Kayerts is an overweight, mild-mannered former government telegraph office clerk from Belgium. He takes the remote assignment to secure funds for his daughter's dowry. Lacking practical experience in trading or management, he relies heavily on his self-perception as an emissary of European civilization and maintains an officious, slightly nervous demeanor.

Carlier is a former career officer in the Belgian national cavalry. Tall and thin, he takes the outpost assignment because his wife's family wants to distance themselves from his tendency to live off their money. He avoids hard labor, preferring to smoke cigars on the veranda and engage in idle conversations about life back in Belgium.

Makola is a pragmatic and bilingual man from Sierra Leone who manages the financial and operational realities of the trading post. While he presents himself with European affectations—even asking to be called Henry Price—he maintains a quiet contempt for the ineptitude of the two newly arrived Belgian administrators.

The managing director of the Great Trading Company's regional operations is a practical man who oversees multiple trading stations along the river. He views his new employees with skepticism, privately dismissing them as imbeciles as he leaves them to manage the remote station until he returns in six months.

Gobila is a local man from a nearby village who frequently interacts with the outpost. He observes the inept white traders with a mixture of reverence and fear, wondering if they might be immortal deities anticipated by his people.

She lives in Belgium and requires a dowry to become a more attractive potential wife. Her financial needs prompt her father to seek lucrative employment in the deep Congo.

She is married to the former cavalry officer. Her family, exhausted by Carlier's tendency to live off their funds, actively works to get him assigned to the distant African outpost.

A failed artist who took the Congo posting out of desperation and homelessness in Belgium. He fashioned a slightly irregular, perpendicular wooden cross for the station before passing away from a fever.

She resides at the isolated Congo trading post alongside her husband and their three children. Her presence contributes to Makola's settled, pragmatic approach to life in the wilderness.

They are the three children of Makola and his wife. They live at the remote trading post with their parents, representing a rare domestic element in the otherwise severe colonial environment.