Already in Mr.
Morel's books I had read their testimony, but hearing from the men
themselves the tales of outrage and cruelty gave them a fresh and
more intimate value, and sent me to bed hot and sick with
indignation. But, nevertheless, the night I slept at Thysville was
the only cool one I knew in the Congo. It was as cool as is a night
in autumn at home. Thysville, between the Upper and the Lower Congo,
with its fresh mountain air, is an obvious site for a hospital for
the servants of the State. To the Congo it should be what Simla is
to the sick men of India; but the State is not running hospitals. It
is in the rubber business.
All steamers for the Upper Congo and her great tributaries, whether
they belong to the State or the Missions, start from Leopoldville.
There they fit out for voyages, some of which last three and four
months. So it is a place of importance, but, like Boma, it looks as
though the people who yesterday built it meant to-morrow to move
out. The river-front is one long dump-heap. It is a grave-yard for
rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars. The interior of the
principal storehouse for ships' supplies, directly in front of the
office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old
iron and newspapers. I should have enjoyed taking the captain of the
port by the neck and showing him the water-front and marine shops at
Calabar; the wharfs and quays of stone, the open places spread with
gravel, the whitewashed cement gutters, the spare parts of
machinery, greased and labeled in their proper shelves, even the
condemned scrap-iron in orderly piles; the whole yard as trim as a
battleship.
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