of thatched reeds, stood at the edge of a tangled forest, on a low hill above the marshy borders of the tepid lake. All about it there rose a primeval world, where the vegetation was alternately lush and riotous or burned to a cinder, and the earth at one season lay soaked with water and gave off a hot mist and at another turned so dry that the fantastic birds and animals for hundreds of miles gathered about the life-giving lake to drink and kill and leave the border strewn with bleaching bones. Once, a dozen years earlier, the mission had been a post for Portuguese slave-traders, but with the end of the trade the jungle had once more taken possession, thrusting whole trees through the decaying thatch and overrunning barricade and huts with a tangle of writhing vines. It was thus they had come upon it, young Philip Downes and his pale wife, Naomi, and the strange Swede, Swanson, who by some odd circumstance felt that he was called by God from the state of hospital porter to save the heathen from their sin. Of the three, only Naomi, the daughter of missionaries, knew anything of the hostility of such a world. Philip was a boy of twenty-three who had never been outside his own state and Swanson only an enormous, stupid, tow-headed man with the strength of a bull.
It was a world of the most fantastic exaggeration, where the very reeds that bordered the lake were tall as trees and the beasts which trampled them down—the lumbering leviathans of the Old Testament—were, it seemed, designed upon a similar scale. In the moonlight the beasts thrust their way by sheer bulk to break great paths to the feeding-grounds along the shore. At times, during the rainy season, whole acres
