INTRODUCTION 3 



activity on their side in exploring her mysteries, and in spite 

 of the patient work of Barth and Overweg, Lake Chad had 

 not yet yielded up her secret ; her fish and her birds were 

 still unknown, her shores and islands undetermined, and her 

 dwellers remained as illusive as herself. Thus it was that I 

 came under her spell, and Chad became the pendant that I 

 aimed at hanging upon the hnks of our other enterprises. 



About the autumn of 1898 three French expeditions 

 started from west and north and south to converge on Lake 

 Chad. Gentil, fighting against enormous difficulties, came 

 from the west by the Congo and Ubanghi rivers and succeeded 

 in reaching the Lake. Foureau came down from Algiers 

 through the Sahara, and was not heard of in the desert for 

 nearly a year. About the same time a third expedition set 

 out from Senegal under Voulet and Chanoine, the story of 

 whose progress of pillage and rape and murder forms the 

 darkest page in the history of Africa. For some unhappy 

 reason (perhaps their incapability to withstand the tempta- 

 tions of supreme power, and perhaps the trying African 

 climate had inflamed their worst passions), they had not 

 gone far from the restraint of authority before they gave way 

 to the most terrible excesses of cruelty and appetite. And 

 when rumours of their abuses reached a French post, and 

 a superior officer was sent out to arrest them, they ordered 

 their soldiers to shoot him down as he approached, and then 

 stripped the uniform off his body. Thus, by the murder of a 

 white man having crossed the Rubicon of crime, and knowing 

 that they could never return to their countrymen and live, 

 they became desperate and went mad in a fearful orgy of 

 crimes, leaving a bloody trail of horrors and death behind 



