Now it was only a couple of days' journey to Boma, near the mouth of the Congo, where there were trade factories and Europeans. Stanley wrote a letter to them, and was soon supplied with all necessaries; and after a short rest at Boma the party made the voyage round the south of Africa to Zanzibar, where Stanley dismissed his men.
He then travelled home, and was, of course, fêted everywhere. For a thousand years the Arabs had travelled into the interior of Africa, but they did not know the course of the Congo. European explorers had for centuries striven to penetrate the darkness. The natives themselves did not know whither the Lualaba ran. All at once Stanley had filled up the blank and knit together the scattered meshes of the net; and now a railway runs beside the falls, and busy steamboats fly up and down the Congo. Well did Stanley deserve his native name of Bula Matadi, or "the breaker of stones," for no difficulty was too great for him to overcome.
After a life of restless activity—including another great African journey to find Emin Pasha, the Governor of the Equatorial Province after Gordon's death—Stanley was gathered to his fathers in 1904. He was buried in a village churchyard outside London, and a block of rough granite was placed above the grave. Here may be read beneath a cross, "Henry Morton Stanley—Bula Matadi—1841-1904," and lastly the word that sums up all the work of his life, "Africa."
Timbuktu and the Sahara
In the middle of north-western Africa, where the continent shoots a gigantic tongue out into the Atlantic, lies one of the world's most famous towns, Timbuktu.
Compared with Cairo or Algiers, Timbuktu is a small town. Its three poor mosques cannot vie with the grand temples which under French, Turkish, or English dominion raise their graceful minarets on the Mediterranean shores of Africa. Not a building attracts the eye of the stranger amidst a confusion of greyish-yellow mud houses with flat roofs and without windows, and neglect and decay stare out from heaps of ruins. There is hardly a tottering caravanserai to invite the desert wanderer to rest. Some streets are abandoned, while in others the foot sinks over the ankle in blown sand from the Sahara.
Timbuktu is not so famous as the sparkling jewels in the diadem of Asia—Jerusalem and Mecca, Benares and Lhasa. The very name of each of these is, as it were, a vital portion of a great religion, and indeed almost stands for the religion itself. Timbuktu has scarcely any religion, or, more correctly, too many. And yet this town has borne a proud name during its eight hundred years of existence—the great, the learned, the mysterious city. No pilgrims flock thither to fall down in prayer before a redeemer's grave or be blessed by a high priest. No pyramids, no marble temples, make Timbuktu one of the world's wonders. No wealth, no luxuriant vegetation exist to make it an outer court to Paradise.
NORTH-WEST AFRICA.
And yet Timbuktu is an object of desire. Millions long to go there, and when they have been, long to get away again. Caravan men who have wandered for months through the desert long for the tones of the flute and the cithern, and the light swayings of the troops of dancers. Palms and mimosa grow sparsely round Timbuktu, but after the dangers of the desert the monotonous, dilapidated town with its dusty, dreary streets seems really like an entrance to Paradise. Travelling merchants who have risked their wealth in the Sahara among savage robbers, and have been fortunate to escape all dangers, are glad at the sight of Timbuktu, and think its grey walls more lovely than anything they can imagine.