the Mamelukes. Since then, during this
century, of which four-fifths have now passed away, commerce in slaves
has not diminished in Africa. On the contrary.

And, in fact, Islamism is favorable to the slave trade. The black
slave must replace the white slave of former times, in Turkish
provinces. So contractors of every origin pursue this execrable
traffic on a large scale. They thus carry a supplement of population
to those races, which are dying out and will disappear some day,
because they do not regenerate themselves by labor. These slaves, as
in the time of Bonaparte, often become soldiers. With certain nations
of the upper Niger, they compose the half of the armies of the African
chiefs. Under these circumstances, their fate is not sensibly inferior
to that of free men. Besides, when the slave is not a soldier, he is
money which has circulation; even in Egypt and at Bornou, officers and
functionaries are paid in that money. William Lejean has seen it and
has told of it.

Such is, then, the actual state of the trade.

Must it be added that a number of agents of the great European powers
are not ashamed to show a deplorable indulgence for this commerce.
Nevertheless, nothing is truer; while the cruisers watch the coasts of
the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, the traffic goes on regularly
in the interior, the caravans walk on under the eyes of certain
functionaries, and massacres, where ten blacks perish to furnish one
slave, take place at stated periods!

So it will now be understood how terrible were those words just
pronounced by Dick Sand.

"Africa! Equatorial Africa! Africa of slave-traders and slaves!"

And he was not deceived; it was Africa with all its dangers, for his
companions and for himself.

But on what part of the African continent had an inexplicable fatality
landed him? Evidently on the western coast, and as an aggravating
circumstance, the young novice was forced to think that the "Pilgrim"
was thrown on precisely that part of the coast of Angola where the
caravans, which clear all that part of Africa, arrive.

In fact it was there. It was that country which Cameron on the south
and Stanley on the north were going to cross a few years later, and at
the price of what efforts! Of this vast territory, which is composed
of three provinces, Benguela, Congo, and Angola, there was but little
known then except the coast. It extends from the Nourse, in the south,
as far as the Zaire in the north,