"What's the use!" he exclaimed.
"Try," laughed Everett."Maybe I'm not as unintelligent as Italk."
"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 coward with authority, he becomes a bully.