During the years of bloodshed that followed, Emin remained at his post, his provinces entirely cut off from the world, and he himself neglected and left entirely to his own resources. He held at the time about four thousand native and Egyptian troops under his command. He was completely surrounded by hostile tribes, but it is generally admitted that if he had chosen to leave behind him the thousands of helpless women and children and abandon the province to the merciless cruelties of the slave traders, he could easily have effected his escape either to the Congo or to the Zanzibar coast. But he determined to stay and to keep the equatorial provinces for civilization, if possible. The great work done by this brave and indefatigable German cannot be told here in detail. But he organized auxiliary forces of native soldiers; he was constantly engaged in warfare with surrounding tribes; he garrisoned a dozen river stations lying long distances apart. His ammunition ran low and he lacked the money needed for paying his small army; but in the face of manifold difficulties and dangers he maintained his position, governed the country well, and taught the natives how to raise cotton, rice, indigo and coffee, and also how to weave cloth and to make shoes, candles, soap and many articles of commerce. He vaccinated the natives by the thousand in order to stamp out small-pox; he opened the first hospital known in that quarter; he established a regular post-route, with forty offices; he made important geographical discoveries in the basin of the Albert Nyanza Lake, and in many ways demonstrated his capacity for governing barbarous races by the methods and standards of European civilization. Murder, war and slavery were made things of the past, so that at last “the whole country became so safe that only for the wild beasts in the thickets, a man could have gone from one end of the province to the other, armed with nothing more than a walking-stick.” A German writer said of him at the time: “In his capital, Lado, where Dr. Schnitzer earlier resided, he arose every day before the sun. His first work was to visit the hospitals and care for the health of the people and the troops. After a day devoted to executive labors, a great part of the night would be spent in writing those essays on anthropology, ethnology, geography, botany, and the languages of the people dwelling in his province which have made his name famous as a scientific explorer.”