I have not attempted to avoid intruding matters of a private and personal nature upon the reader; it would have been impossible to avoid egotism in a purely egotistical narrative. The official matter, however, has been banished into Appendix II. In publishing it, my desire is to avoid the possibility of a charge being concealed in the pigeon-holes of the India House, to be produced, according to custom, with all the effect of a surprise whenever its presence is convenient. I know the conditions of appealing from those in office to a higher tribunal--the Public. I well know them and I accept them. _Avant tout, gentilhomme!_ I have spoken out my feelings concerning Captain Speke, my companion in the Expedition which forms the subject of these pages. The history of our companionship is simply this:--As he had suffered with me in purse and person at Berberah, in 1855, I thought it but just to offer him the opportunity of renewing an attempt to penetrate into Africa. I had no other reasons. I could not expect much from his assistance; he was not a linguist--French and Arabic being equally unknown to him--nor a man of science, nor an accurate astronomical observer. The Court of Directors officially refused him leave of absence; I obtained it for him by an application to the local authorities at Bombay. During the exploration he acted in a subordinate capacity; and as may be imagined amongst a party of Arabs, Baloch, and Africans, whose languages he ignored, he was unfit for any other but a subordinate capacity. Can I then feel otherwise than indignant, when I find that, after preceding me from Aden to England, with the spontaneous offer, on his part, of not appearing before the Society that originated the Expedition until my return, he had lost no time in taking measures to secure for himself the right of working the field which I had opened, and that from that day he has placed himself _en evidence_ as the _primum mobile_ of an Expedition, in which he signed himself “surveyor,”--_cujus pars minima fuit_? With deference to the reader’s judgment, I venture to express a hope that whatever of unrefinement appears in these pages, may be charged to the subject. It has been my duty to draw a Dutch picture, a cabaret-piece which could not be stripped of its ordonnance, its boors, its pipes, and its pots. I have shirked nothing of the unpleasant task,--of recording processes and not only results; I have entered into the recital of the maladies, the weary squabbles, and the vast variety of petty troubles, without which the _coup d’œil_ of African adventure would be more like a Greek Saint in effigy--all lights and no shade--than the chapter of accidents which it now is.