he again
retreated, but had not proceeded many hundred yards when his horse once
more came down, with such violence as to throw him against a tree at a
considerable distance. At this juncture, alarmed by the horses behind
him, the animal got up and escaped, leaving the major on foot and
unarmed.

The Mandara officer and his followers were butchered and stripped within
a few yards of him. Their cries were dreadful. His hopes of life were
too faint to deserve the name. He was almost instantly surrounded, and
speedily stripped, his pursuers making several thrusts at him with their
spears, wounding his hands severely, and his body slightly. In the
first instance they had been prevented from murdering him by the fear of
injuring the value of his clothes, which appeared to them a rich booty.
His shirt was now torn off his back. When his plunderers began to
quarrel for the spoil, the idea of escape came across his mind.
Creeping under the belly of the horse nearest him, he started as fast as
his legs would carry him, to the thickest part of the wood. Two of the
Felatahs followed. He ran in the direction the stragglers of his own
party had taken. His pursuers gained on him, for the prickly underwood
tore his flesh and impeded his progress. Just then he saw a mountain
stream gliding along at the bottom of a deep ravine. His strength had
almost failed him, when, seizing the long branches of a tree overhanging
the water, he let himself down into it. What was his horror to observe
a large liffa, the most venomous of serpents, rise from its coil as if
in the very act of striking! His senses left him, the branch slipped
from his hand, and he tumbled headlong into the water. The shock,
however, revived him, and with three strokes of his arms he reached the
opposite bank, which with great difficulty he crawled up. He, at
length, felt that he was safe from his pursuers. Still, the forlorn
situation in which he was placed, without even a rag to cover his body,
almost overwhelmed him. Yet, fully alive to the danger to which he was
exposed, he had began to plan how he could best rest on the top of a
tamarind tree, in order to escape from panthers, when the idea of
liffas, almost as numerous, excited a shudder of despair. While trying
to make his way through the woods, he observed two horsemen between the
trees, and, still further to the east, with feelings of gratitude, he
recognised Barca Gana and Boo-Khaloum, with about