As soon as I had gathered all the details from my two followers I asked Bartier to send out a few of his people to meet my caravan coming along, to tell them of what had happened, and to warn them to be very careful; also, if the two men who had been ambushed were not dead, to bring them in with them, and this he readily agreed to do. My men were not very far behind, and the caravan shortly afterwards arrived, bringing with them one of the men still alive. He had had two or three spears thrust right through his back. He was not yet dead, and I did all I possibly could for him, but he was past human help, and, after confirming the story which the others had already told me, he died in an hour or two. As soon as the caravan arrived we at once set to work to build a boma, and I realized that I was now in about the tightest corner I had ever been in. With all these men of the Goanese safari murdered, the country was in a state of ferment, and thousands of armed men on the war-path all round us, so that the prospect was not the most cheerful, and I could see that I was in for a rough time, and how I was going to get out of it I could not imagine. As I have already said, I had such an immense amount of ivory that I could only just get along, and it was not likely that I should be disposed to abandon it, after all the months of trouble and worry it had cost me to collect—living entirely among savages, and never seeing a white face for twelve months. At any rate, I meant to make a good fight for it, and determined, if it were at all possible, to win my way out, though I knew that these people, who had already dipped their hands in the blood of my white brothers—as they imagined them to be—would do their utmost to blot me out, if only for the sake of the quantity of loot which they would get. The next step to building the boma was to bury the ivory, and having made this as secure as possible for the present, I cheered everybody up by telling them that we should get through all right—that we had not been travelling in the country for so long to be afraid now.