He now mustered his entire force, to see what he had to rely on before setting out, and found it to consist of three white men and one hundred and six Wanguana soldiers, twenty-eight having died since leaving Itwru thirty days before, or at an average of nearly one a day. This was a gloomy prospect. Before beginning his real work one-half of his entire expedition had disappeared. Dysentery had been the great scourge that had thinned their ranks so fearfully. Stanley in the first place was not a physician, while even those remedies which ordinarily might have proved efficacious were rendered well-nigh useless by the necessity of constant marching. Rest alone would have cured a great many, but he felt compelled to march. Whether the necessity for marching with the rapidity he did, was sufficiently urgent to justify him in sacrificing so many lives, he doubtless is the best judge. These poor men were not accustomed to travel at the rate he kept them moving. Had they marched as leisurely as an Arab caravan, they would have been nine months or a year in making the distance which Stanley had accomplished in the short space of one hundred and three days. He was at last on the lake that Baker hoped to reach with his steam vessels, and here he expected to meet Gordon, his successor, but he evidently had not yet arrived, for the natives told him that no boats had been seen on the water. They related strange tales, however, of the people inhabiting the shores. One told him of a race of dwarfs, another of a tribe of giants, another still of a people who kept a breed of dogs so large that even Stanley's mastiffs were small in comparison. How much or little of this was true, he, of course, could not tell, still it excited his curiosity, and increased his desire to explore the country. He reached the lake on the 28th of February, and in eight days had everything ready, and launched his boat. He selected ten good oarsmen, who, with the steersman and himself, composed the boat's crew, and the whole force with which he was to overcome all the difficulties that he might encounter. The camp was left in charge of Frank Pocoke and young Barker. Naming the large body of water, into which the Shimeeyu and Ruano Rivers flowed, Speke Bay, in honor of the distinguished explorer, he sailed east along the irregular coast. To-day passing a district thinly populated, to-morrow a rugged hill country, through which the elephants wandered in immense droves, and of course, thronged with elephant hunters, he passed various tribes, until he came to the mouth of the Ruano River, discharging a large volume of water into Speke Bay, but nothing in comparison with the Shimeeyu and the Kagera, the two great river supplies of the lake. The former is the largest of all, and at its mouth a mile wide. Its length is three hundred and seventy miles and is, he says, the extreme southern source of the Nile.