406 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
“ What the devil is the matter, Mara ? ” 
No response was made, but on my repeating the 
question more vehemently and emphatically, the answer 
name, short and pointed : 
“ Gente comprada l Vamos ! ” (“People who have 
been bought ! Let us go on ! ”) 
But here there was no going on for me. 1 was deter- 
mined to see what was being done, hurry or no hurry. 
The throngs of blacks were jostled and shoved into all 
sorts of corners, and herded into the cane-wall enclosures 
of the huts. The meaning of the scene was that I had 
alighted at a secluded village, where a number of kid¬ 
napped slaves had been brought en route to some head¬ 
quarters, for they were not people of the district. The 
slimy visage of a man robed in white—he himself was of 
Satanic blackness—suggested to me that the agents of 
my previous acquaintance, Saiide or Xuala, were bringing 
in an assortment of the human commodity. 
Possibly the reader can guess what my feelings were ; 
I should have liked with a single bound to have been in 
the midst of the harshly-used creatures, to strip from 
their suffering bodies the tyrant’s thongs and fetters. 
Under such circumstances these impulses can never be 
gratified, no matter how acute may be the desire to give 
relief. The suppression of the traffic cannot in the 
slightest degree be influenced by the words or actions of 
solitary passing travellers; any movement on my part 
would have been madness, even had 1 a strong caravan 
of armed followers. 
Nothing decidedly advantageous in this way can be 
accomplished excepting, as in the case of every great 
good work, by every effort being made by strong organi¬ 
sations, whose work follows the hard and slow course of 
Time’s transforming power. 
One indiscreet act on the part of a traveller may cause 
barriers to progress to spring up, and insurmountably 
and for generations stop the advance of trade and 
missions. Every traveller who is influenced by conside¬ 
rations of relative positions must feel how important is 
the question of his bearing among a people, who watch 
