Dark Continent

“ It could as easily be overthrown as our belief in war, as our international hatreds, as our old conception of the status of women, as our fear of educating the masses, and as our belief in the necessity of poverty. We can, if we will, inaugurate on the Dark Continent a last great crusade for humanity. With Africa redeemed Asia would be safe and Europe indeed triumphant. ”

“ Many men of his blood and type—simple, strenuous, somewhat prosaic—had threaded their way through some dark continent to add some treasure or territory to the English name. He was seeking what for us his countrymen has long been a dark continent—but which contains a much more noble treasure. The glory of a great people, long hidden from the English by accidents and by lies, lay before him at his journey's end. ”

“ We have said our last words for years, perhaps forever, to kindly men! The sun sinks fast to the western horizon, and gloomy is the twilight that now deepens and darkens. Thick shadows fall upon the distant land and over the silent sea, and oppress our throbbing, regretful hearts, as we glide away through the dying light towards the Dark Continent.
"Upon landing at Bagamoyo, on the morning of the 13th of November, we marched to occupy the old house where we had stayed so long to prepare the first expedition. ”

“ The dark continent of motive and desire has never been explored. In the brain, that wondrous world with one inhabitant, there are recesses dim and dark, treacherous sands and dangerous shores, where seeming sirens tempt and fade ”

“ The Dark Continent has no love for me; on the march it persecuted me daily with its whirlwinds, and here at Chingulungulu it pursues a systematic plan for expelling me from its interior. Knudsen and I dine between twelve and one. ”

“ In a world less full of strange hazards I must have lost patience with calamity, and made a swift and sudden end of myself. Thanks to the Dark Continent I have lived somehow, as you see, and come back a semi-savage, a creature of thews and sinews. ”

“ Once again, if millennial contact and intermingling of such near affinities as Teuton and Alpine Kelt have not availed to efface their distinguishing features, either of body or of mind—if the wonted ancestral fires still live in the remote descendants—how can we hope for aught else from the mixture of European and African? Will not the slumberous apathy in which the Dark Continent broods away its æons surely fall upon the people that drink its blood into their own veins? Not to anticipate such a result is to scorn analogy, to despise science, to defy history. ”

“ What you termed the Dark Continent of Africa, as well as the great continents of Sonth America and Australia, was over-run by humanity. For many centuries the various governments of the earth had made it a rule to do all in their power to preserve decrepit life and allow it to multiply. ”

“ And so, little by little, the sun rises upon the Dark Continent. One by one the old evil customs pass away. The Moorish galleys no longer hold the seas in dread; the slave caravan no longer leaves its terrible track of bleaching bones from Central Africa to the coast. Benin and Omdurman, and other 'cruel habitations,' have been thrown open and broken down. Wise heads have thought and planned, brave blood has been shed, noble lives laid down for the good of Africa, and, by slow degrees, the shadows are fleeing before the dawn. ”

“ European manufacturers dream night and day of Africa, of a lake in the Saharan desert, of a railroad to the Soudan. They anxiously follow the progress of Livingston, Stanley, Du Chaillu; they listen open-mouthed to the marvelous tales of these brave travelers. What unknown wonders are contained in the "dark continent"! ”

“ Only in the extreme North have we any romance in American travel which can at all compare with that so inseparably connected with the winning of each of the secrets of that sister continent so aptly named the Dark. ”

“ The American bowed across the table with a serious politeness, and then began, playing idly with a quaint ring on his long finger as he talked.
“If you go to the Barbary coast, where the last wedge of the forests narrows down between the desert and the great tideless sea, you will find the natives still telling a strange story about a saint of the Dark Ages. There, on the twilight border of the Dark Continent, you feel the Dark Ages. ”

“ The rosy tints of the morning dawn of destiny have scarcely risen in the east of this mighty continent—the boldest and the wildest imagination cannot soar into futurity, and predict its noon-day glories, or count up the tides and floods of human beings, that shall be wafted to these shores, and thence roll in successive waves, to the dark and as yet unknown west. ”

“ And all the time that this has been going on, away off there across the ocean, in that new continent hitherto unexplored, Baker, Livingstone and Stanley, with untiring industry, have been prosecuting their work; and “the great dark continent” is being made a light continent in one respect—light to our knowledge, only that something greater and grander may follow. Are these lines parallel—the lines of God’s movements in America and the lines of God’s movements in Africa? They converge ”

“ Thus they in Heaven, above the starry sphere, Their happy hours in joy and hymning spent. Mean while upon the firm opacous globe Of this round world, whose first convex divides The luminous inferiour orbs, enclosed From Chaos, and the inroad of Darkness old, Satan alighted walks: A globe far off It seemed, now seems a boundless continent Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky ”

“ Those whose inspirations and whose lives have created this oasis in the desert, plead only that no intruder now should be allowed to undo their labor or idly reap its fruits. Here is one spot, at least, on the Dark Continent, which is being kept pure and clean. It is now within the power of the English Government to mark it off before the world as henceforth sacred ground. ”

“ Our condensers, which compress, cool, and rarefy air, enabling travellers to obtain water and even ice from the atmosphere, are great aids in desert exploration, removing absolutely the principal distress of the ancient caravan. The erstwhile 'Dark Continent' has a larger white population now than North America had a hundred years ago, and has this advantage for the future, that it contains 11,600,000 square miles, while North America has less than 9,000,000. ”

“ Apart from other considerations, it is essential in the interests of civilization and of commerce that the route to the interior of the Dark Continent should be kept in our hands. It has been through the stations planted by our missionaries all along it, as far as Matabeleland, that the influence of the Gospel has been spread among the natives, and that the way has been made safe and easy for the traveller and the trader. Can we suppose that these stations can be maintained if we suffer the road to fall within the limits of the Transvaal? ”

“ On the coasts of the Dark Continent of Ignorance the several sciences have gained a foothold. In each case there is a well-defined country carefully surveyed and guarded. Within its frontiers the laws are obeyed, and all affairs are carried on in an orderly fashion. Beyond it is a vague "sphere of influence," a Hinter-land over which ambitious claims of suzerainty are made; but the native tribes have not yet been exterminated, and life goes on very much as in the olden time. ”

“ To compare a fifty-years-old map of Africa with one of the present day will a little enable us to estimate the advances made in our acquaintance with the Dark Continent alone; similar maps including the Polar regions of North America will testify also to a large increase of hard-won knowledge. ”

“ For me too they are heroes, these poor, ignorant children of Africa, for, from the first deadly struggle in savage Ituru to the last staggering rush into Embomma, they had rallied to my voice like veterans, and in the hour of need they had never failed me. And thus, aided by their willing hands and by their loyal hearts, the expedition had been successful, and the three great problems of the Dark Continent's geography had been fairly settled." [95]
How many times we have read this marvellous narrative of Stanley's march through the Dark Continent, we do not know ”

“ For centuries Africa has been known as the Dark Continent. The edges of this immense tract have been known as far back as 22history goes. Egypt, on the North, is the oldest government on earth; while the nations bordering on the Mediterranean and Red seas, were actors in the earliest recorded histories. ”

“ Of the 325,000,000 of people in civilized Europe, there must be some surely to whom the gospel of enterprise I preach will present a few items of fact worthy of retention in the memory, and capable of inspiring a certain amount of action. I am encouraged in this belief by the rapid absorption of several ideas which I have promulgated during the last few years respecting the Dark Continent. Pious missionaries have set forth devotedly to instil in the dull mindless tribes the sacred germs of religion ”

“ Their presence in Africa would, he wrote, create no surprise or hostility among the natives, and they would soon acquire influence over the native tribes and start the work of civilization. In this way the experiment of opening the dark continent would be tried under the only conditions that afford the least promise of success. ”

“ Dark Continent " are doomed to an everlasting childhood, incapable of expanding to man's estate. But the facts are there to refute the assumption, and to attest the progress already made during the short space of half a century — a progress wiiich, all things con- sidered, may perhaps be considered as relatively superior to that achieved by Europe herself in the course of two thousand years. Certain populations, such as the Basutos, who were till recently an,thropopha gists, have already outstripped in material culture and public instruction many of the laggard members of the European world. ”

“ On Zothique, the last continent on Earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood. ”

“ Below them the night land of the sea-bottom stretches far away into a light that shines eternally, a light no human eyes will ever see. Inside the cities which are tombs now, the beautiful bodies of the dwellers float hollow-boned, bare skeletons cleansed by the wandering denizens of the sea. The dead race lies forever entombed in its dead cities.
But a race still lives among them for awhile. A dark, alien race that destroyed its masters and shambles now among the ruins it made. Death lives with that race. ”

“ But no human being in the outside world could possibly conceive what takes place in that gigantic shadowland—vague and vast as the midnight heavens—a continent unknown, impenetrable!
"Shut away in that remote interior—in a valley so little heard of that it is almost mythical—beyond trackless deserts and the loftiest mountains on the globe—this terrible sect of sorcerers has been growing in power for thousands of years, storing up secret energy that some day should inundate the world with horrors such as never have been known! ”

“ With all that region I would have no more to do: for all here, it used to be said, lies a great sunken continent; and I thought it would be rising and shewing itself to my eyes, and driving me stark mad: for the earth is full of these contortions, sudden monstrous grimaces and apparitions, which are like the face of Medusa, affrighting a man into spinning stone; and nothing could be more appallingly insecure than living on a planet. ”

“ The most High Gods, that sit behind the stars, have a limit to even Their sublime patience; and that has been passed. The city of Atlantis, the great continent that is beyond, and all that are in them are doomed to unutterable destruction. Of old it was foreseen that this great wiping-out would happen through the sins of men, and to this end the Ark of the Mysteries was built under the direction of the Gods. No mortal implements can so much as scratch its surface, no waves or rocks wreck it. ”

“ And a vision of countries still more remote—regions of mists, northern lands, and, far across the ocean, the immense continent where she had appeared like an unknown force amid astonished multitudes, bearer of the mystic word and the flame of genius—vanished behind her head: the throngs, the mountains, rivers and gulfs, the impure cities, the ancient, enfeebled, savage race, the strong people aspiring to dominate the world, the new nation that wrests from Nature her most secret energies to make them serve an all-powerful work in erecting edifices of iron and of crystal ”

“ This area embraces the rest of the planet, comprising something less than half of its entire surface. Here is eternal night—a night of Stygian darkness, unlighted even by the stars, since the same atmosphere makes them invisible.
The Dark Country, so far as it has been explored—which is very little—is a rocky waste and a sea of solid ice that never melts. Near the borders of the Twilight Country a few people like our Eskimos exist—savages with huge white faces, and great, staring eyes. ”

“ Once in the æons which will never unfold their secrets now, when the continent of the Western seas was undreamed of by the sages and the philosophers of the Eastern world, when it was as alone, surrounded by its wide waters, as the planets are alone in their wastes of space, when it was living its own life,—which was to leave no trace upon the scroll of the wisdom of the ages,—the mountains and the bowels of the earth melted before the wrath of that same Lord whose voice shook the wilderness of Judæa. ”