nd now the famous Arab Tippu-Tib comes on the scene,
a chief with whom Stanley was to be closely connected hereafter. He
was a tall, black-bearded man with an intelligent face and gleaming
white teeth. He wore clothes of spotless white, his fez was smart and
new, his dagger resplendent with silver filigree. He had escorted
Cameron across the river to the south, and he now confirmed Stanley
in his idea that the greatest problem of African geography, "the
discovery of the course of the Congo," was still untouched.

"This was momentous and all-important news to the expedition. We had
arrived at the critical point in our travels," remarks Stanley. "What
kind of a country is it to the north along the river?" he asked.

"Monstrous bad," was the reply. "There are large boa-constrictors in
the forest suspended by their tails, waiting to gobble up travellers.
You cannot travel without being covered by ants, and they sting like
wasps. There are leopards in countless numbers. Gorillas haunt the
woods. The people are man-eaters. A party of three hundred guns started
for the forest and only sixty returned."

Stanley and his last remaining white companion, Frank Pocock,
discussed the somewhat alarming situation together. Should they go
on and face the dwarfs who shot with poisoned arrows, the cannibals
who regarded the stranger as so much meat, the cataracts and
rocks--should they follow the "great river which flowed northward for
ever and knew no end"?

"This great river which Livingstone first saw, and which broke his
heart to turn away from, is a noble field," argued Stanley. "After
buying or building canoes and floating down the river day by day, either
to the Nile or to some vast lake in the far north or to the Congo and
the Atlantic Ocean."

"Let us follow the river," replied the white man.

So, accompanied by Tippu-Tib, with a hundred and forty guns and seventy
spearmen, they started along the banks of the river which Stanley now
named the Livingstone River.

"On the 5th of November 1876," says Stanley, "a force of about seven
hundred people, consisting of Tippu-Tib's slaves and my expedition
departed from the town of Nyangwe and entered the dismal forest-land
north. A straight line from this point to the Atlantic Ocean would
measure one thousand and seventy miles; another to the Indian Ocean
would measure only nine hundred and twenty miles; we had not reached
the centre of the continent by seventy-five miles.

"Outs