In order to be in a position to descend the Lualaba to its very mouth, Stanley engaged at Nyangwé 140 porters and nineteen boats. Difficulties arose from the very outset, and not only had he to contend with the cannibals of Ugusu, but, in order to avoid many unnavigable cataracts, he had to convey his boats many miles by land. Near the equator, just at the point where the Lualaba turns north-northwest, Stanley’s little convoy was attacked by a fleet of boats, manned by several hundred natives, whom, however, he succeeded in putting to flight. Nothing daunted, the resolute American pushed on to lat. 20° N. and ascertained, beyond room for doubt, that the Lualaba was really the Upper Zaire or Congo, and that, by following its course, he should come directly to the sea.
Beset with many perils was the way. Stanley was in almost daily collision with the various tribes upon the riverbanks; on the 3rd of June, 1877, he lost one of his companions, Frank Pocock, at the passage of the cataracts of Massassa, and on the 18th of July he was himself carried in his boat into the Mbelo Falls, and escaped by little short of a miracle.
On the 6th of August the daring adventurer arrived at the village of Ni Sanda, only four days from the sea; two days later he received a supply of provisions that had been sent by two Emboma merchants to Banza M’buko, the little coast-town where, after a journey of two years and nine months, fraught with every kind of hardship and privation, he completed his transit of the mighty continent. His toil told, at least temporarily, upon his years, but he had the grand satisfaction of knowing that he had traced the whole course of the Lualaba, and had ascertained, beyond reach of question, that as the Nile is the great artery of the north, and the Zambesi of the east, so Africa possesses in the west a third great river, which in a course of no less than 2,900 miles, under the names of the Lualaba, Zaire, and Congo, unites the lake district with the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1873, however, the date at which the Pilgrim foundered upon the coast, very little was known of the province of Angola, except that it was the scene of the western slave-trade, of which the markets of Bihé, Cassanga, and Kazunde were the chief centres. This was the country in which Dick Sands now found himself, a hundred miles from shore, in charge of a lady exhausted with fatigue and anxiety, a half-dying child, and a band of negroes who would be a most tempting bait to the slave-driver.
His last illusion was completely dispelled. He had no longer the faintest hope that he was in America, that land where little was to be dreaded from either native, wild beast, or climate; he could no more cherish the fond impression that he might be in the pleasant region between the Cordilleras and the coast, where villages are numerous and missions afford hospitable shelter to every traveller. Far, far away were those provinces of Bolivia and Peru, to which (unless a criminal hand had interposed) the Pilgrim would certainly have sped her way. No: too truly this was the terrible province of Angola; and worse than all, not the district near the coast, under the surveillance of the Portuguese authorities, but the interior of the country, traversed only by slave caravans, driven under the lash of the havildars.
Limited, in one sense, was the knowledge that Dick Sands possessed of this land of horrors; but he had read the accounts that had been given by the missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the Portuguese traders who frequented the route from St. Paul de Luanda, by San Salvador to the Zaire, as well as by Dr. Livingstone in his travels in 1853, and consequently he knew enough to awaken immediate and complete despair in any spirit less indomitable than his own.
Anyhow, his position was truly appalling.
II
Accomplices
On the day following that on which Dick Sands and his party had made their last halt in the forest, two men met by appointment at a spot about three miles distant.
The two men were Harris and Negoro, the one lately landed from New Zealand, the other pursuing his wonted occupation of slave-dealer in the province of Angola. They were seated at the foot of an enormous banyan-tree, on the banks of a rushing torrent that streamed between tall borders of papyrus.
After the conversation had turned awhile upon the events of the last few hours, Negoro said abruptly—
“Couldn’t you manage to get that young fifteen-year-old any farther into the interior?”
“No, indeed; it was a hard matter enough to bring him thus far; for the last few days his suspicions have been wide awake.”
“But just another hundred miles, you know,” continued Negoro, “would have finished the business off well, and those black fellows would have been ours to a dead certainty.”
“Don’t I tell you, my dear fellow, that it was more than time for me to give them the slip?” replied Harris, shrugging his shoulders. “Only too well I knew that our young friend was longing to put a shot into my body, and that was a sugarplum I might not be able to digest.”
The Portuguese gave a grunt of assent, and Harris went on—
“For several days I succeeded well enough. I managed to palm off the country as the forest of Atacama, which you may recollect I
