any's store. Here they found
that the chop-boxes had all gone on board their ship. Mr. Wallace
ordered three Borroughs and Wellcome medicine cases, specially made up
for the West Coast. He also procured two hypodermic syringes and a
small quantity of Pasteur serums.

"We'll probably never need them," he explained, as they left the store,
"but in case our men strike a snake a quick hypodermic is the only thing
to save them. Then we have poisoned arrows to consider also. If we
happened to get into the pigmy country--which I hope we won't--it'll
take a powerful anti-tetanic serum to kill their poisons."

After a lunch they returned to the Boma Company. The lists which Mr.
Wallace had given the clerks had been filled and now each of them was
measured for the clothes and personal equipment. This consumed an hour,
after which they took another taxi and went to a camera supply house.

The boys went into extravagant delight over the small and compact
moving-picture outfit. Burt promptly took charge of this, or rather
promised to take charge, for when the whole outfit had been sealed up it
would be sent down to the steamer like the other supplies.

"Tell you what," he cried, "we'll get some great little old pictures!
You let an elephant chase you, Uncle George, while I get a good view
and Critch shoots him!"

"Don't want much, do you?" laughed his uncle. "Nothing like that for
mine. I'd sooner have an elephant after me, at that, than a big buffalo.
That's the most dangerous animal we'll find in Africa."

"How 'bout rhinoceros?" challenged Critch.

"All poppycock," snorted the explorer. "A rhino can't see ten feet away.
He goes by smell. He'll usually run away unless he's wounded. But a
buffalo doesn't wait to be wounded. You rouse him up out of a
comfortable feeding place and he'll go for you. Takes more than one
bullet to kill him unless you're lucky."

The boys now stocked up with fresh linen for the voyage while Mr.
Wallace looked up his own guns, which he usually stored in London. They
stopped at the Carleton over Sunday and Monday. As Burt's father had
sales offices in London they secured a large touring car without cost
and spent the two days riding about the historic city. There were
various minor details of their outfits to be attended to on Monday and
on Tuesday noon they went aboard the _Benguela_, when she arrived from
Liverpool.

She proved to be a large cargo and passenger boat and was very
comfortably fi