But happily a great storm came and Mungo spread out his clothes to collect the drops of rain, and quenched his thirst by wringing them out and sucking them. After this refreshment he led his tired horse, directing his way by the compass, lit up at intervals by vivid flashes of lightning. It was not till the third week of his flight that his reward came. "I was told I should see the Niger early next day," he wrote on 20th July 1796. "We were riding through some marshy ground, when some one called out 'See the water!' and, looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission--the long-sought-for majestic Niger glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly _to the eastward_. I hastened to the brink and, having drunk of the water, lifted up my fervent thanks in prayer to the Great Ruler of all things, for having thus far crowned my endeavours with success. The circumstance of the Niger's flowing towards the east did not excite my surprise, for although I had left Europe in great hesitation on this subject, I had received from the negroes clear assurances that its general course was _towards the rising sun_." He was now near Sego--the capital of Bambarra--on the Niger, a city of some thirty thousand inhabitants. "The view of this extensive city, the numerous canoes upon the river, the crowded population, and the cultivated state of the surrounding country, formed altogether a prospect of civilisation and magnificence which I little expected to find in the bosom of Africa." The natives looked at the poor, thin, white stranger with astonishment and fear, and refused to allow him to cross the river. All day he sat without food under the shade of a tree, and was proposing to climb the tree and rest among its branches to find shelter from a coming storm, when a poor negro woman took pity on his deplorable condition. She took him to her hut, lit a lamp, spread a mat upon the floor, broiled him a fish, and allowed him to sleep. While he rested she spun cotton with other women and sang: "The winds roared and the rains fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk, no wife to grind his corn"; and all joined in the chorus: "Let us pity the white man, no mother has he." [Illustration: KAMALIA, A NATIVE VILLAGE NEAR THE SOUTHERN COURSE OF THE NIGER. From a sketch by Mungo Park.]