The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

would eventually turn into a year. Another year, recovering very slowly from the fevers and trying to regain the weight he had lost, picking up the tennis racket again, swimming, playing bridge or chess to pass the long nights in Boma, while he resumed his tedious consular tasks: making note of the ships that arrived and departed, the goods the merchant ships of Antwerp unloaded—rifles, munitions, chicote whips, wine, holy pictures, crucifixes, colored glass beads—and the ones they carried to Europe, the immense stacks of rubber, ivory, and animal skins. This was the exchange that in his youthful imagination was going to save the Congolese from cannibalism and from the Arab merchants of Zanzibar who controlled the slave trade, and open the doors of civilization to them!
    For three weeks he was laid low by malarial fevers, at times delirious, taking drops of quinine dissolved in herbal infusions that Charlie and Mawuku prepared for him three times a day—his stomach tolerated only broth and pieces of boiled fish or chicken—and playing with John, his most loyal companion. He did not even have the energy to concentrate on reading.
    During this forced inactivity, Roger often thought about the expedition of 1884 under the leadership of his hero, Henry Morton Stanley. He had lived in the forests, visited countless indigenous villages, made camp in clearings surrounded by stockades of trees where monkeys screeched and wild beasts roared. He was tense and happy in spite of the bites of mosquitoes and other insects, against which rubbing with camphorated alcohol was useless. He swam in lagoons and rivers of dazzling beauty with no fear of crocodiles, still convinced that by doing what they were doing, he, the four hundred African porters, guides, and assistants, the twenty whites—English, German, Flemish, Walloon, French—who made up the expedition, and, of course, Stanley himself, constituted the tip of the lance of progress in this world where the Stone Age that Europe had left behind many centuries earlier was only just beginning to be visible.
    Years later, in the visionary half-sleep of fever, he blushed to think how blind he had been. He had not even been aware, at first, of the reason for the expedition led by Stanley and financed by the king of the Belgians, then considered—by Europe, the West, the world—to be a great humanitarian monarch bent on exterminating the social degradations of slavery and cannibalism and freeing the tribes from the paganism and servitude that kept them in a feral state.
    It would be another year before the great Western powers at the Berlin Conference of 1885 granted Leopold II the Congo Free State, more than a million square miles—eighty-five times the size of Belgium—but the king of the Belgians had already begun to administer the territory they were going to give him so he could put his redemptive principles into practice with the estimated twenty million Congolese believed to inhabit it. The monarch with the combed beard had contracted the great Stanley to that end, guessing, with his prodigious aptitude for detecting human weaknesses, that the explorer was equally capable of great deeds and formidable villainies if the prize was on a level with his appetites.
    The apparent reason for the 1884 expedition in which Roger served his apprenticeship as an explorer was to prepare the communities scattered along the banks of the Upper, Middle, and Lower Congo, in thousands of miles of dense jungles, gorges, waterfalls, and mountains thick with vegetation, for the arrival of the European merchants and administrators that the International Congo Society (AIC), presided over by Leopold II, would bring in once the Western powers granted him the concession. Stanley and his companions had to explain to the half-naked chieftains, tattooed and feathered, sometimes with thorns in their faces and arms, sometimes with reed funnels on their penises, the benevolent intentions of the Europeans: they