"And, in twenty-two hundred years, he's got
just twenty miles inland. The native didn't need forts, or a navy, to
stop him. He had three allies: those waves, the fever, and the sun.
Especially the sun. The black man goes bare-headed, and the sun lets him
pass. The white man covers his head with an inch of cork, and the sun
strikes through it and kills him. When Jameson came down the river from
Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat. He waved his helmet at them for
three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe. Three
minutes was all the sun wanted. Jameson died in two days. Where you are
going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him: it drives him
mad. It keeps the fear of death in his heart; and _that_ takes away his
nerve and his sense of proportion. He flies into murderous fits, over
silly, imaginary slights; he grows morbid, suspicious, he becomes a
coward, and because he is a coward with authority, he becomes a bully.
"He is alone, we will suppose, at a station three hundred miles from any
other white man. One morning his house-boy spills a cup of coffee on
him, and in a rage he half kills the boy.
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