our times, alternately changing
from rail to river. At Kibombo the 550,000 pounds of metal had to be
carried on the heads of natives to the scene of operations. In the Congo
practically every ton of merchandise must be moved by man power--the
average load is sixty pounds--through the greater part of its journey.

Late in the afternoon of the day which marked the encounter with the
Campbells I reached Kindu, where navigation on the Lualaba is resumed
again. By this time you will have realized something of the difficulty
of travelling in this part of the world. It was my third change since
Bukama and more were to come before I reached the Lower Congo.

[Illustration: NATIVE FISH TRAPS AT STANLEY FALLS]

At Kindu I had a rare piece of luck. I fell in with Louis Franck, the
Belgian Minister of the Colonies, to whom I had a letter of
introduction, and who was making a tour of inspection of the Congo. He
had landed at Mombassa, crossed British East Africa, visited the new
Belgian possessions of Urundi and Ruanda which are spoils of war, and
made his way to Kabalo from Lake Tanganyika. He asked me to accompany
him to Stanleyville as his guest. I gladly accepted because, aside from
the personal compensation afforded by his society, it meant immunity
from worry about the river and train connections.

Franck represents the new type of Colonial Minister. Instead of being a
musty bureaucrat, as so many are, he is a live, alert progressive man of
affairs who played a big part in the late war. To begin with, he is one
of the foremost admiralty lawyers of Europe. When the Germans occupied
Belgium he at once became conspicuous. He resisted the Teutonic scheme
to separate the French and Flemish sections of the ravaged country.
After the investment of Antwerp, his native place, accompanied by the
Burgomaster and the Spanish Minister, he went to the German Headquarters
and made the arrangement by which the city was saved from destruction by
bombardment. He delayed this parley sufficiently to enable the Belgian
Army to escape to the Yser. Subsequently his activities on behalf of his
countrymen made him so distasteful to the Germans that he was imprisoned
in Germany for nearly a year. For two months of this time he shared the
noble exile of Monsieur Max, the heroic Burgomaster of Brussels.

I now became an annex of what amounted to a royal progress. To the
Belgian colonial official and to the native, Franck incarnated a sort of
All High