But the tornado had blown out the heart of its strength. In five more minutes the wind had dropped, the rain ceased, the air cleared, the sun glared out overhead and began to heat the tropical day, and white steam oozed up from all the face of creation.
This time Carter's rifle represented the whole orchestra of death for the defence. The factory Krooboys' flintlocks spoke no more; the ill-aimed Winchesters of the snuff-and-butter colored da Silva and his wife were silent. The Portuguese and the factory clerks, and the factory porters had cannily crawled away into the bush. They knew nothing of what was ahead of them in those steamy shades. One certainty alone fluttered big in their minds, and that was that they were leaving massacre behind.
In the factories which dot the West African seaboard and rivers, death is such a constant visitor that much of his grimness had faded. At home, in England, or America, or Hamburg, we shiver with apprehension whenever our relative who is "out on the West Coast" comes up into the mind; but the relative himself takes his doses of fever when they fall due with a certain callous philosophy, and on his emergence shattered and shrunken from the attack, congratulates himself on not being a candidate for a gun-case and a top hat that time. Those who go up in the bush and are there engulfed, those who get drowned in the ever-grinding surf, those who go out by the thousand and one opportunities which the climate and the surroundings offer, slip off their human garb with an easy nonchalance; and those who are left pronounce some pithy epitaph over the deceased, and go on with their quicker interests.
With the native African, death is an event of even smaller moment still; and in the event of a quarrel, one competitor will often sit down, cuddle his knees, shut his eyes, and there and then deliberately suspend his vital processes, merely to cause temporary annoyance to his rival.
Now, the above paragraphs are somewhat of the nature of a footnote elevated to the text. But they are necessary at this point in these memoirs to explain the coolness with which Laura and Carter viewed the near prospect of extinction. Neither of them of course in the least wished to die, but it never occurred to them to face death with anything beyond the usual Coast philosophy.
