This is to be the order, and this the method of the march, and I have stood observing the files pass by until the last of the rear guard is out of the camp, and the Major and Jameson and the garrison next crowd out to exchange the farewell.
"Now, Major, my dear fellow, we are in for it. Neck or nothing! Remember your promise and we shall meet before many months."
"I vow to goodness. I shall be after you sharp. Let me once get those fellows from Bolobo and nothing shall stop me."
"Well, then, God bless you--keep a stout heart--and Jameson--old man--the same to you."
Captain Nelson, who heard all this, stepped up in his turn to take a parting grasp, and I strode on to the front, while the Captain placed himself at the head of the rear guard.
The column had halted at the end of the villages or rather the road that Nelson the other day had commenced.
"Which is the way, guide?" I asked to probably the proudest soul in the column--for it is a most exalted position to be at the head of the line. He was in a Greekish costume with a Greekish helmet à la Achilles.
[Illustration: THE KIRANGOZI, OR FOREMOST MAN.]
"This, running towards the sunrise," he replied.
"Know ye not one village or country beyond here?"
This amounted to what the wisest of us knew.
"Well, then, set on in the name of God, and God be ever with us. Cling to any track that leads by the river until we find a road."
"Bismillah!" echoed the pioneers, the Nubian trumpets blew the signal of "move on," and shortly the head of the column disappeared into the thick bush beyond the utmost bounds of the clearings of Yambuya.
This was on the 28th day of June, and until the 5th of December, for 160 days, we marched through the forest, bush and jungle, without ever having seen a bit of greensward of the size of a cottage chamber floor. Nothing but miles and miles, endless miles of forest, in various stages of growth and various degrees of altitude, according to the ages of the trees, with varying thickness of undergrowth according to the character of the trees which afforded thicker or slighter shade. It is to the description of the march through this forest and to its strange incidents I propose to confine myself for the next few chapters, as it is an absolutely unknown region opened to the gaze and knowledge of civilized man for the first time since the waters disappeared and were gathered into the seas, and the earth became dry land. Beseeching the reader's patience, I promise to be as little tedious as possible, though there is no other manuscript or missal, printed book or pamphlet, this spring of the year of our Lord 1890, that contains any account of this region of horrors other than this book of mine.