r or so
we managed to row the boat, though with great labour; but after that the
weeds got too thick to allow of it, and we were obliged to resort to the
primitive and most exhausting resource of towing her. For two hours we
laboured, Mahomed, Job, and I, who was supposed to be strong enough to
pull against the two of them, on the bank, while Leo sat in the bow of
the boat, and brushed away the weeds which collected round the cutwater
with Mahomed's sword. At dark we halted for some hours to rest and enjoy
the mosquitoes, but about midnight we went on again, taking advantage
of the comparative cool of the night. At dawn we rested for three hours,
and then started once more, and laboured on till about ten o'clock, when
a thunderstorm, accompanied by a deluge of rain, overtook us, and we
spent the next six hours practically under water.

I do not know that there is any necessity for me to describe the next
four days of our voyage in detail, further than to say that they were,
on the whole, the most miserable that I ever spent in my life, forming
one monotonous record of heavy labour, heat, misery, and mosquitoes. All
that dreary way we passed through a region of almost endless swamp, and
I can only attribute our escape from fever and death to the constant
doses of quinine and purgatives which we took, and the unceasing toil
which we were forced to undergo. On the third day of our journey up the
canal we had sighted a round hill that loomed dimly through the vapours
of the marsh, and on the evening of the fourth night, when we camped,
this hill seemed to be within five-and-twenty or thirty miles of us. We
were by now utterly exhausted, and felt as though our blistered hands
could not pull the boat a yard farther, and that the best thing that
we could do would be to lie down and die in that dreadful wilderness of
swamp. It was an awful position, and one in which I trust no other white
man will ever be placed; and as I threw myself down in the boat to sleep
the sleep of utter exhaustion, I bitterly cursed my folly in ever having
been a party to such a mad undertaking, which could, I saw, only end in
our death in this ghastly land. I thought, I remember, as I slowly sank
into a doze, of what the appearance of the boat and her unhappy crew
would be in two or three months' time from that night. There she would
lie, with gaping seams and half filled with foetid water, which, when
the mist-laden wind stirred her, would wash backwa