But, strange to say, the sickness was worse than ever after this episode, until the people got tired of trying to isolate the cases and just left them in the villages. Crowds of people still died at this time, and many of the corpses were left unburied, until at last we began to think that we should all be finished off by the sickness, which lasted many moons, perhaps sixteen or eighteen. When at last the sickness did cease, the villages were half empty, whole families had been swept away, and the few who were left were so weak that most of the work in the villages had to be left undone. Then many more died of the hunger and after-effects, because they were unable to work to get food, and had no friends left to help them. But one thing had to go on without cessation all the time, and that was rubber collecting. It must have varied in quantity, but the supply was never allowed to stop during all that dreadful time. When our wives and children or mothers and fathers were sick and we knew not what the end of the sickness would be, we still had to leave them with others, or even alone, and go into the forest on another errand—that of rubber collecting! Many a relative died in those days without our ever knowing of their illness; but we were rubber men. Were we not also slaves, having no choice but to go, even though the rubber sap seemed to us sometimes like drops of our blood? CHAPTER VIII OTHER CHANGES. HOPE DEFERRED A change of labour—We become hunters—A new demand—And new difficulties—Failure—The sentry’s demand—The old men’s plea—Murder—We tell the men of God—And complain to the rubber man—The white chief—The things written in a book—And no remedy comes—Hunting again—The English visitor—The white woman—Results of making complaints—The sentries’ threats—The one way of escape—“Better to be with the hunters than the hunted”—Another sorrow—The sleeping-sickness—“Just a little while, and they die”—We cry to the white people. As I was telling you before, many of our people died of the “sickness from above,” including a number of the young men who worked rubber. Of necessity the supply of rubber became very small when there were so few to collect it in the forest. After the sickness was finished, and the white men found that it was really true that so many of our people were dead, and that others were still sick and unfit for work, they called us young men of Ekaka together and told us some very good news. It was this. That they had decided that we should make no more rubber, but be freed entirely from that work on condition that we men would hunt antelopes for the white man’s table, and bring smoked meat for his workmen’s rations, and that our women would supply tökö (manioca cooked ready for eating) at stated intervals.