A year and more, spring and summer, autumn and winter, had gone by since Allan Carew and his companions set their faces towards the Dark Continent; and now it was spring again, the early spring of Central Africa; and under the pale cloudless blue of a tropical sky three white men, with their modest following of Wangwana and Wanyamwezi--a company no bigger than that with which Captain Trivier crossed from shore to shore--camped beside the Sea of Ujiji. They had come from the east, and the journey from the coast opposite Zanzibar, taken very easily, with many halting-places on the way, had occupied the best part of a year. Some of those resting-places had been chosen for sport, for exploration, for repose after weary and troublesome stages. Sometimes a long halt had been forced upon the travellers by sickness, by inclement weather, by the rebellion or the perversity of their men--those porters upon whose endurance and good will their comfort and safety alike depended, in a land where it has been truly said that "luggage is life." That march from Bagamoyo, Stanley's starting-point, through the vicissitudes of the road and the seasons, had not been all pleasure; and there were darker hours on the way, when, toiling on with aching head and blistered feet, half stifled by the rank mists and poisonous odours of a jungle that smelt of death, Allan Carew and his companions may have wished themselves back in the beaten paths of a civilized world, where there is no need to think of bed or dinner, and where all that life requires for sustenance and support seems to come of itself. But if there had been weak yearnings for the comfortable, as opposed to the adventurous, not one of the three travellers had ever given any indication of such backsliding. Each in his turn stricken down--not once, but often--by the deadly mukunguru, or African fever, had rallied and girded his loins for the journey without an hour's needless delay; and then, on recovery, there had followed a fervent joy in life and nature; a rapture in the atmosphere; a keener eye for every changeful light and colour in earth and sky; the blissful sensations of a newly created being, basking in a new world. It was almost worth a man's while to pass through the painful stages of that deadly fever, the ague fit and languor, the yawning and drowsiness which mark the beginning of sickness, the raging thirst and throbbing temples, the aching spine and hideous visions that are its later agonies, in order to feel that ecstasy of restored health in which the convalescent sees ineffable loveliness even in the dull monotony of rolling woods, and thrills with friendship and love for the dusky companions of his journey.