ed weed, varying from twelve to
twelve hundred yards in breadth, very often prevented the steamers
from approaching the bank to tie up. The banks themselves depressed the
explorers by their melancholy inhospitality. At times the river flowed
past miles of long grey grass and swamp-land, inhabited and habitable
only by hippopotami. At times a vast expanse of dreary mud flats
stretched as far as the eye could see. At others the forest, dense with
an impenetrable undergrowth of thorn-bushes, approached the water, and
the active forms of monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees.
But the country--whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie--was always damp
and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with
mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life.

Onward and southward toiled the flotilla, splashing the brown water into
foam and startling the strange creatures on the banks, until on the 18th
of September they approached Fashoda. The gunboats waited, moored to the
bank for some hours of the afternoon, to allow a message which had been
sent by the Sirdar to the mysterious Europeans, to precede his arrival,
and early in the morning of the 19th a small steel rowing-boat was
observed coming down stream to meet the expedition. It contained a
Senegalese sergeant and two men, with a letter from Major Marchand
announcing the arrival of the French troops and their formal occupation
of the Soudan. It, moreover, congratulated the Sirdar on his victory,
and welcomed him to Fashoda in the name of France.

A few miles' further progress brought the gunboats to their destination,
and they made fast to the bank near the old Government buildings of
the town. Major Marchand's party consisted of eight French officers or
non-commissioned officers, and 120 black soldiers drawn from the Niger
district. They possessed three steel boats fitted for sail or oars, and
a small steam launch, the Faidherbe, which latter had, however,
been sent south for reinforcements. They had six months' supplies of
provisions for the French officers, and about three months' rations for
the men; but they had no artillery, and were in great want of small-arm
ammunition. Their position was indeed precarious. The little force
was stranded, without communications of any sort, and with no means of
either withstanding an attack or of making a retreat. They had fired
away most of their cartridges at the Dervish foraging party, and were
daily expecting a