s, which were about to disappear. His first impulse was to
shout that we must go and get them!

It was with some relief that we were able to extricate ourselves, and
eventually reached the outer edge of the whirlpool, where the water
changed direction, and the canoe was swung violently, entering a patch of
comparatively placid water. Paddling with our hands we slowly reached the
bank, and nearly an hour later--it having taken us all that time to go
about 150 m.--we baled the water out of the canoe and proceeded to
examine the amount of our loss.

Nearly all the cooking utensils, as I have said, had disappeared; two
boxes of tinned provisions had gone overboard and were lost for ever; a
bag of flour and a bag of rice had vanished in those terrible waters; a
package containing a great part of my clothes had also gone for ever, as
well as some of the clothing of my men. What was worse than all for me,
my camp-bed and all my bedding were lost, which would compel me in the
future to sleep either on the ground--which was practically impossible in
that region owing to the number of ants and other insects--or else do as
I did, sleep on four wooden packing-boxes, which I placed in a line. They
made a most uneven and hard bed, as I had, of course, no mattress and no
covering of any kind. A despatch-box, with some money, a lot of important
official letters and other documents, were lost, and also my mercurial
artificial horizon and one of my chronometers. A number of other things
of less importance were also gone and quite beyond recovery.

We worked hard all that afternoon and the greater part of the night in
shaping new paddles out of trees we had cut down with the axes, which
were fortunately not lost. The new paddles were even more primitive and
clumsy than those we had before.

We dried what remained of our baggage in the sun during the afternoon.
The beautiful sandy beach on which we had landed looked very gay with all
the articles I had spread out from some of my trunks, including a
dress-suit which I hung on a young palm, and other such articles, which
looked rather incongruous in that particular region. All the white linen
clothes I possessed had gone, and there only remained some good serge
clothes which I had kept for my arrival in civilized places again. My
water-tight boxes had been knocked about so much that they had got
injured and let in a good deal of moisture.

One of my valuable cameras was badly damaged in