OUT INTO TIIE ATLANTIC. 
521 
gnawing emptiness, assisted themselves with the wanton 
recklessness of necessity, and appropriated food unpaid 
for. While I am seated among a crowd from the right 
bank, who have come across the river to elate me with 
stories of white men whom they have seen by the sea, 
and from whom I learn the news that there are whites 
like myself at Embomma, I hear shots on the cultivated 
uplands ; and though I pretend to take no interest in 
them, yet a bitter, restless instinct informs me that 
those shots have reference to myself ; and presently the 
people return, some with streaming wounds from oxide 
of copper pellets and iron fragments which have been 
fired at them. Uledi comes also, bearing a mere skele- 
ton on his back, whom, with his usual daring, lie has 
rescued from the power of the men who would shortly 
have made a prisoner of him ; and he and the rest 
have all a horrible tale to tell. “ Several men have 
been captured by the natives for stealing cassava and 
beans.” 
“ Why did you do it ? ” 
“We could not help it,” said one. “Master, we are 
dying of hunger. We left our beads and moneys— all 
we had — on the ground, and began to eat, and they 
began shooting.” 
In a very short time, while they are yet speaking, a 
large force of natives appears, lusty with life and hearty 
fare, and, being angered, dare us, with loaded guns, to 
fight them. A few of the men and chiefs hasten to 
their guns, and propose to assume the defensive, but I 
restrain them, and send my native friends from the 
right bank to talk to them ; and, after two hours’ 
patient entreaties, they relax their vindictiveness and 
retire. 
When I muster the people next morning, that we 
may cross the river to Nsuki Kintomba, I discover that 
six men have been wounded, and three, Ali Kiboga,* 
* Some two or three months after we had left Loanda, Ali Kiboga 
escaped from his captivity, and after a desperate journey, during which 
he must have gone through marvellous adventures, succeeded in reach- 
ing Boma, whence he was sent to Kabinda, thence by the Portuguese 
gunboat Tamega to San Paulo de Loanda. After a short stay at Loanda, 
