a salute, which frightened
him not a little till the honour was explained. Having now exchanged
their two canoes for one of a larger size, they continued their journey
down the river.

[Illustration: RICHARD AND JOHN LANDER PADDLING DOWN THE NIGER. From
a drawing in the account of Lander's _Travels_, 1835.]

On 25th October they found the waters of the Niger were joined by
another large river known to-day as the Benue, the Mother of Waters,
flowing in from the east. After this the banks of the river seemed
to grow hilly, and villages were few and far between. "Our canoe passed
smoothly along the Niger, and everything was silent and solitary; no
sound could be distinguished save our own voices and the plashing of
the paddles with their echoes; the song of birds was not heard, nor
could any animal whatever be seen; the banks seemed to be entirely
deserted, and the magnificent Niger to be slumbering in its own
grandeur."

"One can imagine the feelings," says a modern writer, "in such
circumstances of the brothers, drifting they knew not whither, in
intolerable silence and loneliness on the bosom of a river which had
caused the death of so many men who had endeavoured to wrest from it
its secret." Two days later a large village appeared, and suddenly
a cry rang through the air: "Holloa, you Englishmen! You come here!"
It came from a "little squinting fellow" dressed in an English
soldier's jacket, a messenger from the Chief of Bonney on the coast,
buying slaves for his master. He had picked up a smattering of English
from the Liverpool trading ships which came to Bonney for palm-oil
from the river. There was no longer any doubt that the mouth of the
Niger was not far off, and that the many-mouthed delta was well known
to Europeans under the name of the "Oil Rivers" flowing into the Bight
of Benin.

Lander pushed on till he had paddled down the Brass River, as one of
the many branches was called, when he heard "the welcome sound of the
surf on the beach."

The mystery of the Niger, after a lapse of two thousand five hundred
years since its existence had been recorded by Herodotus, was solved
at last.

CHAPTER LVII

ROSS DISCOVERS THE NORTH MAGNETIC POLE

The first attempt to discover the North-West Passage by means of steam
instead of sail was made by Captain Ross, who, since his expedition
in 1819, had been burning to set off again for the Arctic regions.
The reward of 20,000 pounds held out to the disco