But he was not satisfied with the vengeance he had taken and the devastation he had wrought. He had resolved to teach those savage negroes a lesson on the danger of treachery to strangers, and he meant, now he had commenced it, to make it thorough and complete, and so next morning he sent off sixty men to proceed to the farthest end of the valley, some eight miles away, and destroy what yet remained; passing on through the ruins of the villages, they came to a large village in the extreme northeast. A very slight resistance was made here, and they entered it and applied the torch, and soon it shared the fate of all the rest. Before they destroyed it, however, they loaded themselves with grain. Provisions were now plenty, for the frightened negroes had left everything behind them in their flight. There was no longer any need of purchasing food, the valley was depopulated, and all the accumulated provisions of the inhabitants was at the mercy of the victors. Finding he had enough to last the expedition six days, Stanley next morning started westward before daybreak, and was soon far away from this valley of destruction, leaving the thoroughly humbled natives to crawl back to the ashes of their ruined homes. Without further trouble, in three days, he reached Iramba. Here he halted and took a calm survey of his condition and prospects. He found that out of the more than three hundred men with which he had left the coast, but one hundred and ninety-four remained. Sickness, desertion and battle had reduced his number over a third before he had reached the point where his actual labors were to commence. It was not a pleasant look-out, for, although two hundred men, well armed with rifles, made a formidable force in a country where only arrows and spears were used, still this heavy ratio of loss must stop, or the expedition itself must fail. He was not in a country where he could recruit soldiers, and each one lost was a dead loss, and thousands of miles of exploration lay before him, in prosecuting which, he knew not how many battles would be fought, nor how much sickness would have to be encountered. It would not seem a difficult piece of arithmetical calculation to determine how long three hundred men would last if one-third disappeared in three months, or how many men it would require to prosecute his labors three years. But Stanley never seemed to act as though he thought defeat possible. Whether his faith was in God, himself, or his star, it was nevertheless a strong and controlling faith. Still, now and then it is very evident that he was perfectly conscious of the desperate nature of his condition, and felt disease, which carried off his friends and retainers, or the spear, might end, at any moment, his explorations and his life.