He Was Moreover A Firm Believer
In The Divine Right Of Kings.
He was an ordinary man, he said, when
his father died, and left him the chieftainship; but directly he
Succeeded to the high office, he was conscious of power passing into
his head, and down his back; he felt it enter, and knew that he was a
chief, clothed with authority, and possessed of wisdom; and people
then began to fear and reverence him. He mentioned this, as one
would a fact of natural history, any doubt being quite out of the
question. His people, too, believed in him, for they bathed in the
river without the slightest fear of crocodiles, the chief having
placed a powerful medicine there, which protected them from the bite
of these terrible reptiles.
Leaving the vessel opposite Chibisa's village, Drs. Livingstone and
Kirk and a number of the Makololo started on foot for Lake Shirwa.
They travelled in a northerly direction over a mountainous country.
The people were far from being well-disposed to them, and some of
their guides tried to mislead them, and could not be trusted.
Masakasa, a Makololo headman, overheard some remarks which satisfied
him that the guide was leading them into trouble. He was quiet till
they reached a lonely spot, when he came up to Dr. Livingstone, and
said, "That fellow is bad, he is taking us into mischief; my spear is
sharp, and there is no one here; shall I cast him into the long
grass?" Had the Doctor given the slightest token of assent, or even
kept silence, never more would any one have been led by that guide,
for in a twinkling he would have been where "the wicked cease from
troubling." It was afterwards found that in this case there was no
treachery at all, but a want of knowledge on their part of the
language and of the country. They asked to be led to "Nyanja
Mukulu," or Great Lake, meaning, by this, Lake Shirwa; and the guide
took them round a terribly rough piece of mountainous country,
gradually edging away towards a long marsh, which from the numbers of
those animals we had seen there we had called the Elephant Marsh, but
which was really the place known to him by the name "Nyanja Mukulu,"
or Great Lake. Nyanja or Nyanza means, generally, a marsh, lake,
river, or even a mere rivulet.
The party pushed on at last without guides, or only with crazy ones;
for, oddly enough, they were often under great obligations to the
madmen of the different villages: one of these honoured them, as
they slept in the open air, by dancing and singing at their feet the
whole night. These poor fellows sympathized with the explorers,
probably in the belief that they belonged to their own class; and,
uninfluenced by the general opinion of their countrymen, they really
pitied, and took kindly to the strangers, and often guided them
faithfully from place to place, when no sane man could be hired for
love or money.
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