"A laugh. The sentence was translated to Casati, and the gallant Captain replied: "'Oh! I beg pardon, but I absolve the Pasha from all responsibility connected with me, because I am governed by my own choice entirely.' "Thus day after day I recorded faithfully the interviews I had with Emin Pasha; but these extracts reveal as much as is necessary for you to understand the position. I left Mr. Jephson thirteen of my Soudanese, and sent a message to be read to the troops, as the Pasha requested. Everything else is left until I return with the united expedition to the Nyanza. [Illustration: From Harper's Weekly. Copyright, 1887, by Harper & Brothers. EMIN PASHA.] "Within two months the Pasha proposed to visit Fort Bodo, taking Mr. Jephson with him. At Fort Bodo I have left instructions to the officers to destroy the fort and accompany the Pasha to the Nyanza. I hope to meet them all again on the Nyanza, as I intend making a short cut to the Nyanza along a new road." CHAPTER XXXIII. IN THE HEART OF AFRICA. It was in April, 1889, that the thrilling narrative of Mr. Stanley's march from the Congo to the Lakes was made known. Then he disappeared again from view, but not for long. Early in November following he was heard from again, authoritatively, and in the same month the story of his work in the Equatorial Province was rehearsed to the listening world. It was on November 24th that Mr. Marston, of London, the well-known publisher, received this letter from the explorer, dated at a mission station at the southern end of Victoria Nyanza, September 3d, 1889: "It just now," wrote Mr. Stanley, "appears such an age to me since I left England. Ages have gone by since I saw you, surely. Do you know why? Because a daily thickening barrier of silence has crept between us during that time, and this silence is so dense that in vain we yearn to pierce it. On my side I may ask, what have you been doing? On yours you may ask, and what have you been doing? I can assure myself, now that I know you live, that few days have passed without the special task of an enterprising publisher being performed as wisely and as well as possible. "And, for the time being, you can believe me that one day has followed another in striving strifefully against all manner of obstacles, natural and otherwise. From the day I left Yambuya to August 28th, 1889, the day I arrived here, the bare catalogue of incidents would fill several quires of foolscap; the catalogue of skirmishes would be of respectable length; the catalogue of adventures, accidents, mortalities, sufferings from fever, morbid musings over mischances that meet us daily, would make a formidable list. "You know that all the stretch of country between Yambuya and this place was an absolutely new country except what may be measured by five ordinary marches.