at length I again opened my eyes and looked about me the
sun was nearly overhead, and I was lying unbound in the bottom of a long
craft that my slowly returning senses at length enabled me to recognise
as a native dug-out canoe. She was about forty feet long by four feet
beam and about two feet deep; and was manned by thirty as ferocious-
looking savages as one need ever wish to see. They were stark naked,
save for a kind of breech-clout round the loins, and squatted in pairs
along the bottom of the canoe, plying short broad-bladed paddles with
which they seemed to be urging their craft at a pretty good pace through
the water. A big, brawny, and most repulsive-looking savage, who was
probably the captain of the craft, sat perched up in the stern, steering
with a somewhat longer and broader-bladed paddle, and urging his crew to
maintain their exertions by continually giving utterance to the most
hair-raising shrieks and yells.

It was the fresh air, I suppose, that revived me, even as, after my long
sojourn in the noisome hold of the slaver, it had prostrated me by my
sudden emergence into it, and I presently became conscious that I was
feeling distinctly better than I had done for some time past. For a
minute or two I lay passively where I was, in the bottom of the canoe,
blinking up at the pallid zenith, near which the sun blazed with
blinding brilliancy; and then, no one saying me nay, I slowly and
painfully raised myself into a sitting posture and looked about me.

We were in a typical African river, about three-quarters of a mile wide,
with low bush-clad banks bordered by the inevitable mangrove, while
beyond towered the virgin tropical forest, dense, impenetrable, and full
of mystery. The turbid current was against us, as could be seen at a
glance; I therefore knew at once that we were paddling up-stream. But
whither were we bound; of what tribe or nation were the negroes who
manned the canoe; and how had I come to be among them? Had Tourville,
with a greater refinement of cruelty than even I gave him credit for,
handed me over to the tender mercies of these savages, to work their
bloodthirsty will upon me, instead of himself murdering me out of hand?
If so, what was to be my ultimate fate? I shuddered as I put this
question to myself, for I had been on the Coast quite long enough to
have heard many a gruesome, blood-curdling story of the horrors
perpetrated by the African savages upon those unhappy white