They went down to breakfast, and the morning was occupied in getting their kit and packages together. At noon the steamer was berthed at a pier, and their packages were transferred to a paddle-wheeler, which was to take them over three hundred miles up the wide estuary to a Belgian station. Thence, perhaps, they would proceed hundreds of miles further by another river steamer before they took to their own boat.
"Why, we may be days before we really get to work," said Venning, when the vastness of the Congo was forced on his attention by a casual reference to "hundreds of miles."
"Days—weeks, my boy, before we come to the fringe of our field. The river is more than half the length of the Continent; its length is half the distance by sea from Southampton to the Cape, and, next to the Amazon, it pours a greater body of water into the sea than any river in the world."
"Africa," said Compton, "seems to be the driest and the wettest, in parts, of any country; and all its great rivers, except the Nile, run to waste."
"They'll keep," said Mr. Hume. "When the old world gets tired, worn out, and over-populated, it will find use for these big, silent, deserted rivers, that would carry the ships of the world on their yellow waters."
CHAPTER IV
THE STORY OF MUATA
They went from the wide estuary into the true river, with a width that opened out at times to twenty miles; and while the white men sweltered on the sticky decks, the rescued man grew in strength. When they reached Stanley Pool his skin was like satin again, with a polish on it from the palm-oil he rubbed in continually.
And when he found his strength he found use for his tongue, and in the speech he made to his rescuers. Mr. Hume caught the meaning of a few words of Bantu, Compton detected a phrase or two in Arabic, and Venning, who had been schooling himself since they passed Banana Point at the river mouth, picked out other words in the tongue of the river tribes.
The meaning of his speech, when they had made a mosaic of the different understood facts, was this—that he was a great man in his own land, but only a child now, being without arms or men, but that if the white men ever came to his place, he would be a father and a mother to them. He would throw his shield before them, and protect them with bow and spear.