, there will be no peace
beneath the Equator. From the West Coast of Africa to the East men