TERRIFIC FIGHT FOR LIFE.
“Within two months the Pasha proposed to visit Fort Bodo, taking Mr. Jephson with him. At Fort Bodo I have left instructions to the officers to destroy the fort and accompany the Pasha to the Nyanza. I hope to meet them all again on the Nyanza, as I intend making a short cut to the Nyanza along a new road.”
In a subsequent letter wherein he refers to his return to the rear, to bring up those of his forces that had been left behind, he says:
“This has certainly been the most extraordinary expedition I have ever led into Africa.
“A regular divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed. I say it with all reverence. It has impelled us whither it would, effected its own will, but nevertheless guided us and protected us.
“What can you make of this, for instance? On August 17th, 1887, all the officers of the rear column are united at Yambuya. They have my letter of instructions before them, but instead of preparing for the morrow’s march to follow our track, they decide to wait at Yambuya, which decision initiates the most awful season any community of men ever endured in Africa or elsewhere.
“The results are that three-quarters of their force die of slow poison. Their commander is murdered, and the second officer dies soon after of sickness and grief. Another officer is wasted to a skeleton and obliged to return home. A fourth is sent to wander aimlessly up and down the Congo, and the survivor is found in such a fearful pest-hole that we dare not describe its horrors.
“On the same date, one hundred and fifty miles away, the officer of the day leads three hundred and thirty-three men of the advanced column into the bush, loses the path and all consciousness of his whereabouts, and every step he takes only leads him further astray. His people become frantic; his white companions, vexed and irritated by the sense of the evil around them, cannot devise any expedient to relieve him. They are surrounded by cannibals, and poison-tipped arrows thin their numbers.
“Meantime, I, in command of the river column, am anxiously searching up and down the river in four different directions; through forests my scouts are seeking for them, but not until the sixth day was I successful in finding them.
“Taking the same month and the same date in 1888, a year later, on August 17th, I listen, horror-stricken, to the tale of the last surviving officer of the rear column at Banalya, and am told of nothing but death and disaster, disaster and death, death and disaster. I see nothing but horrible forms of men smitten with disease, bloated, disfigured and scarred, while the scene in the camp, infamous for the murder of poor Barttelot Barth four weeks before, is simply sickening.