Month after month, sometimes camping for weeks, sometimes marching in the track of rivers or skirting swamps, the expedition wore its way steadily on, making for the point of the compass to which it had set its face, north-north-by-west. And still word went ahead, through a thousand miles of virgin forest; and Davidina coming after, continued--however bad her theology might be--to prove the thesis she had set out to demonstrate; always triumphal in her progress, successfully collecting botanical specimens, her course unpunctuated by gunfire and unstained by blood. For when, in the languages of the native tribes they became variously known as the Music-makers, the Ball-bearers: the Breathers of the breath of life, their way was not made merely safe but prepared before them, and a choice of many roads was offered them. Runners from a hundred miles distance to right and left of their route would come entreating them to turn aside and do honour to communities waiting to welcome them. For food they depended entirely on the skill of the native bow-men, slingers, trappers, and blowers of darts who formed their company; for Davidina had quite correctly calculated that if by this means the natives could support themselves in life, they could also support an expedition in which the whites were only as one to ten. Had these followers deserted, she and her two companions would speedily have starved. It was a risk--not greater, she maintained, than the carrying of fire-arms; and since some risk must be taken, that was the one she preferred. In the end she had actually to face it and come through on her own; but the goal of her itinerary was then not far. It happened one night, after a heavy march that, without knowing it, she had pitched her camp upon the confines of the Ray River Company’s sphere of operations,--at the point, therefore, where civilization might be said to begin. When she turned in for the night all appeared to be well. Outside her tent the native guards sat motionless upon their haunches looking out into the black bush; the toy air-balloons floated dreamily on their pole in the centre of the camp, and about its base all the impedimenta of the expedition stood neatly piled: there was then neither sign of danger, nor prospect of alarm, for up to that time nobody knew that they had touched civilization. But during the dead hours, some sense--sight, or sound--of peril lurking ahead: native runners, perhaps, from a distance, or hidden dwellers in the surrounding forest, had struck the hearts of her followers a blow. In the morning the camp was empty. The cases of botanical specimens lay undisturbed, but the toy air-balloons had vanished. The pipes, the soap, the bird-warblers, the monkey, and the two concertinas remained, also a small amount of food--rice, flour, extracts of meat, and other medicaments which white men think that they require when travelling. It was panic not the loot-instinct which had cleared the camp of its carriers.