Ere his death, his followers had deserted him, carrying back to the coast lying stories of his having been murdered. Trusted servants ran away with his medicine chest, leaving him no means of fighting the deadly diseases which from that hour began to break down his strength. The country ahead had been wasted and almost emptied of inhabitants by the slave-traders. Hunger and thirst were the daily companions of his march. Constant exposure to wet brought on rheumatism and ague; painful ulcers broke out in his feet; pneumonia, dysentery, cholera, miasmatic fever, attacked him by turns; but still, so long as his strength was not utterly prostrated, the daily march had to be accomplished. Still more trying than the fatigue were the vexatious delays, extending sometimes over many months, caused by wars, epidemics, or inundation, that frequently compelled him to retrace his steps when apparently on the verge of some great discovery. Often, in order to make progress, he had no alternative but to attach his party to some Arab expedition which, under pretence of ivory-trading, had come out to plunder, to kidnap, and to murder. The terrible scenes of misery and slaughter of which he was thus compelled to be the witness, had perhaps a stronger and more depressing effect on his mind than all the other trials that fell to his lot. “I am heart-broken and sick of the sight of human blood,” he writes, as he turns, baffled, weary, and broken in health from one line of promising exploration to another. He has left us only rough jottings of this story of wild adventure and strange discovery. For weeks at a time no entries are found in his journal. The hand that should have written them was palsied with fever, the busy brain stunned into unconsciousness, and the tortured body borne by faithful attendants through novel scenes on which the eager explorer could no longer open his eyes. His letters were stolen by Arabs——both those going to and coming from him. Yet his disjointed notes, written on scraps of old newspapers with ink manufactured by himself out of the seeds of native plants, tell a more affecting tale of valuable discovery than many a carefully written narrative.