Anxious for the safety of the Expedition, I permitted my canoes to float by me, and then formed them in line, the boat in the rear, and thus we began the fight. The natives advanced on us in gallant style, and after firing their heavily charged guns withdrew rapidly again to reload, and in the meantime the wooden assegais were launched with a marvellous dexterity, and the beautiful canoes skimmed about like flying fish here and there with bewildering evolutions and wonderful velocity and grace. Of course the shields were raised like bulwarks around our flotilla, and the fire from behind them was deadly; while though we in the boat were conspicuous marks, we could not be touched owing to our rapidity of fire. But they persistently followed us until the natives of the district of Mpakiwana heard the firing and rushed to the assault, and maintained it with a pertinacity that made us almost despair. About noon we discovered a channel leading among the islands, which we followed, soon becoming involved once more among the mazy laybrinths of the winding creeks. Our course may be ascertained, if I state that a little above Urangi we were in north latitude 1° 36′ 0″, and at noon of the 11th, about twenty miles westward of the Urangi, we obtained north latitude 1° 41′ 0″. The islands are much more numerous below Rubunga, and are marvels of vegetation, producing greater varieties of the palm species than those above. Though gigantic trees of the class already mentioned are as numerous, they are much more shrouded by masses of palm-vegetation, vines, and creepers, from the observation of the river voyager. As the banks here rise only from 5 to 10 feet above the surface of the river, they are subject to inundation when the river is in flood, and in many parts there are swampy depressions, favourable to dense growths of rattan and young palms. These low islands are haunted by many pests. As we glided by them during the day, we were subject to the attacks of vicious gad-flies and the tsetsé, and at night mosquitoes were so abundant that we obtained but little sleep. The murmur of the vast multitude of these insects sounded during the night to our half-waked senses like the noise of advancing savages, and until the wee hours of the morning the continual flip-flap of branches of the fig-tree, with which the worried mortals had armed themselves, annoyed my drowsy ears. We obtained just a glimpse of Ukatakura, or, as it is sometimes called, Ukaturaka, as we hastened from one island channel to another. We were followed by five or six canoes for a distance of five miles, but we finally escaped them.