The Fire-Gods: A Tale of the Congo

THE EXPLORERS' CLUB The Explorers' Club no longer exists. To-day, as a matter of fact, it is a tea-shop in Old Bond Street--a small building, wedged between two greater ones, a fashionable milliner's and a famous Art Establishment. Towards the end of the last century, in what is known as the mid-Victorian era, the Explorers' Club was in the heyday of its glory. The number of its members was limited to two hundred and fifty-one. In the inner smoking-room, through the green baize doors, where guests were not admitted, both the conversation and the company were at once remarkable and unique. The walls were adorned with the trophies of the chase: heads of elk, markhor, ibex, haartebeest and waterbuck; great lions and snarling tigers; mouflon from Cyprus, and the white leopard of the Himalayas. If you looked into the room through the glass peep-hole in one of the green baize doors, you might have thought at first that you beheld a menagerie, where the fiercest and the rarest beasts in the world were imprisoned in a single cage. But, presently, your attention would have been attracted by the great, sun-burnt men, sprawling in the leather chairs, dressed in tweeds for the most part, and nearly every one with a blackened briar pipe between his lips. In those days, Africa was the "Dark Continent"; the source of the Nile and the Great Lakes were undiscovered, of the Congo nothing was known. Nor was this geographical ignorance confined to a single continent: in every part of the world, vast tracts of country, great rivers and mountains were as yet unexplored. And the little that was known of these uttermost parts of the earth never passed the green baize doors of the inner smoking-room of the Explorers' Club. There, in an atmosphere blue with smoke, where a great fire roared in winter to keep the chill of the London fog from the bones of those who, time and again, had been stricken with the fevers of the equatorial parts, a small group of men would sit and talk by the hour. There great projects were suggested, criticised and discussed. A man would rise from his seat, take down a map of some half-discovered country, and placing his finger upon a blank space, announce in tones of decision that that was the exact spot to which he intended to go. And if he went, perhaps, he would not come back