We, for our part, busied ourselves in serving out those guns which we had taken in the first fight with the slavers to the thirty or forty picked men whom I had been instructing in the use of firearms.

If they did not do much damage, at least, I thought, they could make a noise and impress the enemy with the idea that we were well armed.
Ten minutes or so later Babemba arrived with about fifty men, all the Mazitu soldiers who were left in the town.

He reported that he had held the north gate as long as he could in order to gain time, and that the Arabs were breaking it in.

I begged him to order the soldiers to pile up stones as a defence against the bullets and to lie down behind them.
This he went to do.
Then, after a pause, we saw a large body of the Arabs who had effected an entry, advancing down the central street towards us.

Some of them had spears as well as guns, on which they carried a dozen or so of human heads cut from the Mazitus who had been killed, waving them aloft and shouting in triumph.