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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 564 of 572
Words from 301447 to 302007
of 306638
