“On the south-east of the range the connection between Albert Edward Nyanza and the Albert Nyanza has been discovered, and the extent of the former lake is now known for the first time. Range after range of mountains has been traversed, separated by such tracts of pasture land as would make your cowboys out West mad with envy. “And right under the burning Equator we have fed on blackberries and bilberries, and quenched our thirst with crystal water fresh from snow beds. We have also been able to add nearly six thousand square miles of water to Victoria Nyanza. “This has certainly been the most extraordinary expedition I have ever led into Africa. A veritable divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed. I say it with all reverence. It has impelled us whither it would, effected its own will, but nevertheless guided and protected us. “I gave as much good will to my duties as the strictest honor would compel. My faith that the purity of my motive deserved success was firm, but I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands. “Not one officer who was with me will forget the miseries he has endured, yet everyone that started from his home destined to march with the advance column and share its wonderful adventures is here to-day, safe, sound and well. “This is not due to me. Lieutenant Stairs was pierced with a poisoned arrow like others, but others died and he lives. The poisoned tip came out from under his heart eighteen months after he was pierced. Jephson was four months a prisoner, with guards with loaded rifles around him. That they did not murder him is not due to me. “These officers have had to wade through as many as seventeen streams and broad expanses of mud and swamp in a day. They have endured a sun that scorched whatever it touched. A multitude of impediments have ruffled their tempers and harassed their hours. “They have been maddened with the agonies of fierce fevers. They have lived for months in an atmosphere that medical authority declared to be deadly. They have faced dangers every day, and their diet has been all through what legal serfs would have declared to be infamous and abominable, and yet they live. “This is not due to me any more than the courage with which they have borne all that was imposed upon them by their surroundings or the cheery energy which they bestowed to their work or the hopeful voices which rang in the ears of a deafening multitude of blacks and urged the poor souls on to their goal. “The vulgar will call it luck. Unbelievers will call it chance, but deep down in each heart remains the feeling, that of verity, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in common philosophy. “I must be brief. Numbers of scenes crowd the memory.