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

320 THINKING BLACK
the moment. Far from treating these Belgian new-comers
to a cold, hostile stare, we rallied round their ensign and
wheedled all sorts of negroes into a loyalty that has stood
the stress of years. When there was no king in Israel
every one did that which was right in his own eyes, and a
like anarchy menaces us. Granted years of grinding
autocracy and, be sure of it, the day the political pendulum
begins to move it will go full swing to anarchy : aprhs
moi le deluge.
So off we trek East for the new start with many a
haunting memory of the Bunkeya charnel-house. Our
backward look at the dark den is full of sad regret that
there we had been hammering away at the iron gates of
Mansoul and never a surrender. Fishing, however, is
Christ's own simile of this business of saving souls, and
our farewell was as cheerless as that of the man who from
dawn to dusk of a wintry day has fished a cold Scotch loch
with never a nibble. Yet watch again the " dramatic
neatness of God's methods," and how at eventide it can
be light. Just then, in a brown study that was almost
black, God gave me my first soul, a wild man of blood
who had been an executioner in the old days. Smish was
his name, the same in after years who became an honest
elder and won two other elders. The sun is westering,
and Mr. Lane and I have said good-bye to the doomed
Babylon, of which place it was legally true that a Garen-
ganze man could not die outside it. Stupidly, I had
lingered too long at my good-byeing, and was in fact lost
in one of the too many roads leading out from the capital,