Park’s resolution to return to the coast was taken on the 29th July 1796. His hope of accomplishing this purpose in safety seemed almost as desperate as the task of going forward. Before him lay a journey on foot of eleven hundred miles in a straight line, to which must be added an additional five hundred for deviations and the windings of the road. He had thus before him nineteen hundred miles on foot through a barbarous country, where the stranger was considered fair prey, and the laws afforded him no protection from violence. He was without the wherewithal to buy food, and had only rags to shield him from the violence of the weather and the maddening onslaughts of mosquitoes. In addition he had to face all the horrors of the tropic winter, tornadoes of wind, rain, and thunder overhead, swamps and mire under foot, and flooded streams barring the way at every turn. The hardships were sufficient to have killed any man of less indomitable spirit and weaker frame. Even Park would probably have succumbed, but that he could not die while his discoveries remained uncommunicated to his employers and the public. Till then his work was only half done. With his death it would be wholly undone--all his toil and suffering in vain. To reach the coast was therefore now a point of as much importance as formerly it had been to see the Niger. His mind once made up, Park acted with promptitude and resolution. He arrived at Silla on the 29th July. The night sufficed to determine his course, and morning saw the commencement of his return journey. It behoved him indeed to waste no time. A few days more and the country would be impassable by land on account of the flooded rivers. Already it was so on the southern side of the Niger--a fact Park much regretted, as he had hoped to return by that way. Crossing to Murzan by one canoe, he was there enabled to hire another to Kea. Here he was permitted to sleep in the hut of one of the head man’s slaves, who, seeing him sick and destitute of clothes, compassionately covered him with a large cloth. Next day, in proceeding to Madibu with the head man’s brother, he had an opportunity of seeing a peculiar instance of the native respect for private property under some circumstances. A large pile of earthenware jars were lying on the bank of the river. They had been found there two years before, and as no one had ever claimed them, they were believed to belong to some supernatural power. People passing invariably threw a handful of grass upon them, which Park thinks was to protect them from the rain, but more likely was meant as a propitiatory gift to the spirit--the practice being common over all Central Africa.