A march of nine and a half miles on the 9th of November took us to a Pigmies' camp. Until noon a mist had hung over the land. Towards the latter part of the tramp we passed through several lately deserted villages of the dwarfs, and across eight streams. 1887.
Nov. 9.
Indékaru. Khamis, the guide, and his followers, and about half-a-dozen of the pioneers proceeded to Ibwiri, which was only one and a half mile distant, and on the next day we joined them. This was one of the richest and finest clearings we had seen since leaving Yambuya, though had the Expedition been despatched eight months earlier, we should have found scores in the same prosperous condition. Here was a clearing three miles in diameter abounding in native produce, and hitherto unvisited by the Manyuema. Almost every plantain stalk bore an enormous branch of fruit, with from fifty to one hundred and forty plantains attached. Some specimens of this fruit were twenty-two inches long, two and a half inches in diameter, and nearly eight inches round, large enough to furnish Saat Tato the hunter, with his long desired full meal. There was an odour of ripe fruit pervading the air, and as we climbed over the logs and felt our way gingerly along the prostrate timber, I was often asked by the delighted people to note the bunches of mellow fruit hanging temptingly before their eyes.
Before reaching the village Murabo, a Zanzibari headman, whispered to me that there were five villages in Ibwiri, and that each hut in every village was more than a fourth full of Indian corn, but that Khamis and his Manyuema had been storing corn in their own huts, which, according to right of preemption, they had reserved for themselves.
On entering the street of the village, Khamis met me with the usual complaints about the wickedness of the "vile Zanzibaris." Looking down on the ground I saw many a trail of corn which went to corroborate Murabo's story, and as Khamis proposed that the Expedition should occupy the western half of the village, and he and his fifteen Manyuema would occupy the eastern half, I ventured to demur to the proposition on the ground that as we had departed out of his master's territory we claimed all the land to the eastward, and would in future dispense with any suggestion as to what we should do, and that furthermore not a grain of corn, nor plantain, banana, or any other native product in the 1887.
Nov. 10.
Ibwiri. land would leave the country without my permission. He was told, no people on earth could have borne so uncomplainingly such shames, affronts, and insults as had been put upon the Zanzibaris, and that in future they should be permitted to resent all such injuries as they best knew how. Khamis assented submissively to all this.
The first thing after storing goods, and distributing the men to their quarters, was to give fifty ears of corn per man, and to arrange with the natives as to our future conduct towards one another.
Within an hour it was agreed that the western half of the Ibwiri clearing should be granted to us for foraging; that the eastern half, from a certain stream, should be the reserve of the natives. Khamis, the Manyuema, was also induced to enter into the pact. In return for a packet of brass rods, Boryo, the principal chief of the Balessé of the district, presented us with five fowls and a goat.
This was a great day. Since August 31st not one follower of the Expedition had enjoyed a full meal, but now bananas, plantains ripe and green, potatoes, herbs, yams, beans, sugar-cane, corn, melons in such quantities were given them that were they so many elephants they could not have exhausted the stock provided for them in less than ten days. They could gratify to the full the appetite so long stinted and starved.
As we were compelled to wait for Mr. Jephson and some sixty Zanzibaris—forty of the relief party, boat's crew, and convalescents from Ipoto—the good effect of this abundance would be visible in a few clays. It was also one of those settlements we had been anxiously searching for as a recuperating station. On this date the men were hideous to look upon, because of their gaunt nakedness. They were naked, for they had stripped themselves to obtain food from the slaves of the Manyuema at Ugarrowwa's and Ipoto; of flesh they had none, for they had been reduced to bones by seventy-three days of famine and thirteen days of absolute want; of strength they had but little, and they were ill-favoured in every respect; their native colour of oiled bronze had become 1887.
Nov. 10.
Ibwiri. a mixture of grimy black and wood ashes; their rolling eyes betrayed signs of disease, impure blood, and indurated livers; that beautiful contour of body, and graceful and delicate outlines of muscles—alas, alas!—were all gone. They more befitted a charnel-house than a camp of men bound to continually wear fighting accoutrements.
Khamis, the Manyuema guide, offered the next morning to proceed east to search out the road from Ibwiri, for, as he informed me, Boryo, the chief, had told him of a grass-land being not many days off. He thought that with a few of Boryo's natives, and thirty of our riflemen, he could discover something of interest. Calling Boryo to me, he confirmed, as well as we could understand him, that from a place called Mandé, which he said was only two days' good marching—say forty miles—the grass-land could be seen; that herds of cattle came in such numbers to the Ituri river to drink that the river "swelled up." All this chimed with my eager desire to know how far we were from the open country, and as Boryo said he was willing to furnish guides, I called for volunteers. Twenty-eight men came forward, to my surprise, as willing and as eager for new adventures as though they had been revelling in plenty for the last few months. Khamis and his party departed shortly after.
Despite strict prohibition to touch anything on the native reservation of Ibwiri, one of our raiders paid it a visit, and captured nineteen fowls, two of which he had already despatched, the remaining seventeen he had decapitated, but our detectives pounced upon him and his stock, as he and his chum were debating what they should do with the feathers. The flesh and bones did not promise to be any trouble to them. Close by them two men had despatched an entire goat, excepting the head! These facts serve to illustrate the boundless capacity of Zanzibari stomachs.
The natives of Ibwiri had behaved most handsomely, and personally I felt a sense of shame at the ingratitude of my followers. The chief and his family were living with us, and exchanged their greetings of "Bodo, Bodo, 1887.
Nov. 10.
Ibwiri. ulenda, ulenda," half-a-dozen times a day. Yet our men had undergone such extremes of wretchedness during the last two and a half months that we might have well anticipated some excesses would be committed upon the first opportunity. No other body of men in the wide world that I am acquainted with could have borne such a period of hunger so meekly, so resignedly. Not a grain or a bit of human food discoverable anywhere, their comrades dying at every camp, or falling dead along the track, others less patient plunging into the depths of the wilderness maddened by hunger, leaving them to fare as they might under the burdens of war-munitions, and baggage. Goaded by the protracted hunger, and fierce despair, and loss of trust in their officers, they might have seized their Remingtons and, by one volley, have slain their white chiefs, and fed on them, and shaken off power, and, in a moment, the clutch of authority which, so far as they knew, was only dragging them down to certain doom.