After dropping three miles down the Mbokwe River, we entered the Londo influent:  some three miles further on it fines down from a width of eighty feet to a mere ditch, barred with trees, which stop navigation.  We landed on the left bank and walked into the palaver-house of Fakanjok or Pakanjok, the village of a Fan head man, called by Mr. Tippet “John Matoko.”  It was old, dirty and tattered, showing signs of approaching removal.  Out of the crowd of men and women who nearly sat upon us, I had no difficulty in hiring eight porters, thereby increasing our party to twenty-five souls.  These people carry on the shoulder, not as Africans always should do, on the head:  they even cross the fallen trunks which act as rickety bridges, with one side of the body thus heavier than the other.

The bush-path began by wheeling westward, as though we were returning to Anenge-nenge; thence it struck south-eastwards, a rhumb from which it rarely deviated.  Though we were approaching the sub-ranges of the Sierra del Crystal, the country was very like that about Mbata; streamlets flowing to the Mbokwe, wet yellow soil forming slippery muds, unhealthy as unpleasant in the morning sunshine; old and new clearings and plantations, mostly of bananas, mere spots in the wide expanse of bush, and deserted or half-inhabited villages.  Shortly after noon we came to a battle-field, where the heroes of Tippet-town had chanced to fall in with their foes of Auta, a settlement distant eight or nine miles.  Both armies at once “tree’d” themselves behind trunks, and worked at long bowls, the “bushmen,” having only one gun and two charges, lost four of their men, and the victors, who had no time to carry off the slain, contented themselves with an arm or two by way of gigot.

Probably the memory of this affair, which is still to be settled, unfavourably impressed my escort.  After a total of some two hours (six miles) we arrived at a large “Olako” or breakwind, a half-face of leafy branches, and all insisted upon a long rest.  I objected, and then “palaver came up.”  We were at last frankly told that the villages ahead were hostile, that we could not proceed further in this direction, and that the people of Fakanjok had thought my only object was to sight from afar a golden prairie and a blue range beyond.  The latter is known to the French as “Tem,” from a hillock crowned with a huge red-trunked tree of that name.

Opposition was useless, so we turned back some twenty minutes to a junction, and took the south-eastern instead of the eastern line.  Here the country was higher and drier, more hilly and gravelly, the aneroid showing some 900 feet (29.11); it would be exceptionally healthy in any but the rainy season.  Before the afternoon had well set in, a camping ground had been chosen in the tall, thin forest, near the confluence of two dwarf streams, whose vitreous waters, flowing over fine sand and quartz pebbles, were no small recommendation.  As the cooking proceeded,