"What are you doing here?" asked the Captain.
"Oh, we're waiting for Wissman, and it's high time he came."
"Let's see; how long have you been waiting for Wissman?"
"Well, we've been here a little over two months. We're running short of supplies ourselves, and if the party doesn't turn up here within the next week, we shall leave Wissman's mails and boxes, and go back to Stanley Pool."
"Well, Wissman has the start of you. He's at Stanley Pool now."
"You don't mean it! Reached the Congo? How long ago?"
"Just a week."
"Why didn't he follow the Kassai to its mouth, as he was ordered to do?"
"He did. You see, this river here isn't the Kassai. The Kwa River is the Kassai. Wissman reached the Congo at Kwamouth over 200 miles south of here."
More work for the map-makers. This story illustrates the surprises that came to Europe month after month from the Congo basin. The geographers had to pull to pieces most of their preconceptions about the lay of the land and the extent and direction of the rivers. The waters of the Sankuru, for instance, which Livingstone and Stanley had crossed in their upper part, were found to reach the Congo about 700 miles from the supposed point of confluence. Lakes that had appeared on the maps, on native or Arab authority, were wiped out. A part of the Lualaba, or western head stream of the Congo, was found to have no counterpart in Africa. The narrow gorge, forty-three miles long, through which it flows, walled in by perpendicular rock masses rising a quarter of a mile above the stream, resembles our great Western cañons. In these few years nearly all of our notions of Congo hydrography away from the main stream were completely changed.