Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - David Livingstone (best romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

abundance of speech-making and drumming. It is no easy matter to get away from these villages, for the chiefs esteem it an honor to have strangers with them. These delays, and the frequent heavy rains, greatly retarded the progress of the travelers.

They had traveled four months, and accomplished half of their journey before encountering any show of hostility from the tribes through which they passed. A chief, named Njambi, then demanded tribute for passing through his country; when this was refused he said that one of Livingstone's men had spit on the leg of one of his people, and this crime must be paid for by a fine of a man, an ox, or a gun.

This reasonable demand was likewise refused, and the natives seemed about to commence hostilities; but changed their minds upon witnessing the determined attitude of the strangers. Livingstone at last yielded to the entreaties of his men and gave them an ox, upon the promise that food should be sent in exchange. The niggardly chief sent them only a small bag of meal, and two or three pounds of the meat of their own ox.

From this time they were subject to frequent attempts at extortion.

The last of these was made on the banks of the River Quango, the boundary of the Portuguese possessions. A Bashinje chief, whose portrait is given by Mr. Livingstone, made the usual demand of a man, a gun, or an ox, otherwise they must return the way they came. While negotiations were in progress the opportune arrival of a Portuguese sergeant freed the travelers from their troubles. The river was crossed, and once on Portuguese territory their difficulties were over.

At Cassange, the frontier settlement, they sold Sekeletu's ivory.

The Makololo, who had been accustomed to give two tusks for one gun, were delighted at the prices they obtained. For one tusk they got two muskets, three kegs of powder, large bunches of beads, and calico and baize enough to clothe all the party.

On the 31st of May, after more than six months' travel, Livingstone and his companions reached the Portuguese sea-port of Loanda.

The Makololo were lost in wonder when they first caught sight of the sea.

"We marched along," they said, "believing that what the ancients had told us was true, that the world has no end; but all at once the world said to us, I am finished, there is no more of me." Still greater was their wonder when they beheld the large stone houses of the town. "These are not huts,"

they said, "but mountains with caves in them." Livingstone had in vain tried to make them comprehend a house of two stories.

They knew of no dwellings except their own conical huts, made of poles stuck into the ground, and could not conceive how one hut could be built on the top of another, or how people could live in the upper story, with the pointed roof of the lower one sticking up in the middle of the floor.

The vessels in the harbor were, they said, not canoes, but towns, into which one must climb by a rope.

At Loanda Livingstone was attacked by a fever, which reduced him to a skeleton, and for a while rendered him unable to attend to his companions. But they managed very well alone.

Some went to the forest, cut firewood, and brought it to town for sale; others unloaded a coal-vessel in the harbor, at the magnificent wages of a sixpence a day. The proceeds of their labor were shrewdly invested in cloth and beads which they would take home with them in confirmation of the astounding stories they would have to tell; "for," said they, "in coming to the white man's country, we have accomplished what no other people in the world could have done; we are the true ancients, who can tell wonderful things."

The two years, at the close of which Livingstone had promised to rejoin his family, had almost expired, and he was offered a passage home from Loanda.

But the great object of his expedition was only partially attained.

Though he had reached the west coast in safety, he had found that the forests, swamps, and rivers must render a wagon-road from the interior impracticable.

He feared also that his native attendants would not be able to make their way alone back to their own country, through the unfriendly tribes.

So he resolved, feeble as he was, to return to Sekeletu's dominions, and thence proceed to the eastern coast.

In September he started on his return journey, bearing considerable presents for Sekeletu from the Portuguese, who were naturally anxious to open a trade with the rich ivory region of the interior. The Board of Public Works sent a colonel's uniform and a horse, which unfortunately died on the way.

The merchants contributed specimens of all their articles of trade, and a couple of donkeys, which would have a special value on account of their immunity from the bite of the tsetse. The men were made happy by the acquisition of a suit of European clothes and a gun apiece, in addition to their own purchases.

In the Bashinje country he again encountered hostile demonstrations.

One chief, who came riding into the camp upon the shoulders of an attendant, was especially annoying in his demands for tribute. Another, who had quarreled with one of Livingstone's attendants, waylaid and fired upon the party. Livingstone, who was ill of a fever, staggered up to the chief, revolver in hand. The sight of the six mouths of that convenient implement gaping at his breast wrought an instant revolution in his martial ideas; he fell into a fit of trembling, protesting that he had just come to have a quiet talk, and wanted only peace.

These Bashinje have more of the low negro character and physiognomy than any tribe encountered by Livingstone. Their color is a dirty black; they have low foreheads and flat noses, artificially enlarged by sticks run through the septum, and file their teeth down to a point.

A little further to the south the complexion of the natives is much lighter, and their features are strikingly like those depicted upon the Egyptian monuments, the resemblance being still further increased by some of their modes of wearing the hair. Livingstone indeed affirms that the Egyptian paintings and sculptures present the best type of the general physiognomy of the central tribes.

The return journey was still slower than the advance had been; and it was not till late in the summer of 1855 that they reached the villages of the Makololo, having been absent more than eighteen months.

They were received as men risen from the dead, for the diviners had declared that they had perished long ago. The returned adventurers were the lions of the day. They strutted around in their gay European suits, with their guns over their shoulders, to the abounding admiration of the women and children, calling themselves Livingstone's "braves", who had gone over the whole world, turning back only when there was no more land. To be sure they returned about as poor as they went, for their gun and their one suit of red and white cotton were all that they had saved, every thing else having been expended during their long journey. "But never mind," they said; "we have not gone in vain, you have opened a path for us."

There was one serious drawback from their happiness. Some of their wives, like those of the companions of Ulysses of old, wearied by their long absence, had married other husbands. They took this misfortune much to heart.

"Wives," said one of the bereaved husbands, "are as plenty as grass --

I can get another; but," he added bitterly, "if I had that fellow I would slit his ears for him." Livingstone did the best he could for them.

He induced the chiefs to compel the men who had taken the only wife of any one to give her up to her former husband. Those -- and they were the majority --

who had still a number left, he consoled by telling them that they had quite as many as was good for them -- more than he himself had.

So, undeterred by this single untoward result of their experiment, the adventurers one and all set about gathering ivory for another adventure to the west.

Livingstone had satisfied himself that the great River Leeambye, up which he had paddled so many miles on his way to the west, was identical with the Zambesi, which he had discovered four years previously.

The two names are indeed the same, both meaning simply "The River", in different dialects spoken on its banks. This great river is an object of wonder to the natives. They have a song which runs, "The Leeambye! Nobody knows

Whence it comes, and whither it goes."

Livingstone had pursued it far up toward its source, and knew whence it came; and now he resolved to follow it down to the sea, trusting that it would furnish a water communication into the very heart of the continent.

It was now October -- the close of the hot season. The thermometer stood at 100 Deg. in the shade; in the sun it sometimes rose to 130 Deg.

During the day the people kept close in their huts, guzzling a kind of beer called `boyola', and seeming to enjoy the copious perspiration which it induces. As evening set in the dance began, which was kept up in the moonlight till long after midnight.

Sekeletu, proud of his new uniform, and pleased with the prospect of trade which had been opened, entertained Livingstone hospitably, and promised to fit him out for his eastern journey as soon as the rains had commenced, and somewhat cooled the burning soil.

He set out early in November, the chief with a large body of retainers accompanying him as far as the Falls of Mosioatunye, the most remarkable piece of natural scenery in all Africa, which no European had ever seen or heard of. The Zambesi, here a thousand yards broad, seems all at once to lose itself in the earth. It tumbles into a fissure in the hard basaltic rock, running at a right-angle with the course of the stream, and prolonged for thirty miles through the hills. This fissure, hardly eighty feet broad, with sides perfectly perpendicular, is fully a hundred feet in depth down to the surface of the water, which shows like a white thread at its bottom. The noise made by the descent of such a mass of water into this seething abyss is heard for miles, and five distinct columns of vapor rise like pillars of smoke to an enormous height.

Hence the Makololo name for the cataract, `Mosi oa tunye' --

"Smoke sounds there!" -- for which Livingstone, with questionable taste, proposes to substitute the name of "Victoria Falls" -- a change which we trust the world will not sanction.

From these falls the country gradually ascends toward the east, the river finding its way by this deep fissure through the hills.

Every thing shows that this whole region, for hundreds of miles, was once the bed of an immense fresh-water lake. By some convulsion of nature, occurring at a period geologically recent, this fissure was formed, and through it the lake was drained, with the exception of its deepest part, which constitutes the present Lake Ngami. Similar indications exist of the former existence of other immense bodies of water, which have in like manner been drained by fissures through the surrounding elevations, leaving shallow lakes at the lowest points.