ACCOUNT OF THE MUSEUWS CONGO EXPEDITION. 161 
Finding after all that Stanleyville was impossible as a base for 
operations, because of high prices and because too far distant from the 
most interesting zoélogical regions, decision was made to push on still 
farther east with a part of the supplies, to Avakubi in the Haut Ituri. 
Certain bits of local color from Avakubi are in the following quota- 
tions from letters sent to friends and not intended for public reading: 
You laugh about the quinine, but I do not take quite ten grains a day. Every 
other day I take six grains and have become so accustomed to it that I do not notice 
any bad effects. Our medicine chest is quite a formidable affair, but seems to be 
mostly used for treating our black boys and porters, who are always having little 
illnesses, for which they want ‘‘dawa”’ (medicine). 
Just now we are having the pleasure of inhabiting a house, built of bricks laid 
in mud, as they all are here, and roofed with palm leaves. ...How you would laugh 
to see us catching bats in the evening with a butterfly net. 
Avakubi is a great rubber station, about twenty tons a month being received 
from the natives as taxes. Some elephant tusks are also received from the same 
source. There is a mission here with two priests who often shoot birds for us. 
They have added a number of good specimens to our collection. It has taken us an 
almost incredible time to get out to this place, and will take almost as long to get 
back. Such an isolated spot can hardly exist anywhere else in the world. A lieu- 
tenant who gets his newspapers by way of East Africa, and consequently much more 
quickly than if they came up the Congo, has lately informed us that Cook claims to 
have discovered the North Pole. This is about the only news from the rest of the 
world we have heard. [November 12.]| 
That the place is isolated was well proved to the friends of the ex- 
plorers when after August 14, 1909, the months passed by and no word 
came. Anxiety increased, notwithstanding the knowledge that the 
expedition had gone far into the Haut Ituri district where it was difficult 
to get out mail. In late April, however, a sixty-six page report.dated 
November 29, relieved all fear. They were putting in every hour from 
the first beam of light in the morning till nightfall, and often till mid- 
night when the work required it, and that in a humid atmosphere of 
about one hundred degrees, but heroically said that all was so fasci- 
nating they were not thinking of discomfort. The report, which was 
rather buiky, had come by parcel post and had been nearly five months 
on the way. 
The comparative isolation of the Congo is well illustrated in the 
matter of cablegrams. For instance, a cablegram from New York to 
a point five hundred miles inland in British East Africa will be an- 
swered in about eighteen hours, while one from New York to Boma 
