A CONGO HOUSE.
The Doctor paused a moment to glance at a slip which had been cut from a newspaper, and then continued:
"At its mouth the Congo River is of enormous depth, but only one hundred miles or so above Stanley Pool, Captain Braconnier said, a year or two ago, that 'steam-launches drawing barely two and a half feet of water have to be dragged along by our men.' H. H. Johnston mentions the same fact in his description of the Congo. 'Our boat is constantly running aground on sand-banks,' he wrote. 'It has an extraordinary effect to see men walking half-way over a great branch of the river, with water only up to their ankles, tracing the course of some hidden sand-bank.' Stanley, Johnston, and others attributed the remarkable shallowness of the river to its great breadth in this part of its course; but none of them knew how wide the river really is above the Kassai River.
"We now have some new light on this question, which is a very interesting one, because the Congo is next to the greatest river in the world, and new discoveries with regard to it are apt to be on a large scale. Captain Rouvier has been surveying this part of the river, and he finds that for a distance of about fifty miles the Congo is much wider than was supposed. Its width, in fact, is from fifteen to twenty miles, a circumstance that has not been discovered before on account of many long islands, some of which have always been taken for one shore of the river. It follows, therefore, that there is an expanse on the upper Congo similar to and very much larger than Stanley Pool. Steamboats have passed each other in this enlargement of the river without knowing of each other's proximity.
THE EFFECT OF CIVILIZATION.
"It is easy to understand, therefore, how it happens that the Congo is in this place so very shallow, while in narrow portions of the lower river no plummet-line has ever yet touched bottom. Navigation in this part of the Congo would be almost impossible were it not that here and there soundings are revealing channels deep and wide enough for all the requirements of steamboat traffic.
"The great explorer has planned a railway from Vivi to Leopoldville, so that the lower series of falls on the river will no longer be a hinderance to commerce. This railway will be about two hundred and thirty-five miles long, and Mr. Stanley estimates its cost and equipment at something less than five millions of dollars, or one million pounds sterling. He estimates its annual revenue from freight alone at one and a half million dollars, while the passenger business would not be an unimportant item. The up-freights would consist of cotton cloth, beads, wire, muskets, gunpowder, cutlery, china-ware, iron, and other African 'trade-goods,' while the down-freights would include ivory, palm-oil, ground-nuts, hippopotamus teeth and hides, rubber, beeswax, gum copal, monkey and other skins, and several kinds of fine woods used in cabinet-making. Doubtless other products of Central Africa would come into market which are now unknown in consequence of the high cost of transportation.