It may be true that the development of a country can only take place after a drastic purgation of some sort, but it is also true, fortunately, that there always is some cause to arrest total ruin. In this instance the Arabs themselves had aided the cause. The enslaving bands which escorted me from Nyangwé consisted of trained and educated boy slaves from Manyuema and Unyamuezi and Zanzibar. Many a trusted slave was in the ranks of the expedition which descended the Lualaba to the Atlantic, through whose means a watery highway into the heart of the continent was discovered, and by whom the course of the westward-rolling waves of fire and slaughter was destined to be arrested. Seven years after we had parted from Tippu Tib in 1876 a small flotilla of steamers was advancing towards Stanley Falls, which was barely sixty miles off, and this is what we saw, as entered in a journal at the time: “Surely there had been a great change. As we moved slowly up the stream, a singular scene attracted our gaze. This was two or three long canoes standing on their ends, like split hollow columns, upright on the verge of the bank. What freak was this, and what did it signify? To have tilted and raised such weights argued numbers and union. It could never have been the work of a herd of chattering savages. They are Arabs who have performed this feat of strength, and these upright columnar canoes betray the advent of the slave-traders in the region below the Falls. We learned later that on this now desolate spot once stood the town of Yomburri. “A few miles higher on the same bank we came abreast of another scene of desolation, where a whole town had been burnt, the palm-trees cut down, the bananas scorched, and many acres of them laid level with the ground, and the freak of standing canoes on end repeated. “We continued on our journey, advancing as rapidly as our steamers could breast the stream. Every three or four miles we came in view of the black traces of the destroyers. The charred stakes, poles of once populous settlements, scorched banana groves, and prostrate palms, all betokened ruthless ruin. “On the morning of the 27th November (1883) we detected some object of a slaty color floating down stream. The man in the bow turned it over with a boat-hook. We were shocked to discover the bodies of two women bound together with cord.