Unfortunately the emigrants had, a fortnight after the landing, scattered abroad, going according as they were wanted, to the different establishments in the colony, which were far apart from each other.  Daniel had therefore, at least for the moment, to give up a plan he had formed, to talk with every one of them until he should recognize the voice of the false boatman.

He himself, besides, was not to remain at Saigon.  After a first expedition, which kept him away for two months, he obtained command of a steam-sloop, which was ordered to explore and to take all the bearings of the River Kamboja, from the sea to Mitho, the second city of Cochin China.  This was no easy task; for the Kamboja had already defeated the efforts of several hydrographic engineers by its capricious and constant changes, every pass and every turn nearly changing with the monsoons in direction and depth.

But the mission had its own difficulties and dangers.  The Kamboja is not only obstructed by foul swamps; but it flows through vast marshy plains, which, in the season of rains, are covered with water; while in the dry season, under the burning rays of the sun, they exhale that fatal malaria which has cost already thousands of valuable lives.

Daniel was to experience its effects but too soon.  In less than a week after he had set out, he saw three of the men who had been put under his orders die before his eyes, after a few hours’ illness, and amid atrocious convulsions.  They had the cholera.  During the next four months, seven succumbed to fevers which they had contracted in these pestilential swamps.  And towards the end of the expedition, when the work was nearly done, the survivors were so emaciated, that they had hardly strength enough to hold themselves up.  Daniel alone had not yet suffered from these terrible scourges.  God knows, however, that he had not spared himself, nor ever hesitated to do what he thought he ought to do.  To sustain, to electrify these men, exhausted as they were by sickness, and irritated at wasting their lives upon work that had no reward, a leader was required who should possess uncommon intrepidity, and who should treat danger as an enemy who is to be defied only by facing him; and such a leader they found in Daniel.

He had told Sarah Brandon on the eve of his departure,—­

“With a love like mine, with a hatred like mine, in the heart, one can defy all things.  The murderous climate is not going to harm me; and, if I had six balls in my body, I should still find strength enough to come and call you to account for what you have done to Henrietta before I die.”

He certainly had had need of all that dauntless energy which passion inspires to sustain him in his trials.  But alas! his bodily sufferings were as nothing in comparison with his mental anxiety.  At night, while his men were asleep, he kept awake, his heart torn with anguish, now crushed under the thought of his helplessness, and now asking himself if rage would not deprive him of his reason.