As far as the eye could reach either bank of the slow river was thus 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 will fight and quarrel and bicker so long as human nerves are human nerves. The irritability lurks in the shades of boundless forests where men may starve for want of animal sustenance; it hovers over the broad bosoms of a hundred slow rivers haunted by the mysterious crocodile, the weird hippopotamus. It is everywhere, and by reason of it men quarrel about trifles and descend to brutal passion over a futile discussion. Victor Durnovo had sent his boatmen into the forest to find a few bananas, a few handsful of firewood, and while they were absent he gave vent to that wild unreasoning passion which is inhaled into the white man's lungs with the air of equatorial Africa. For there are moral microbes in the atmosphere of different countries, and we must not judge one land by the laws of another. There is the fatalism of India, the restlessness of New York, the fear of the Arctic, the irritability of Africa. “Curse this country!” he shouted, “curse it--curse it! River and tree--man and beast!”