Two miles below we came to some rocky straits and the ten islets of Kabombo. The current ran through these at the rate of about five knots an hour, but, excepting a few eddies, there was nothing to render the passage difficult. Down to this point the course of the great river had been north-east, north-north-east, and east-north-east, but below it sheered to north. On our right now began the large country of Koruru, and on our left Yambarri.[11] ----- Footnote 11: Colonel Long, of the Egyptian army, on his way to the Nyam-Nyam country, in 1874, met with a tribe called the Yanbari, in about 5° north latitude. ----- We descended rapidly for two miles down the river, here about two thousand yards wide, after which the hoarse murmur of falls was again heard. Our cannibal guides warned us not to venture near the left bank, and, relying on their information, we approached the Sixth Cataract along the right bank, and camped not four hundred yards from an island densely inhabited by a tribe of the Waregga called Wana-Rukura. [Illustration: CAVERN, NEAR KABOMBO ISLANDS.] We here released our cannibal guides, and surrendered their weapons to them. They availed themselves of their liberty by instantly running along the river bank up the river. We were not long left unmolested in our jungle camp, for while we were still engaged in constructing a stockade, war-cries, horns, and drums announced the approach of the ever-fierce aborigines; and in a short time we were hotly engaged. In an hour we had driven them away. Following them up rapidly a little distance we came to a large village, where we discovered three or four women well advanced in years, and, in order to obtain information of the country and its inhabitants, conveyed them to camp, where we began to practise such arts of conciliation and kindness as calm and soothe the fears of excited captives, and which had been so successful up river. We had hardly returned to camp before a larger force—the inhabitants of the islands—appeared in head-dresses of parrot-feathers, and skull-caps of civet, squirrel, goat, and “soko,” and with a bold confidence born of ignorance made a rush upon the stockade. The attack was promptly repelled, and in turn we attacked, driving the savages back step by step, and following them to a creek about fifty yards wide, into which they sprang to swim to their island. Two of the wounded warriors we caught and conveyed to our camp, where their wounds were dressed, and other attentions paid to them, which were much appreciated by them. The pioneers were during the afternoon engaged in cutting a broad road to the creek past the first fall, and by sunset our canoes and boat were dragged out of the river into the stockade, ready for transport overland.