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Each morning, before they could start the ship's engines, they had been obliged to take poles and push from between the paddles of the wheels the dead bodies of Africans men, women, and children slain bodies which had floated down from the villages that the Arab slave-raiders had burned and sacked.
He knew the ruthless cruelty of the slave-raiders, and in his ears rang, still, the cries of agony when a village was set on fire and attacked by the Arabs.
Lord Dufferin and Sir E. Malet had strongly urged the Khedive to abandon Kordofan and Darfur; but it would seem that the desire of the governing class at Cairo to have a hand in the Sudan administration overbore these wise remonstrances, and hence the disaster near El Obeid with its long train of evil consequences . It was speedily followed by another reverse at Tokar not far from Suakim, where the slave-raiders and tribesmen of the Red Sea coast exterminated another force under the command of Captain Moncrieff.
And when he was sure that the wretched system was entrenched from the center of the continent to the coast, is it any wonder that he determined to make the exposure of this gigantic iniquity his principal work until "the open sore of the world" should be healed? The slave-raiders were Livingstone's bitter enemies, and did everything possible to hinder his work. Just a story:
If I had died the expedition would have broken in pieces. It was my influence that held together such of the native tribes as remained faithful to us. I had given my word that I would not desert them till I had exterminated the slave-raiders. Two days after my death my force would have melted away, and the whites would have been helpless. Not one of them would have escaped.
It was a disused track possibly dating back to the old days when the Arab slave-raiders traversed the greater part of Central Africa in search of "black ivory," and was now greatly overgrown by cacti and other fibrous plants.
Grenfell went on with his work in face of fever, inter-tribal fighting, slave-raiders, the horrors of wife and slave-slaughter at funerals, witch-killing and in some ways worse still, the horrible cruelties of the Belgian rubber-traders for over a quarter of a century. In June 1906, accompanied by his negro companions, he lay at Yalemba, sick with fever.
The air was immediately filled with fierce howls and yells. The announcement that these men were the hated slave-raiders of Samory caused an instant rush to arms. Loud cries of revenge sounded on every side, spears were flourished, knives gripped in fierce determination, and those who had muskets made certain that their weapons were loaded.
He stooped and his strong, bronzed face was twisted with mingled sorrow and anger, as, looking into the face of his younger friend, he gritted out between his clenched teeth, "The slave-raiders again!" It was the whitening skull of an African boy.
A few days' march from the mystic mountain of Nauri we approached a little town called Imigu, but found it had been sacked and burned, evidently by Arab slave-raiders, who, Omar said, were constantly descending upon the towns and villages on the border of his land.
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