Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. I had to watch for sunken stones, and my twenty pilgrims grumbled on deck while a crew of cannibals worked the boat for three pieces of brass wire a week, which they could not eat. Sometimes a burst of yells or a glimpse of a village would pass, and the steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black incomprehensible frenzy. What thrilled me was the thought of their humanity, like mine, and the suspicion of their not being inhuman. Eight miles below the Inner Station we anchored in the stream, for a white fog had come down and would not lift before morning.