Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/97

Rh and they would not begin now. If any readers should think that two thousand bearers were rather more than were needed to carry the effects and baggage of 212 men, let them know that there was a steamer in parts and artillery, and we know not what besides, to carry, all which had to be left behind owing to this laziness of the Bari chief and his people. Thus foiled, Baker again divided his expedition, leaving 120 men under Major Abdallah in a camp by the river, sending the English engineers back to Gondokoro, and pressing on himself to Lobord with about one hundred men, who were to drag the baggage and supplies in carts for sixty miles. With this slender force and light equipments, Baker started, on February 8th, under the guidance of an old rainmaker named Lokko. Four horses, on one of which Lady Baker rode, ten donkeys, and a whole herd of cattle accompanied the expedition, and on the 12th it readied Loboré without having fired a shot, where on the 24th they were joined by Major Abdallah and the men under his command, who in the mean time had been attacked by the Baris in their camp, and had lost their fieldpiece. From Loboré Baker pushed on for Afuddo on the White Nile above the cataracts, and thence for Fatiko, a spot 165 miles south of Gondokoro. At this point in the Sholi country, in north latitude 3° 01m., Baker found his ubiquitous foe Aboo Saood, who had pushed on here from Gondokoro to protect his interests in these parts, where he had a seriba and did a good business in slaves and ivory. This was in March 1872, and, as the contract with Agad had not yet quite expired. Baker gave Aboo Saood leave to remain on sufferance in the district, from which he was to be allowed to remove his ivory, amounting to more than three thousand tusks, on condition that he was to abandon his slave-trading and ivory-expeditions to the south and east, in which he had been up to that time actively engaged. At the same time Baker determined to build a fort and to leave a garrison at Fatiko, while he pushed on with one hundred men towards the Equator. On March 18, 1872, he started for the Unyoro country on the shores of the Albert Nyanza, though it is separated from it by a lofty range of cliffs, and when there he would be in the territory of his old acquaintance Kamrasi, whose rapacious covetousness was well known to him on his former journeys. But that potentate had been dead two years, and his son Kabba Rega reigned in his stead, who had risen to power by the wholesale murder of his brothers and relations, Rionga, an uncle, having alone escaped his attempts to take his life. As he marched through these regions along the banks of the Victoria Nile, Baker was amazed to find them, once so fertile and populous, desolated by the incursions of the Khartoum traders, who kidnap the women and children for slaves, kill the men, and plunder and destroy whatever they can lay hands on.

To make a long story short, on April 25, 1872, he reached Masindi, the capital of Kabba Rega, a large town, in latitude 1° 45m. N., 332 miles from Gondokoro and about fifty miles east of the cliffs which bound the Albert Nyanza. It must be allowed that Baker's account of Kabba Rega the young king is extremely unprepossessing; for he describes him as an awkward undignified lout of twenty, who thought himself a great monarch, and was cruel, cowardly, and treacherous to the last degree. In the capital of this monarch Baker remained till June 14th. During that period he had, as he conceived, such sufficient proof of Aboo Saood's treachery, that he sent orders to Major Abdallah at Fatiko to arrest him. But quite apart from Aboo Saood, Kabba Rega gave Baker quite enough to do. Though at first professedly friendly, the relations between them grew worse and worse, and after having tried to poison the whole force by a present of drugged beer, the treacherous king gathered his warriors around him, drove off his cattle, and attacked a fort which Baker had fortunately built to protect his force. Then ensued a series of hostile operations in which was fought the battle of Masindi, to the sore loss of the natives and the destruction of the whole town by fire, though Baker lost several valuable lives. Then the natives set fire to the quarters of Baker's force while they retired to their fort, and on the whole matters assumed such an angry complexion, that on June 13th Baker resolved to leave Masindi and fight his way back to Fatiko. Up to this time his heroic wife had exhibited the greatest bravery and devotion, and her name must ever be remembered amongst those women who have shown that they can be as brave as lions and yet as gentle as doves. On the march back through woods and marshes lined on either side by unseen foes, she still maintained a cheerfulness and resolution which sustained the spirits, of all around 