How I Found Livingstone Travels, Adventures And Discoveries In Central Africa Including Four Months Residence With Dr. Livingstone By Sir Henry M. Stanley
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It Was The Last Opportunity, For We Soon Surmounted The
Crest Of A Land-Wave, And Began The Descent Into The Depression On
The Other Side, And I NEVER Saw Him More.
God grant, dear reader, that if ever you take to travelling in
Central Africa, you find as good and true a man, for your
companion, as I found in noble David Livingstone.
For four months
and four days he and I occupied the same house, or, the same tent,
and I never had one feeling of resentment against him, nor did he
show any against me, and the longer I lived with him the more did
my admiration and reverence for him increase.
What were Livingstone's thoughts during the time which elapsed
between my departure for the coast, and the arrival of his
supplies, may be gathered from a letter which he wrote on the 2nd
of July to Mr. John F. Webb, American Consul at Zanzibar.
I have been waiting up here like Simeon Stylites on his pillar,
and counting every day, and conjecturing each step taken by our
friend towards the coast, wishing and praying that no sickness
might lay him up, no accident befall him, and no unlooked-for
combinations of circumstances render his kind intentions vain
or fruitless. Mr. Stanley had got over the tendency to the
continued form of fever which is the most dangerous, and was
troubled only with the intermittent form, which is comparatively
safe, or I would not have allowed him, but would have accompanied
him to Zanzibar. I did not tell himself so; nor did I say what I
thought, that he really did a very plucky thing in going through
the Mirambo war in spite of the remonstrances of all the Arabs,
and from Ujiji guiding me back to Unyanyembe. The war, as it
is called, is still going on. The danger lay not so much in
the actual fighting as in the universal lawlessness the war
engendered.
I am not going to inflict on the reader a repetition of our march
back, except to record certain incidents which occurred to us as we
journeyed to the coast.
March 17th. - We came to the Kwalah River. The first rain of the
Masika season fell on this day; I shall be mildewed before I reach
the coast. Last year's Masika began at Bagamoyo, March 23rd, and
ended 30th April.
The next day I halted the Expedition at Western Tura, on the
Unyamwezi frontier, and on the 20th arrived at Eastern Tura; when,
soon after, we heard a loud report of a gun, and Susi and Hamoydah,
the Doctor's servants, with Uredi, and another of my men, appeared
with a letter for "Sir Thomas MacLear, Observatory, Cape of Good
Hope," and one for myself, which read as follows:
Kwihara, March 15, 1872.
Dear Stanley,
If you can telegraph on your arrival in London, be particular,
please, to say how Sir Roderick is. You put the matter exactly
yesterday, when you said that I was "not yet satisfied about the
Sources; but as soon as I shall be satisfied, I shall return and
give satisfactory reasons fit for other people." This is just as
it stands.
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