without the adventures on Lake Tchad and at the Senegal, I verily believe we should have died of ennui."
An English frigate was about to sail, and the three travelers were taken on board. On the 25th of June they arrived at Portsmouth, and on the following day they reached London. We shall not attempt to describe the welcome they received from the Royal Geographical Society, nor the cordiality of their general reception. Kennedy set out for Edinburgh with his famous rifle to reassure his old housekeeper of his existence.
Doctor Ferguson and his faithful Joe are still the same, although change has come upon them; they have become friends—no longer master and servant.
The European journals were unanimous in their praises of the explorers, and the Daily Telegraph issued 977,000 copies on the day they published an extract from the journals of the voyage.
Doctor Ferguson read the account of the expedition at a public meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, and the Gold Medal was bestowed upon him and his two companions, for having achieved the most remarkable expedition of the year 1862.
The result of the journey of Doctor Ferguson was to confirm in the most precise manner the facts and statements reported by Barth, Burton, Speke, and others. Thanks to the still more recent expeditions of Speke and Grant, Heuglin and Munzinger, who ascended to the sources of the Nile, where they spread towards the center of Africa, we shall soon be able to confirm in their turn Doctor Ferguson's own discoveries in that immense territory comprised between the fourteenth and thirty-third degree of longitude.
THE END
