This was not so easily settled. Four hours were spent before the bargain was concluded, and Mr. Stanley found himself obliged to pay one hundred and sixty dollars down in cloth and a rental of ten dollars per month. The papers confirming the agreement were then drawn up in due form, and signed by the various parties concerned in the matter. Mr. Stanley, as "Mundelé of Vivi," had no good reason to congratulate himself upon his bargain. He had, of course, secured a site for his station, but he had been compelled to pay a big price for it, and his land was a mere wilderness of rocky and barren hillsides. All the really good land at Vivi was already occupied, and the natives would not part with it. On the evening of the day on which his contract was signed he wrote in his diary: "I am not altogether pleased with my purchase. It has been most expensive, in the first place, and the rent is high. However, necessity has compelled me to do it. It is the highest point of navigation of the Congo, opposite which a landing could be effected. The landing-place is scarcely three hundred yards long, but if the shores were improved by leveling, available room for ships could be found for fifteen hundred yards." On the plateau near the river was room for a town of twenty thousand people, and the situation seemed salubrious. So a road was made up to the plateau, buildings erected, and a large quantity of goods brought up from Mussuko, and safely housed. So far the expedition had had plain sailing. The Congo affords a magnificent waterway from the ocean, at Banana, up to Vivi. But a little distance above Vivi are the Livingstone Falls, rendering further navigation impossible. It was therefore necessary to build a road and make further progress overland. So work was begun on a new road, from Vivi to Isangila, fifty-two miles above, which had been chosen as the site of the next station. The country was wild and rugged, and ruled by thirty or forty different chiefs. Each of these chiefs had to be negotiated with and won over, and each in his own way. Moreover, the individual owners of farms and gardens had to be dealt with, and often paid exorbitant prices for their land. Surveying the route was a long and toilsome job. The work of clearing and grading would have been stupendous had it been designed merely to make it a wagon-road. But it was to be more than that. It was to be a road over which several of the steamboats could be transported, to be relaunched on the river above the falls. Mr. Stanley never faltered, however, and at noon of March 18th, 1880, the work of making the road was begun. On January 2d, 1881, within ten months from the actual beginning of the work, the road, fifty-two miles in length, was completed, the boats were on the shore at Isangila waiting to be repaired, scraped, and painted, and the "Royal," a small screw steamer presented to the expedition by the King of the Belgians, was steaming on the river.