"RichardHardingDavis-AQuestionOfLatitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Richard Harding)

to send out his fighting men and they'd prove it. It cast quite a gloom over the
celebration."
"Do you mean that only twenty miles from the coast--" began Everett.
"TEN miles," said the Coaster. "wait till you see Calabar. That's our Exhibit A.
The cleanest, best administered. Everything there is model: hospitals, barracks,
golf links. Last year, ten miles from Calabar, Dr. Stewart rode his bicycle into
a native village. The king tortured him six days, cut him up, and sent pieces of
him to fifty villages with the message: 'You eat each other. WE eat white chop.'
That was ten miles from our model barracks."
For some moments the muckraker considered the statement thoughtfully.
"You mean," he inquired, "that the atrocities are not all on the side of the
white men?"
"Atrocities?" exclaimed the trader. "I wasn't talking of atrocities. Are you
looking for them?"
"I'm not running away from them," laughed Everett. "Lowell's Weekly is sending
me to the Congo to find out the truth, and to try to help put an end to them."
In his turn the trader considered the statement carefully.
"Among the natives," he explained, painstakingly picking each word, "what you
call 'atrocities' are customs of warfare, forms of punishment. When they go to
war they EXPECT to be tortured; they KNOW, if they're killed, they'll be eaten.
The white man comes here and finds these customs have existed for centuries. He
adopts them, because--"
"One moment!" interrupted Everett warmly. "That does not excuse HIM. The point
is, that with him they have NOT existed. To him they should be against his
conscience, indecent, horrible! He has a greater knowledge, a much higher
intelligence; he should lift the native, not sink to him."
The Coaster took his pipe from his mouth, and twice opened his lips to speak.
Finally, he blew the smoke into the air, and shook his head.
"What's the use!" he exclaimed.
"Try," laughed Everett. "Maybe I'm not as unintelligent as I talk."
"You must get this right," protested the Coaster. "It doesn't matter a damn what
a man BRINGS here, what his training WAS, what HE IS. The thing is too strong
for him."
"What thing?"
"That!" said the Coaster. He threw out his arm at the brooding mountains, the
dark lagoons, the glaring coast-line against which the waves shot into the air
with the shock and roar of twelve-inch guns.
"The first white man came to Sierra Leone five hundred years before Christ,"
said the Coaster. "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