How would you like to be among hostile natives, many hundreds of miles from the nearest white settlement, with no means of transportation except a wheezy little steamboat that was likely to blow up or break down beyond repair at any moment? The worn-out _En Avant_, which carried Dr. Wolf's little party, was tired all the time, and incessantly on the verge of giving up entirely. There was no machinist on board to coax the complaining engine into good humor. The boiler-plates were sprung, and every morning the cracks were plastered over with a fresh layer of clay. Some of the tubing and the furnace grates gave out, and the doctor mournfully sacrificed gun-barrels from his slender stock of fire-arms to replace the worn-out parts. Of course, he would have repaired his rickety little steamer before he started if he had had anything with which to patch it up. With everything right at our hand at home, we have little idea of the countless perplexities that beset the explorer. Some years ago the French carried a steamboat in sections, at great cost, to the bank of a river in the French Congo, where they wished to launch it, and there the vessel lay uselessly on the shore for more than a year, because they had lost one little package that had to be replaced from Europe before a fire could be kindled under the boiler. Dr. Wolf was not able to move up stream as fast as a land party would have travelled; and around sharp bends in the river, under full pressure of steam, he was often two hours in making 700 feet against the rapid current. Until he had ascended far towards the sources of the river, he found the Sankuru a noble stream, one to two miles in width; and, curiously enough, the natives on the north bank were very hostile, while those living south of the river were perfectly friendly and hospitable. The wide river was a boundary between peoples who differed from each other in many respects. This has often been observed in savage lands. On the middle Congo, where the river for long stretches is from fifteen to twenty miles wide and crowded with islands, there are thousands of natives who, until recently, had never seen the opposite shore nor the people who live there. Soon after the explorer entered the Sankuru he had an adventure with the hostile natives of the north shore that a little resembled the fabled story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. The doctor was steaming along about twenty feet from the bank, when he saw a girl, wearing ornaments that showed she was the daughter of a chief, leaping through the grass towards the water and shouting: [Illustration: "STOP! DON'T SHOOT!"] "Stop, you fools! Don't shoot! Let them go! They will not harm you!"