Thirty days after leaving the Thames I landed at the seat of the government. I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then an undersized railway truck lying on its back with its wheels in the air. A blasting was going on, objectless, upon a cliff that was not in the way of anything. A chain gang passed me, six black men who walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets of earth on their heads, each with an iron collar on his neck. I avoided a vast artificial hole and stepped into a grove where I found shapes of black men in every pose of contorted collapse, dying slowly. Near the buildings I met a white man so elegantly dressed that I took him for a vision: the Company's chief accountant, who kept his books in apple-pie order.