Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

FIRST FEARS JUSTIFIED 13
with buoyant life, was buried alive. Not a dying yell,
remember, but only a great dry sob. Africa
But it were impossible to tell all. One cry there is,
though, so uniform the words that it almost amounts to a
horrible technical term. Reminiscent of the Epistle to
the Romans as it is, you cannot resist the steady convic-
tion that Paul must have known it too. Take, roughly,
a dozen such cases known to me—I mean, the living
forced to embrace the mortifying corpse. The terrible
formula of their cry was just Romans vii. 24 over again :
** Who shall deliver me from this body of death ? " No
negro could ever read Paul's anti-sin moan in Romans
without a special shudder at that metaphor : well he
knows what it means, for often did he hear that cry.
And long may he shudder at sin, say I.
# * #
But nobody knows his Africa who is not on terms of
intimacy with the fire-flies. Darting about bewilderingly,
they flash their intermittent signals into the night, and
eight or ten confined in a phial give sufficient light to
enable one to write. At sundown behold a parable of
your Missionary tribulation ahead, the fourth plague of
Egypt. For no sooner do you light up than the thousand
tribes of local gnats, flies, and moths mobilise to fight
the flickering flame, each enunciating with impertinent
emphasis the dictum that the fly or the flicker must snuff
out. Children of night as they are, you can see them
swarm round that candle in clouds—war-cry : We love
darkness rather than light, because our deeds are evil.