"My dear Pommerelle and Desrioux, for, as you say you always meet to read our letters, this one is addressed to you both. I write to you in my own name, and those of de Morin and Delange, who are too much occupied with our final preparations for departure to say good-bye to you as they could have wished.
"We hope to embark in an hour's time, if we can manage to collect our sailors, escort, and servants, the whole lot having been undiscoverable and unmanageable ever since they handled their five months' pay, and are evidently bent on leaving their last piastre in the purlieus of Khartoum.
"I have, in my former letters, posted you both up fully as regards our projected plans, which have not been altered in the least. We are going to bear in a straight line southward as far as the seriba, where Nassar states he entertained M. de Guéran. There we shall endeavour to hit upon and follow up the track of our fellow-countryman; but it is evident, as far as de Morin and I are concerned, that if we had known in France as much about the Baron as we have learnt in Khartoum, we should have mapped out a very different plan of operations.
"In reality, if M. de Guéran has succeeded, as he seems in his letter to expect, in crossing the frontier of the Monbuttoos and making either Lake Albert Nyanza or Lake Tanganyika, we are simply going to follow in his footsteps, without any chance of overtaking him. If, on the contrary, we had started from Zanzibar, by way of Kazé, in a north-westerly direction, we might have met him actually coming towards us, and, in any case, we could have reached, from that side, the unknown countries he proposed to visit just as easily as by the Monbuttoo territory. If we could begin de novo, we should therefore start from Zanzibar. But these reflections are futile and all regrets superfluous.
"Good-bye, then, my dear friends, from all of us. Do not quite forget us, take our part against those who call us fools, and if you never hear from us more, say to yourselves that we died thinking of you and our beloved France."
END OF VOL. I.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Parisian Sultana, Vol. I (of 3), by Adolphe Belot