It was followed by five others.

Resistance was not possible, and nevertheless, Dick Sand and his companions attempted it.  Some soldiers of the caravan were wounded by them, and certainly they would have paid for this resistance with their lives, if there had not been a formal order to spare them.

In a few minutes, the passage was made.  But just as the boat landed, Hercules, with an irresistible bound, sprang on the ground.  Two natives having sprung on him, the giant turned his gun like a club, and the natives fell, with their skulls broken.

A moment after, Hercules disappeared under the cover of the trees, in the midst of a shower of balls, as Dick Sand and his companions, having been put on land, were chained like slaves.

CHAPTER VII.

IN CAMP ON THE BANKS OF THE COANZA.

The aspect of the country was entirely changed since the inundation.  It had made a lake of the plain where the termite village stood.  The cones of twenty ant-hills emerged, and formed the only projecting points on this large basin.

The Coanza had overflowed during the night, with the waters of its tributaries swelled by the storm.

This Coanza, one of the rivers of Angola, flows into the Atlantic, a hundred miles from the cape where the “Pilgrim” was wrecked.  It was this river that Lieutenant Cameron had to cross some years later, before reaching Benguela.  The Coanza is intended to become the vehicle for the interior transit of this portion of the Portuguese colony.  Already steamers ascend its lower course, and before ten years elapse, they will ply over its upper bed.  Dick Sand had then acted wisely in seeking some navigable river toward the north.  The rivulet he had followed had just been emptied into the Coanza.  Only for this sudden attack, of which he had had no intimation to put him on his guard, he would have found the Coanza a mile farther on.  His companions and he would have embarked on a raft, easily constructed, and they would have had a good chance to descend the stream to the Portuguese villages, where the steamers come into port.  There, their safety would be secured.

It would not be so.

The camp, perceived by Dick Sand, was established on an elevation near the ant-hill, into which fate had thrown him, as in a trap.  At the summit of that elevation rose an enormous sycamore fig-tree, which would easily shelter five hundred men under its immense branches.  Those who have not seen those giant trees of Central Africa, can form no idea of them.  Their branches form a forest, and one could be lost in it.  Farther on, great banyans, of the kind whose seeds do not change into fruits, completed the outline of this vast landscape.

It was under the sycamore’s shelter, hidden, as in a mysterious asylum, that a whole caravan—­the one whose arrival Harris had announced to Negoro—­had just halted.  This numerous procession of natives, snatched from their villages by the trader Alvez’s agents, were going to the Kazounde market.  Thence the slaves, as needed, would be sent either to the barracks of the west coast, or to N’yangwe, toward the great lake region, to be distributed either in upper Egypt, or in the factories of Zanzibar.