As the natives would not assist them over the river to the north bank, they cut down a big tree and with axe and fire hollowed it into a sizeable canoe which conveyed them across to the north bank to Ipoto. Since that date they had launched out on one of the most sanguinary and destructive careers to which even Tippu-Tib's or Tagamoyo's career offer but poor comparison. Towards the Lenda and Ihuru Rivers, they had levelled into black ashes every settlement, their rage for destruction had even been vented on the plantain groves, every canoe on the rivers had been split into pieces, every island had been searched, and into the darkest recesses, whither a slight track could be traced, they had penetrated with only one dominating passion, which was to kill as many of the men and capture as many of the women and children as craft and cruelty would enable them. However far northward or eastward these people had reached, one said nine days' march, another fifteen days; or wherever they had gone they had done precisely as we had seen between the Lenda River and Ipoto, and reduced the forest land into a howling wilderness, and throughout all the immense area had left scarcely a hut standing. What these destroyers had left of groves and plantations of plantain and bananas, manioc, and corn-fields, the elephant, chimpanzee, and monkeys had trampled and crushed into decaying and putrid muck, and in their places had sprung up, with the swiftness of mushrooms, whole hosts of large-leafed plants native to the soil, briars, calamus and bush, which the natives had in times past suppressed with their knives, axes and hoes. With each season the bush grew more robust and taller, and a few seasons only were wanted to cover all traces of former habitation and labour. From Ipoto to the Lenda the distance by our track is 105 miles. Assume that this is the distance eastward to which their ravages have extended, and northward and southward, and we have something like 44,000 square miles. We know what Ugarrowwa has done from the preceding pages, what he was still doing with all the vigour of his mind, and we know what the Arabs in the Stanley Falls are doing on the Lumami and what sort of devil's work Mumi Muhala, and Bwana Mohamed are perpetrating around Lake Ozo, the source of the Lulu, and, once we know where their centres are located, we may with a pair of compasses draw great circles round each, and park off areas of 40,000 and 50,000 square miles into which half-a-dozen resolute men, aided by their hundreds of bandits, have divided about three-fourths of the Great Upper Congo Forest for the sole purpose of murder, and becoming heirs to a few hundred tusks of ivory.