The next day the other boats were hauled up and then the process of letting them down commenced. This was done in safety, when the goods were sent overland to the Mbelo Falls beyond, while the boats should attempt to run the rapids There was no abrupt descent, but a wild waste of tumbling, roaring water dashing against the cliffs and rocks in reckless fury. Stanley resolved to try them before risking his men, and embarking in the Lady Alice, with men on shore holding cables attached to bow and stern, he drifted slowly downward amid the rocks. The little boat seemed a mere toy amid the awful surroundings in which it floated, and Stanley realized as it rocked beneath him what a helpless thing it would be in the wild and turbulent midstream. Just as he reached the most dangerous point, one of the cables parted. The boat swung to, when the other snapped asunder and the frightened thing was borne like a bubble into the boiling surge and carried downward like an arrow. Down, down, between the frowning precipices, now barely escaping a huge rock and now lifted like a feather on the top of a wave it swept on, apparently to certain destruction. But death had lost all its terrors to these hard-hunted men, and the six in the boat sat resigned to their fate. The brave Uledi, however, kept his hand on the helm and his steady eye on the hell of waters around and before them. Sometimes caught in a whirlpool that tossed them around and around, and then springing like a panther down a steep incline, the boat continued to plunge on its mad course with death on every side, until at last it shot into the Niguru basin, when they rowed to the sandy beach of Kilanga. Here, amid the rocks, they found the broken boat in which Pocoke went down, and the body of one of the men who was drowned with him jammed among the fragments. Stanley looked back on this perilous ride with strange feelings. It seemed as if fate, while trying him to the utmost, was determined he should not perish, but that he should fulfill the great mission he had undertaken. His people seemed to think so too, for when they saw his boat break adrift and launch into the boiling rapids they gave him up for lost; but when they caught sight of him coming toward them alive and well, they gave way to extravagant joy and exclaimed, "it is the hand of God--we shall reach the sea." The escape was so wonderful, almost miraculous, that they could not but believe that God had spared him to save them all.