Luckily, he bethought himself of a sheet-iron trunk which he had among his baggage, and which was water-tight. He quickly dumped out of it its contents, and filling it with water, set it over a fire which he had ordered to be made. He then broke open his medical stores, and taking out five pounds of Scotch oatmeal and three one-pound tins of _Revalenta Arabica_, he made with it and the two young lions a huge trunk full of gruel, that would give even two hundred and twenty men a good bowl apiece. He said it was a rare sight to see those hungry, famished men gather around that Torquay dress-trunk and pile on the fuel, and in every way assist to make the contents boil, while with greedy eyes, with gourds in their hands full of water, they stood ready to pour it in the moment it threatened to boil over and waste the precious contents. "But," he adds, "it was a rarer sight still to watch the famished wretches, as, with these same gourds full of the precious broth, they drank it down as only starving men swallow food. The weak and sick got a larger portion, and another tin of oatmeal being opened for their supper and breakfast, they awaited patiently the return of those who had gone in quest of food." Stanley's position now became painfully trying. He was five days' march from where he could obtain food, if he attempted to go back. This march, in the present condition of his men, they could never make, and if any did survive, it would be on the terrible condition of the living eating the dead. The only hope lay in reaching supplies in advance. But what if those twenty strong men he had sent on to find them never returned, having been ambushed and killed on the way, or what if they, at the end of several days, returned and reported nothing but an unbroken wilderness and impassable jungle or swamps in front, and themselves famished, ready to die? These were questions that Stanley anxiously put to himself and dared not contemplate the answer. The hours of painful anxiety and suspense, the maddening thoughts and wild possibilities that fire the brain and oppress the heart in such crises as these cannot be imagined, they can be known only by him who suffers the pangs they inflict. This is a portion of the history of the expedition that Stanley can never write, though it is written on his heart in lines that will never be effaced.