s branches
to find shelter from a coming storm, when a poor negro woman took pity
on his deplorable condition. She took him to her hut, lit a lamp, spread
a mat upon the floor, broiled him a fish, and allowed him to sleep.
While he rested she spun cotton with other women and sang: "The winds
roared and the rains fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came
and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk, no wife
to grind his corn"; and all joined in the chorus: "Let us pity the
white man, no mother has he."

[Illustration: KAMALIA, A NATIVE VILLAGE NEAR THE SOUTHERN COURSE OF
THE NIGER. From a sketch by Mungo Park.]

Mungo Park left in the morning after presenting his landlady with two
of his last four brass buttons. But though he made another gallant
effort to reach Timbuktu and the Niger, which, he was told, "ran to
the world's end," lions and mosquitoes made life impossible. His horse
was too weak to carry him any farther, and on 29th July 1796 he sadly
turned back. "Worn down by sickness, exhausted by hunger and fatigue,
half-naked, and without any article of value by which I might get
provisions, clothes, or lodging, I felt I should sacrifice my life
to no purpose, for my discoveries would perish with me." Joining a
caravan of slaves, he reached the coast after some nineteen hundred
miles, and after an absence of two years and nine months he found a
suit of English clothes, "disrobed his chin of venerable encumbrance,"
and sailed for home. He published an account of the journey in 1799,
after which he married and settled in Scotland as a doctor. But his
heart was in Africa, and a few years later he started off again to
reach Timbuktu. He arrived at the Gambia early in April 1805. "If all
goes well," he wrote gaily, "this day six weeks I expect to drink all
your healths in the water of the Niger." He started this time with
forty-four Europeans, each with donkeys to carry baggage and food,
but it was a deplorable little party that reached the great river on
19th August. Thirty men had died on the march, the donkeys had been
stolen, the baggage lost. And the joy experienced by the explorer in
reaching the waters of the Niger, "rolling its immense stream along
the plain," was marred by the reduction of his little party to seven.
Leave to pass down the river to Timbuktu was obtained by the gift of
two double-barrelled guns to the King, and in their old canoes patched
together under the magnificent name o