t the tribes that lived
near the river. On June 3d, 1877, at the passage of the cataracts of
Massassa, he lost one of his companions, Francis Pocock. July 18th he
was drawn with his boat into the falls of M'belo, and only escaped
death by a miracle.

Finally, August 6th, Henry Stanley arrived at the village of Ni-Sanda,
four days' journey from the coast.

Two days after, at Banza-M'bouko, he found the provisions sent by two
merchants from Emboma.

He finally rested at this little coast town, aged, at thirty-five
years, by over-fatigue and privations, after an entire passage of the
African continent, which had taken two years and nine months of his
life.

However, the course of the Loualaba was explored as far as the
Atlantic; and if the Nile is the great artery of the North, if the
Zambesi is the great artery of the East, we now know that Africa still
possesses in the West the third of the largest rivers in the world--a
river which, in a course of two thousand, nine hundred miles, under
the names of Loualaba, Zaire, and Congo, unites the lake region with
the Atlantic Ocean.

However, between these two books of travel--Stanley's and
Cameron's--the province of Angola is somewhat better known in this
year than in 1873, at that period when the "Pilgrim" was lost on the
African coast. It was well known that it was the seat of the western
slave-trade, thanks to its important markets of Bihe, Cassange, and
Kazounde.

It was into this country that Dick Sand had been drawn, more than one
hundred miles from the coast, with a woman exhausted by fatigue and
grief, a dying child, and some companions of African descent, the
prey, as everything indicated, to the rapacity of slave merchants.

Yes, it was Africa, and not that America where neither the natives,
nor the deer, nor the climate are very formidable. It was not that
favorable region, situated between the Cordilleras and the coast,
where straggling villages abound, and where missions are hospitably
opened to all travelers.

They were far away, those provinces of Peru and Bolivia, where the
tempest would have surely carried the "Pilgrim," if a criminal hand
had not changed its course, where the shipwrecked ones would have
found so many facilities for returning to their country.

It was the terrible Angola, not even that part of the coast inspected
by the Portuguese authorities, but the interior of the colony, which
is crossed by caravans of slaves under the whip of