ible; but it may, again, be a sign of chieftainship,
and a chief I have no doubt he is. Maybe he was sent adrift by some
rival faction; but that can scarcely be, for he would not have
survived a long journey; and, again, the canoe would have gone
aground."

"There is another explanation," said Compton, with a grin. "He may
not have come down the river at all. He may have been set adrift
from one of those ships we passed for insubordination."

"Ships do not carry canoes or jackals," said Venning, who had made
up his mind that the castaway was from the forest, and from nowhere
else.

They went down to breakfast, and the morning was occupied in getting
their kit and packages together. At noon the steamer was berthed at
a pier, and their packages were transferred to a paddle-wheeler,
which was to take them over three hundred miles up the wide estuary
to a Belgian station. Thence, perhaps, they would proceed hundreds
of miles further by another river steamer before they took to their
own boat.

"Why, we may be days before we really get to work," said Venning,
when the vastness of the Congo was forced on his attention by a
casual reference to "hundreds of miles."

"Days--weeks, my boy, before we come to the fringe of our field. The
river is more than half the length of the Continent; its length is
half the distance by sea from Southampton to the Cape, and, next to
the Amazon, it pours a greater body of water into the sea than any
river in the world."

"Africa," said Compton, "seems to be the driest and the wettest, in
parts, of any country; and all its great rivers, except the Nile,
run to waste."

"They'll keep," said Mr. Hume. "When the old world gets tired, worn
out, and over-populated, it will find use for these big, silent,
deserted rivers, that would carry the ships of the world on their
yellow waters."

CHAPTER IV

THE STORY OF MUATA

They went from the wide estuary into the true river, with a width
that opened out at times to twenty miles; and while the white men
sweltered on the sticky decks, the rescued man grew in strength.
When they reached Stanley Pool his skin was like satin again, with a
polish on it from the palm-oil he rubbed in continually.

And when he found his strength he found use for his tongue, and in
the speech he made to his rescuers. Mr. Hume caught the meaning of a
few words of Bantu, Compton detected a phrase or two in Arabic, and
Venning, who had been schooling himself since