That honour was reserved for his successor, Caron, who, with Sub-Lieutenant Lefort and Dr. Jouenne, reached Koriomé, the port of the mysterious town; but the intrigues of the Toucouleurs and the merchants of the north made the Tuaregs hostile. He was unable to enter the ancient capital of the Sahara, but he brought back with him a magnificent map on the scale of ¹⁄₅₀₀₀₀ of the course of the river, such as had, perhaps, never before been made of any river of Africa. It proved beyond a doubt, that from Kulikoro to Timbuktu, that is to say, for a length of about 500 miles, the Niger is perfectly navigable, free from obstacles, everywhere accessible to small craft, and nearly always to steamers and barges of considerable draught. Davoust returned to the charge in 1888, when he did me the honour of taking me as his second in command, and it was decided that we should go down the river, until the absolutely insuperable obstacles in our path barred our progress. Alas! it was decreed that Davoust should never realize success. What happened? Just as we were going to start came an order that we were to do nothing. We wintered at Manambugu, a terribly unhealthy spot, and there, with infinite trouble, we constructed a few wretched huts of straw and loam, to protect ourselves and our goods. Under such conditions, death soon wrought havoc in our ranks. We white men numbered eighteen when we started; less than a year later we were but five. The rest we had buried along our path as we returned, or in our little cemetery at Manambugu. Poor Davoust reached Kita but to die. The order forbidding us to start had been his death-blow. Until then he had, however, kept up only by force of his intense determination. It was but his hope of success which sustained him; he existed only for the sake of his great scheme. “Merely having _failed_ to descend the Niger,” he exclaimed to me one day, “made Mungo Park famous, but we, we _shall succeed_.” He could not bear to see all his long-cherished plans upset for no real reason, on the very eve of realization. It was too severe a blow for the little strength which remained to him. He nevertheless continued to help me in fitting out the _Mage_, a gunboat like the _Niger_, which we had brought from France; he even made some trial trips; but in the month of December he set off for home, to try and regain his strength in his native land, and buoyed up with the hope of being able to win over our colonial authorities to his views. He never reached France; he rests at Kita. When we thought all was lost, and our mission hopelessly compromised, we gathered round his tomb. Perhaps it was our doing so which brought us good fortune at last.