At this settlement two Zanzibaris, exceedingly useful, and reckoned among the elect of the force, secretly left camp to make a raid on the Batundu, and were ambushed and slain. This was the manner our most enterprising men became lost to us. One of these two was the leader of the van, and had acted in that capacity since we had departed from Yambuya, June 1887. The sad occasion was an opportunity to impress on the infatuated men for the hundredth time the absurd folly they were guilty of in sacrificing their lives for a goat, in nobly working for months to earn pay and honour by manliness and fidelity, and then bury all in the entrails of cannibals. I had bestowed on them cattle, sheep, goats, fowls, handfuls of silver, and a thousand pounds’ worth of clothes, but none, no, not one, had offered his throat to me to be cut. But for the sake of a goat, at any time day or night the cannibal might kill and then eat them. What monstrous ingratitude! They were instantly penitential. Again they promised to me by Allah! that they would not do so again, and, of course, in a day or two they would forget their promise. It is their way. But any person who has travelled with the writer thus far will have observed that almost every fatal accident hitherto in this Expedition has been the consequence of a breach of promise. How to adhere to a promise seems to me to be the most difficult of all tasks for every 999,999 men out of every million whom I meet. I confess that these black people who broke their promises so wantonly were the bane of my life, and the cause of continued mental disquietude, and that I condemned them to their own hearing as supremest idiots. Indeed, I have been able to drive from one to three hundred cattle a five hundred mile journey with less trouble and anxiety than as many black men. If we had strung them neck and neck along a lengthy slave-chain they would certainly have suffered a little inconvenience, but then they themselves would be the first to accuse us of cruelty. Not possessing chains, or even rope enough, we had to rely on their promises that they would not break out of camp into the bush on these mad individual enterprises, which invariably resulted in death, but never a promise was kept longer than two days. [Sidenote: 1888. Sept. 8. Elephant Playground.] “Elephant Playground” Camp was our next halting-place, and thence we moved to Wasp Rapids.