Having become experts in the science of tracking, ambuscades, and surprises, they became anxious to win fame and fortune after a manner never dreamed of by the earlier traders. The verb “to buy” was to be banished from the vernacular. All that was bestial and savage in the human heart was given fullest scope, unchecked and unreproved. Hence followed the most frightful barbarities and massacres, which spared no age and regarded no sex; fire, spear, arrow, and iron bullet preluded furious loot and pitiless seizure. Among the earliest to put into practice the terrible knowledge they had gained during their tentative incursions into the forest were Abed-bin-Salim, Tippu Tib, Sayid-bin-Habib, Muini Muhala, Rashid (the nephew of Tippu), Nasur-bin-Suliman, and others. Abed-bin-Salim’s case is typical. Among the young Swahili who followed his fortunes were four youthful squires, or apprentices, named Karema, Kiburuga, Kilonga-Longa, and Kibongé. The last of these has given his name to an important Arab station just above Stanley Falls; the other three have since become famous among the Central African rapparees and slave-thieves. The names under which they have severally become notorious, and for which they exchanged those derived from their parents, are synonymes given by the bush natives for rapine, lust, murder, arson. In 1878 Abed-bin-Salim despatched coastward a caravan consisting of Manyuema slaves bearing 350 tusks. At Zanzibar the ivory was sold, and the proceeds invested in double-barrelled guns, Minie rifles, and carbines, gunpowder, percussion-caps, buckshot, and bar lead. Within twenty months the new weapons and war munition reached Nyangwé. Kibongé soon after was sent by his master Abed down the Lualaba as supercargo and store-keeper at a station to be strategically chosen, and his three confederates became leaders of three divisions of booty-gatherers, and to draw all slaves, ivory, and flocks of goats into the slave-hold of Kibongé. A native village near the confluence of the Leopold with the Lualaba River was taken, and without loss of time was palisaded as a measure of security. Canoe after canoe was added to their flotilla, in order that detachments might make simultaneous attacks at various points along the Leopold, Lufu, Lowwa, Lira, and Ulindi rivers.