“I suspect we are not very well fitted to instruct the unenlightened mind,” (“Ho—hi!” sighed Makarooroo, gathering himself up and settling down to listen), “and it seems to me that you’ll have to try again, Peterkin, some other mode of explanation.”
“Very good, by all means,” said our friend.—“Now, Mak, look here. You want to go there” (pointing to the coast with his left hand), “and we want to go there” (pointing to the interior with his right hand). “Now if we both agree to go there,” (pointing straight before him with his nose), “that will be a cumprumoise. D’ye understand?”
“Ho yis, massa, me compiperhend now.”
“Exactly so,” said I; “that’s just it. There is a branch of this river that takes a great bend away to the north before it turns towards the sea, is there not? I think I have heard yourself say so before now.”
“Yis, massa, hall right.”
“Well, let us go by that branch. We shall be a good deal longer on the route, but we shall be always nearing the end of our journey, and at the same time shall pass through a good deal of new country, in which we may hope to see much game.”
“Good,” said Jack; “you have wisdom with you for once, Ralph—it seems feasible.—What say you, Mak? I think it a capital plan.”
“Yis, massa, it am a copitle plan, sure ’nuff.”
The plan being thus arranged and agreed to, we set about the execution of it at once, and ere long our two canoes were floating side by side down the smooth current of the river.
The route which we had chosen led us, as I had before suspected, into the neighbourhood of the gorilla country, and I was much gratified to learn from Mbango, who had travelled over an immense portion of south-western Africa, that it was not improbable we should meet with several of those monstrous apes before finally turning off towards the coast. I say that I was much gratified to learn this; but I little imagined that I was at that time hastening towards a conflict that well-nigh proved fatal to me, and the bare remembrance of which still makes me shudder.