And now what a meeting and greeting there was! The steamers signalled the arrival of strangers. A canoe put out from the shore and hailed in the language of the Eastern coast. Both sides understood that the meeting was one of peace. The steamers made for shore below the tents, and a night encampment was formed. Soon Stanley’s Zanzibaris were shaking hands with the Manyuema slaves of Abed bin Salim, who constituted the band that had been ravaging the country to obtain slaves and ivory. They had been out for sixteen months, and for eleven months had been raiding the Congo. The extent of country they had plundered was larger than Ireland, and contained a population of 1,000,000 souls. They numbered 300 men, armed with shot-guns and rifles, and their retinue of domestic slaves and women doubled their force. Their camp, even then, was on the ruins of the town of Yangambi, which had fallen before their torches, and many of whose people were prisoners on the spot where they were born. Stanley took a view of the stockade in which they had confined their human booty. This is the horrible story as he writes it: “The first general impressions are that the camp is much too densely peopled for comfort. There are rows upon rows of dark nakedness, relieved here and there by the white dresses of the captors. There are lines or groups of naked forms upright, standing or moving about listlessly; naked bodies are stretched under the sheds in all positions; naked legs innumerable are seen in the perspective of prostrate sleepers; there are countless naked children, many were infants, forms of boyhood and girlhood, and occasionally a drove of absolutely naked old women, bending under a basket of fuel, or cassava tubers, or bananas, who are driven through the moving groups by two or three musketeers. In paying more attention to details, I observe that mostly all are fettered; youths with iron rings around their necks, through which a chain like one of our boat-anchor chains is rove, securing the captives by twenties. The children over ten are secured by three copper rings, each ringed leg brought together by the central ring, which accounts for the apparent listlessness of movement I observed on first coming in presence of the curious scene. The mothers are secured by shorter chains, around whom their respective progeny of infants are grouped, hiding the cruel iron links that fall in loops or festoons over mamma’s breasts. There is not one adult man-captive amongst them.