clearly--thin wreaths of
smoke issuing therefrom when he did not sympathise with Jack's
reasoning, and thick voluminous clouds revolving about his woolly head,
and involving him, as it were, in a veil of gauze, when he became
pleasantly impressed. When Jack made mention of the valuable gifts
above referred to, his head and shoulders were indistinctly visible amid
the white cloudlets; and when he further offered to supply him with a
few hundreds of the magical paper balls that had so effectually defeated
his enemies the day before, the upper part of his person was obliterated
altogether in smoke.

This last offer of Jack's we deemed a great stroke of politic wisdom,
for thereby he secured that the pending war should be marked by the
shedding of less blood than is normal in such cases. He endeavoured
further to secure this end by assuring the king that the balls would be
useless for the purpose for which they were made if any other substance
should be put into the gun along with them, and that they would only
accomplish the great end of putting the enemy to flight if fired at them
in one tremendous volley at a time when the foe had no idea of the
presence of an enemy.

All things being thus amicably arranged, we retired to rest, and slept
soundly until daybreak, when we were awakened by the busy sounds of
preparation in the village for the intended pursuit.

We, too, made active arrangements for a start, and soon after were
trooping over the plains and through the jungle in the rear of King
Jambai's army, laden with such things as we required for our journey to
the coast, and Jack, besides his proportion of our food, bedding,
cooking utensils, etcetera, carrying Njamie's little sick boy on his
broad shoulders.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

WE MEET WITH A LUDICROUSLY AWFUL ADVENTURE.

The day following that on which we set out from King Jambai's village,
as narrated in the last chapter, Jack, Peterkin, Makarooroo, Njamie's
little boy, and I embarked in a small canoe, and bidding adieu to our
hospitable friends, set out on our return journey to the coast.

We determined to proceed thither by another branch of the river which
would take us through a totally new, and in some respects different,
country from that in which we had already travelled, and which, in the
course of a few weeks, would carry us again into the neighbourhood of
the gorilla country.

One beautiful afternoon, about a week after parting from our fr