Along the river the firing was more deadly. The very noise was sufficient to frighten a foe so prone as savages to rely on the terrors of sound, but unfortunately the noise was as hurtful as it was alarming. Very many, I fear, paid the penalty of the foolish challenge. The blame is undoubtedly due to the Yambuyas, who must have invented fables of the most astounding character to cause their neighbours to attempt stopping a force of nearly four hundred rifles. It was nearly 9 P.M. before the rear-guard entered camp. Throughout the night the usual tactics were resorted to by the savages to create alarm and disturbance, such as vertically dropping assegais and arrows heavily tipped with poison, with sudden cries, whoops, howls, menaces, simultaneous blasts of horn-blowing from different quarters, as though a general attack was about to be made. Strangers unacquainted with the craftiness of these forest satyrs might be pardoned for imagining that daylight only was required for our complete extermination. Some of these tactics I knew before in younger days, but there was still something to be gleaned from the craft of these pure pagans. The camp was surrounded by sentries, and the only orders given were to keep strict silence and sharpen their eyesight. In the morning a narrow escape was reported. A man had wakened to find a spear buried in the earth, penetrating his sleeping cloth and mat on each side of him, slightly pinning him to his bedding. Two were slightly wounded with arrows. We wandered about for ten minutes or so looking for a track next morning, and at last discovered one leading through a vast square mileage of manioc fields, and at the little village of Bahunga, four miles S.E. of Yankondé, we gladly rested, our object being not to rush at first setting out after a long river voyage, but to accustom the people little by little to the long journey before them. On the 30th we lit on a path which connected a series of fourteen villages, each separate and in line, surrounded by their respective fields, luxuriant with crops of manioc, or, as some call it, the cassava. We did not fail to observe, however, that some disaster had occurred many months before, judging from the traces. The villages we passed through were mostly newly built, in the sharp, conical--candle-extinguisher--or rather four-angled spiry type; burnt poles, ruins of the former villages, marked the sites of former dwellings. Here and there were blazings on trees, and then I knew that Arabs and Manyuema must have visited here--probably Tippu-Tib's brother.