The Mandara officer and his followers were butchered and stripped within a few yards of him. Their cries were dreadful. His hopes of life were too faint to deserve the name. He was almost instantly surrounded, and speedily stripped, his pursuers making several thrusts at him with their spears, wounding his hands severely, and his body slightly. In the first instance they had been prevented from murdering him by the fear of injuring the value of his clothes, which appeared to them a rich booty. His shirt was now torn off his back. When his plunderers began to quarrel for the spoil, the idea of escape came across his mind. Creeping under the belly of the horse nearest him, he started as fast as his legs would carry him, to the thickest part of the wood. Two of the Felatahs followed. He ran in the direction the stragglers of his own party had taken. His pursuers gained on him, for the prickly underwood tore his flesh and impeded his progress. Just then he saw a mountain stream gliding along at the bottom of a deep ravine. His strength had almost failed him, when, seizing the long branches of a tree overhanging the water, he let himself down into it. What was his horror to observe a large liffa, the most venomous of serpents, rise from its coil as if in the very act of striking! His senses left him, the branch slipped from his hand, and he tumbled headlong into the water. The shock, however, revived him, and with three strokes of his arms he reached the opposite bank, which with great difficulty he crawled up. He, at length, felt that he was safe from his pursuers. Still, the forlorn situation in which he was placed, without even a rag to cover his body, almost overwhelmed him. Yet, fully alive to the danger to which he was exposed, he had began to plan how he could best rest on the top of a tamarind tree, in order to escape from panthers, when the idea of liffas, almost as numerous, excited a shudder of despair. While trying to make his way through the woods, he observed two horsemen between the trees, and, still further to the east, with feelings of gratitude, he recognised Barca Gana and Boo-Khaloum, with about six Arabs. Although they were pressed closely by a party of Felatahs, the guns and pistols of the Arabs kept the latter in check. His shouts were drowned by the cries of those who were falling under the Felatahs' spears and the cheers of the Arabs rallying; but, happily, Maraymy distinguished him at a distance. Riding up, the faithful black assisted the major to mount behind him, and, while the arrows whistled over their heads, they galloped off to the rear as fast as the black's wounded horse could carry them. After they had gone a mile or two, Boo-Khaloum rode up and desired one of the Arabs to cover the major with a houmous. This was the last act of Denham's unfortunate friend. Directly afterwards Maraymy exclaimed: "Look, Boo-Khaloum is dead!" The major turned his