I50 THE WEST SIDE OF RUWENZORI 



blowing their horns close by in the bush and not to 

 see them nor know where the next spear or arrow 

 was coming from. And they kept up this hideous 

 concert by night, too, which seriously interfered 

 with sleep. Our advanced guard became quite 

 weary of seeing so little of their enemy, so they fired 

 volleys in the direction of every sound that they 

 heard. Once it happened to be at a poor old 

 elephant which was crashing about in the grass ; 

 luckily their shooting was not very good, and the 

 Albini rifle is not a very deadly weapon, so the 

 animal escaped. Our miserable porters, brought 

 from peaceful Toro into this barbarous land, were 

 gibbering with terror most of the time. Our 

 wounded suffered such mishandling during those 

 days as would have killed a white man a dozen 

 times over. The corpse of the mutilated soldier, 

 which his comrades insisted on taking home for 

 burial, after being carried under a blazing sun for 

 three days, became a member of the caravan which 

 can better be imagined than described, so that there 

 was not one of us who was not glad enough to see 

 the broad waters of the Semliki again, and the 

 houses of Fort Beni upon the hill beyond. 



From information which we obtained at Beni, we 

 learnt that the misdirected attentions which we 

 received from the Ruwenzori natives were due 

 to the machinations of a certain Kengele, the 

 biggest chief in the Semliki Valley, who has always 

 been an evilly disposed person. If he is not his 



