I have mentioned that Toonda was attended by a young lad, his nephew, who, with another young lad, joined us at Lake Victoria.  These two young lads used to keep in front with myself or Mr. Poole, or Mr. Browne, and were quite an amusement to us.  This day both of them disappeared, not very long after we passed the last tribe.  On making inquiries I ascertained, to my surprise, that they had been forcibly taken back by three men from the last tribe, and that both cried most bitterly at leaving the party.  The loss of his nephew greatly afflicted poor Toonda, who sobbed over it for a long time.  We could not understand why the natives had thus detained the boys; but, I believe, they were members of that tribe, between which and a tribe higher up the river some ground of quarrel existed.  After the departure of these boys we had only three natives with us, who had been with the party from Lake Victoria, i. e.  Nadbuck, Toonda, and Munducki, a young man who had attached himself to Kirby, who cooked for the men.  The latter turned out to be a son of old Boocolo, a chief of the Williorara tribe, whom I shall, ere long, have occasion to introduce to the reader.  Mr. Browne, with the assistance of Nadbuck, gathered a good deal of information from the natives then with us, as to the inhospitable character of the country to the north-west of the Williorara, or Laidley’s Ponds, that agreed very little with the accounts we had previously heard.  They stated that we should not be able to cross the ranges, as they were covered with sharp pointed stones and great rocks, that would fall on and crush us to death; but that if we did get across them to the low country on the other side, the heat would kill us all.  That we should find neither water or grass, or wood to light a fire with.  That the native wells were very deep, and that the cattle would be unable to drink out of them; and, finally, that the water was salt, and that the natives let down bundles of rushes to soak it up.

Such was the account the natives gave of the region into which we were going.  We were of course aware that a great deal was fiction, but I was fully prepared to find it bad enough.  From the opinion I had formed of the distant interior, and from my knowledge of the country, both to the eastward and westward of me, I had no hope of finding it good within any reasonable distance.

Prepared, however, as I was for a bad country, I was not prepared for such as the natives described.

It was somewhat strange, that as we neared the supposed scene of the slaughter of the overlanders, we should fail in obtaining intelligence regarding it; neither were the natives, who must have participated in it, so high up the river as we now were, afraid of approaching us, as they undoubtedly would have been if they had been parties to it.  I began, therefore, to suspect that it was one of those reports which the natives are, unaccountably, so fond of spreading without any apparent object in view.