Then he travelled on to the next king, who rejoiced in the name of Daisy Korrabarri. Here Mungo learnt to his dismay that war was going on in the province that lay between him and the Niger, and the king could offer no protection. Still nothing deterred the resolute explorer, who took another route and continued his journey. Again he had to travel by night, for robbers haunted his path, which now lay among Mohammedans. He passed the very spot where Houghton had been left to die of starvation in the desert. As he advanced through these inhospitable regions, new difficulties met him. His attendants firmly refused to move farther. Mungo Park was now alone in the great desert Negroland, between the Senegal and the Niger, as with magnificent resolution he continued his way. Suddenly a clear halloo rang out on the night air. It was his black boy, who had followed him to share his fate. Onward they went together, hoping to get safely through the land where Mohammedans ruled over low-caste negroes. Suddenly a party of Moors surrounded him, bidding him come to Ali, the chief, who wished to see a white man and a Christian. Park now found himself the centre of an admiring crowd. Men, women, and children crowded round him, pulling at his clothes and examining his waistcoat buttons till he could hardly move. Arrived at Ali's tent, Mungo found an old man with a long white beard. "The surrounding attendants, and especially the ladies, were most inquisitive; they asked a thousand questions, inspected every part of my clothes, searched my pockets, and obliged me to unbutton my waistcoat and display the whiteness of my skin—they even counted my toes and fingers, as if they doubted whether I was in truth a human being." He was lodged in a hut made of corn stalks, and a wild hog was tied to a stake as a suitable companion for the hated Christian. He was brutally ill-treated, closely watched, and insulted by "the rudest savages on earth." The desert winds scorched him, the sand choked him, the heavens above were like brass, the earth beneath as the floor of an oven. Fear came on him, and he dreaded death with his work yet unfinished. At last he escaped from this awful captivity amid the wilds of Africa. Early one morning at sunrise, he stepped over the sleeping negroes, seized his bundle, jumped on to his horse, and rode away as hard as he could. Looking back, he saw three Moors in hot pursuit, whooping and brandishing their double-barrelled guns. But he was beyond reach, and he breathed again. Now starvation stared him in the face. To the pangs of hunger were added the agony of thirst. The sun beat down pitilessly, and at last Mungo fell on the sand. "Here," he thought—"here after a short but ineffectual struggle I must end all my hopes of being useful in my day and generation; here must the short span of my life come to an end."

THE CAMP OF ALI, THE MOHAMMEDAN CHIEF, AT BENOWN.
From a sketch by Mungo Park.

But happily a great storm came and Mungo spread out his clothes to collect the drops of rain, and quenched his thirst by wringing them out and sucking them. After this refreshment he led his tired horse, directing his way by the compass, lit up at intervals by vivid flashes of lightning. It was not till the third week of his flight that his reward came. "I was told I should see the Niger early next day," he wrote on 20th July 1796. "We were riding through some marshy ground, when some one called out 'See the water!' and, looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission—the long-sought-for majestic Niger glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward. I hastened to the brink and, having drunk of the water, lifted up my fervent thanks in prayer to the Great Ruler of all things, for having thus far crowned my endeavours with success. The circumstance of the Niger's flowing towards the east did not excite my surprise, for although I had left Europe in great hesitation on this subject, I had received from the negroes clear assurances that its general course was towards the rising sun."

He was now near Sego—the capital of Bambarra—on the Niger, a city of some thirty thousand inhabitants. "The view of this extensive city, the numerous canoes upon the river, the crowded population, and the cultivated state of the surrounding country, formed altogether a prospect of civilisation and magnificence which I little expected to find in the bosom of Africa." The natives looked at the poor, thin, white stranger with astonishment and fear, and refused to allow him to cross the river. All day he sat without food under the shade of a tree, and was proposing to climb the tree and rest among its branches to find shelter from a coming storm, when a poor negro woman took pity on his deplorable condition. She took him to her hut, lit a lamp, spread a mat upon the floor, broiled him a fish, and allowed him to sleep. While he rested she spun cotton with other women and sang: "The winds roared and the rains fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk, no wife to grind his corn"; and all joined in the chorus: "Let us pity the white man, no mother has he."

KAMALIA, A NATIVE VILLAGE NEAR THE SOUTHERN COURSE OF THE NIGER.
From a sketch by Mungo Park.

Mungo Park left in the morning after presenting his landlady with two of his last four brass buttons. But though he made another gallant effort to reach Timbuktu and the Niger, which, he was told, "ran to the world's end," lions and mosquitoes made life impossible. His horse was too weak to carry him any farther, and on 29th July 1796 he sadly turned back. "Worn down by sickness, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, half-naked, and without any article of value by which I might get provisions, clothes, or lodging, I felt I should sacrifice my life to no purpose, for my discoveries would perish with me." Joining a caravan of slaves, he reached the coast after some nineteen hundred miles, and after an absence of two years and nine months he found a suit of English clothes, "disrobed his chin of venerable encumbrance," and sailed for home. He published an account of the journey in 1799, after which he married and settled in Scotland as a doctor. But his heart was in Africa, and a few years later he started off again to reach Timbuktu. He arrived at the Gambia early in April 1805. "If all goes well," he wrote gaily, "this day six weeks I expect to drink all your healths in the water of the Niger." He started this time with forty-four Europeans, each with donkeys to carry baggage and food, but it was a deplorable little party that reached the great river on 19th August. Thirty men had died on the march, the donkeys had been stolen, the baggage lost. And the joy experienced by the explorer in reaching the waters of the Niger, "rolling its immense stream along the plain," was marred by the reduction of his little party to seven. Leave to pass down the river to Timbuktu was obtained by the gift of two double-barrelled guns to the King, and in their old canoes patched together under the magnificent name of "His Majesty's schooner the Joliba" (great water), Mungo Park wrote his last letter home.

A NATIVE WOMAN WASHING GOLD IN SENEGAL.
From a sketch by Mungo Park made on his last expedition.