What wonderful information this was, and if all true, we should have the most bewildering river system, by all odds in the world. We should find the old Portuguese map of three hundred years ago reproduced and verified, and the anomaly of three mighty streams draining a continent mingling their parent waters, and even permitting the passage of a boat at high water, so that in the end it might go to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic or Indian Oceans.
Further, Rumanika stated that Ruanda is peopled by demons, and that beyond, on a lake called Mkinyaga, are a race of cannibals, and also pigmies, not two feet high. Stanley verified the king’s story by a visit to the Ruanda folks, who gnashed their teeth like dogs and otherwise expressed their objections to his visit; and Dr. Schweinfurth found, a little nearer the western coast, evidences of a tribe of dwarfs who are supposed to be the aboriginal people of the continent. But the hardest of Rumanika’s stories was of a tribe who had ears so long that one answered for a blanket to lie on and another as a cover for the sleeper. Stanley began to think his civilized wonders were too tame to pit against those of the African king.
The larger African animals abound in the Karagwe country. Stanley was much interested in the accounts of white elephants and rhinoceri. He had the good fortune to find one of the former animals, which he shot, but found it only a dirty grey brute, just as we find the advertised white elephants of the menagerie. The elephant is the most unpleasant neighbor of the rhinoceros. If they meet in a jungle the rhinoceros has to squeeze his ponderous body into the thicket or prepare for a battle royal. In such a quarrel his tusk is an ugly weapon but no match for the tusks of the elephant. The elephant sometimes treats
him like a school boy and, breaking off a limb, belabors the unlucky rhinoceros till he beats a retreat. At other times the elephant will force him against a tree and pin him there with his tusks, or throw him down and tramp him till the life is out of him. Perhaps these were more of Rumanika’s yarns, but certain it is both beasts are formidable in a forest path, especially when alone and of surly temper.
SHOOTING A RHINOCEROS.
On the southern borders of Karagwe is a ridge 5000 feet high. Beyond this the waters trend southward and toward Tanganyika. And beyond this ridge the people change. There are no more stately kings, but petty, lying, black-mailing chiefs, just as we found about Gondokoro. Here Stanley encountered Mirambo, whose name is a word of terror from the Victoria Lake to the Nyassa, and from Tanganyika to Zanzibar.
To the explorer’s astonishment he found this notorious personage—
“The mildest-mannered man
That ever cut a throat”—
in short “a thorough African gentleman.”