of their lives must be sacrificed simply in a struggle to exist at all. There would be no time to spread the Word among the black people who watched them, alternately shy as gazelles or hilarious as hyenas, from the borders of the forest or the marshes.
He was not a large man—Philip—and his hair was dark, curling close against his small head. His skin, olive-colored like his father's, framed blue eyes that seemed to burn with a consuming, inward fire, the eyes of one who would never be happy. And he was neatly made with light, supple muscles. One would have said that of the three he was the one most fitted to survive in the fantastic, cruel world of Megambo.
And yet (he sometimes pondered it himself) the great blond Swanson, with his pale, northern skin and thin yellow hair, and Naomi with her thin, anemic body and white, freckled skin, seemed not to suffer in the least. They worked after he had fallen with exhaustion, his nerves so raw that he would wander off along the lake lest the seething irritation that consumed him should get the better of his temper. Swanson and Naomi went hopefully on, talking of the day when these rotting huts over which they toiled would give way to houses of brick where sons of negro children would sit learning the words that were to lift them from the sloughs of sin to the blessings of their white brethren. Naomi was even more clever than Swanson. Her courage never flagged and the strange, happy, luminous look in her eyes was never dimmed. She knew, too, the tricks of living in such a world, since, except for two voyages to America to raise money for missions, she had never lived in any other.
They could even sleep, Swanson and Naomi, lost
