On board, Carl made plans on how to reach Timbuktoo in the quickest possible way. The steamer would take him to Senegal. From there he could take the railroad that runs along the Senegal River, for some eight hundred miles, into the African interior. So far so good. At the terminus of the railway, however, he faced a journey of some three or four hundred miles on horseback. That was the part he dreaded. As good a horseman as he was, he realized the strain such a journey would place upon man and beast, especially so if they were in a hurry. But the journey itself did not worry him as much as the procuring of sufficient relays of horses to carry on. Slow as the trip across the Atlantic had seemed, the passage of the freighter along the African Coast was still slower and more tedious. Languidly the vessel crept from port to port. Being a tramp her holds held a general cargo consigned to hundreds of different points in the interior of the continent, which meant a stop at a half dozen different coast towns. The mere calling at these varied ports would not have displeased Carl as much as did the fact that the Captain of the boat saw fit to lay-up at each of the ports for a day or two. To plead with him for a more hurried journey was useless. He had made the trip a half hundred times, he told Carl, and it was always fast enough to suit him. And when an African coaster says that, he means it. Carl was desperate, when, one rainy morning, some four weeks after leaving New York, he finally left the steamer at the port of Saint Louis, lying at the mouth of the Senegal River. Inquiring at the railroad station as to the first train for Segu Sikoro, the last stop, on the road he was told that it would be some hours before the train left. Cursing the indifference to time one encounters all over Africa, Carl turned to a little telegraph office, and from there dispatched a message to Sana, saying he was on his way to Timbuktoo, and hoped to see her within a week. At last the train started its weary journey up the Senegal River. Carl had never traveled on an African railway, but, from what he had heard of the experiences of friends, it was something not to be considered in the light of a pleasure trip. Just how many stops it would make from time to time, for water and wood it used for fuel, he dared not picture in advance. Suffice to say, they would be too many to suit anyone in as great a hurry as he was. From the outset the trip promised to be an unpleasant one. The rain and the heat, together with the swarming flies, foretold as much. Carl tried to concentrate on his books, but after a few hours dreary ride, punctured by several jerking stops, and accompanied by shrieking wheels, he gave it up. He would just have to sit there and wait for his journey’s end. So he sat looking out through the rain at the dismal waters of the Senegal, until the train came to a halt at a little way station, the name of which Carl could not ascertain.