Every precaution was taken to have all assemble at Kartoum, but the expedition was not popular in Egypt, the boats could not be gotten over the Nile cataracts, and months rolled away before the Colonel got ready to start. The fleet of thirty-three vessels in which he did start were nearly all prepared at Kartoum. On these he embarked 1400 men for his voyage of 1450 miles to Gondokoro. His cavalry was dismissed as useless, and his body guard was made up of a corps of picked men, forty-six in all, half of whom were white and half black, that there might be no conspiracy among them, and that the one might stimulate the other. This guard was put into perfect drill, armed with the Snider rifle, and named “The Forty Thieves,” on account of the propensity they at first manifested. They afterwards became models of military discipline. [Illustration: THE FORTY THIEVES.] On February 8, 1870, two small steamers and thirty-one sailing vessels started up the White Nile from Kartoum, with 850 soldiers and six months’ provisions. The rest were to follow as fast as transports could be supplied. In five days they were at Fashoda, in the Shillook country, 118 miles from Kartoum. On February 16 they reached the mouth of the Sobat, 684 miles from Kartoum. This stream was then sending down a volume of muddy water much larger than the White Nile itself. They were now in the region of immense flats and boundless marshes through which the White Nile soaks and winds for 750 miles from Gondokoro. The river proper is almost wholly obstructed by compressed vegetation known as “sponge,” and at points this is so thick as to defy the passage of boats without cutting. But the slavers had discovered another route through an arm or bayou called the Bahr Giraffe, and this Baker determined to take. The Bahr Giraffe proved to be winding, but deep enough at first. Like the White Nile, its waters and banks abounded in game, the first specimen of the larger kind of which proved to be a lion, which bounded off to cover on the approach of the boats. By February 25, they were in a mass of floating vegetation through which a canal had to be cut. These obstructions now became frequent and could only be pierced by means of canals and dams. On March 5, the Colonel was roused from a nap on the steamer’s deck by a shock, followed by a cry “The ship’s sinking!” A hippopotamus had charged the steamer from the bottom, and then had attacked her small boat, cutting two holes through her iron plates with his tusks. The diah-beeah was only kept from sinking by the aid of the steamer’s pumps.