"It was necessary, in the eighteen hundred miles from Nyangué to the ocean, to pass fifty-seven water-falls and rapids. After the river reached fourteen hundred miles, on its journey to the sea, it narrowed and ran through close-meeting, uprising banks of naked cliffs, or steep slopes of mountains, fringed with tall woods. Here the river was as rough and stormy as a sea, sometimes a steep glassy fall, sometimes boiling around isles of stone and bowlders, sometimes whirlpools and caldrons, the air filled with a roar like that of Niagara. This part of the journey, although not more than one hundred and eighty miles, required five months to make. Stanley, looking back, regards the attempt as insanity. But he had resolved to cling to the river, and not to leave it until it bore him, whether over smooth beaches or stony bowlders, to the sea. If he had gone around the cataract region in a land march he would have lessened his journey, avoided fearful hardships, and saved lives. But this knowledge he bought for himself and for mankind by experience. Hard as was the task, it was better done in this way; otherwise there would have been a farther mystery. As it is, we now know every mile of the river from the source to the mouth. But the perils of these falls were the severest of the trip, and it was here that he lost Kalulu, the faithful black boy whom he found in Livingstone days and educated in England, and, more than all, his last remaining white associate, Frank Pocock. [Illustration: STANLEY'S EXPEDITION RECUPERATED AND RECLAD AFTER CROSSING THE "DARK CONTINENT."]