Meredith?"
He threw himself suddenly back and wiped his dripping face. There
was a silence, the great African silence that drives educated men
mad, and fills the imagination of the poor heathen with wild tales
of devils and spirits.
Then Jack Meredith spoke, without moving.
"I'm your man," he said, "with a few more details."
Victor Durnovo was lying back at full length on the hard dry mud,
his arms beneath his head. Without altering his position he gave
the details, speaking slowly and much more quietly. It seemed as if
he spoke the result of long pent-up thought.
"We shall want," he said, "two thousand pounds to start it. For we
must have an armed force of our own. We have to penetrate through a
cannibal country, of the fiercest devils in Africa. It is a
plateau, a little plateau of two square miles, and the niggers think
that it is haunted by an evil spirit. When we get there we shall
have to hold it by force of arms, and when we send the stuff down to
the coast we must have an escort of picked men. The bushes grow up
there as thick as gooseberry bushes in a garden at home. With a
little cultivation they will yield twice as much as they do now. We
shall want another partner. I know a man, a soldierly fellow full
of fight, who knows the natives and the country.
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