e and
asked what was the matter. "There's rum for him," he said, and gave the
chief a buffet which knocked him over and put his whole retinue to
flight.

Now it was only a couple of days' journey to Boma, near the mouth of the
Congo, where there were trade factories and Europeans. Stanley wrote a
letter to them, and was soon supplied with all necessaries; and after a
short rest at Boma the party made the voyage round the south of Africa
to Zanzibar, where Stanley dismissed his men.

He then travelled home, and was, of course, feted everywhere. For a
thousand years the Arabs had travelled into the interior of Africa, but
they did not know the course of the Congo. European explorers had for
centuries striven to penetrate the darkness. The natives themselves did
not know whither the Lualaba ran. All at once Stanley had filled up the
blank and knit together the scattered meshes of the net; and now a
railway runs beside the falls, and busy steamboats fly up and down the
Congo. Well did Stanley deserve his native name of Bula Matadi, or "the
breaker of stones," for no difficulty was too great for him to overcome.

After a life of restless activity--including another great African
journey to find Emin Pasha, the Governor of the Equatorial Province
after Gordon's death--Stanley was gathered to his fathers in 1904. He
was buried in a village churchyard outside London, and a block of rough
granite was placed above the grave. Here may be read beneath a cross,
"Henry Morton Stanley--Bula Matadi--1841-1904," and lastly the word that
sums up all the work of his life, "Africa."

TIMBUKTU AND THE SAHARA

In the middle of north-western Africa, where the continent shoots a
gigantic tongue out into the Atlantic, lies one of the world's most
famous towns, Timbuktu.

Compared with Cairo or Algiers, Timbuktu is a small town. Its three poor
mosques cannot vie with the grand temples which under French, Turkish,
or English dominion raise their graceful minarets on the Mediterranean
shores of Africa. Not a building attracts the eye of the stranger amidst
a confusion of greyish-yellow mud houses with flat roofs and without
windows, and neglect and decay stare out from heaps of ruins. There is
hardly a tottering caravanserai to invite the desert wanderer to rest.
Some streets are abandoned, while in others the foot sinks over the
ankle in blown sand from the Sahara.

Timbuktu is not so famous as the sparkling jewels in the diadem of
Asi