The homeward march lay through miles of villages, all burned; and it was impossible to convince the wretched survivors that he himself had not been guilty. Ambushes were laid to murder him and his party. A large spear “almost grazed my back.” Another spear missed him by only a foot. Two of his men were slain. A huge tree had been loosened at the roots, and almost fell upon him. Three times in one day he escaped death by a hair’s-breadth. So impressed were his people that they cried, “Peace! peace! you will finish your work in spite of everything.” He took it as an omen, and gave thanks to the “Almighty Preserver of men.” For five hours he ran the gauntlet, “perfectly indifferent whether I were killed or not.”
The march was pursued in great suffering through August and September, and on into October. Once, he says, he felt like dying on his feet. He was profoundly shaken and depressed. The infamous traders succeeded, but he had failed, he alone, “and experienced worry, thwarting, baffling, when almost in sight of the end for which I strained.”
On the 23rd of October, reduced to a skeleton, “a mere ruckle of bones,” he arrived at Ujiji. Shereef, who had custody of his goods, had sold them all off. Shereef, says Livingstone, is “a moral idiot.” Little wonder that he feels like the man in the parable who fell among thieves, only, alas! there was no Good Samaritan. So he felt; but this time he was mistaken. “When my spirits were at their lowest ebb, the Good Samaritan was close at hand.” No part of his amazing story is better known. On the morning of October 28, 1871, Susi came running to him “at the top of his speed and gasped out, ‘an Englishman. I see him!’”
A caravan was approaching with the American flag flying over it. A few minutes and the stranger was in front of him, holding out his hand, with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!” It was Henry Morton Stanley, who had undertaken to find him, alive or dead. He had engaged to do so two years before; and he had kept his word.
CHAPTER IX
In the middle of October, 1869, when Livingstone was at Bambarré in quest of the Lualaba, Mr. Stanley was travelling from Madrid to Paris in response to an urgent telegram from Mr. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., of the New York Herald. “Where do you think Livingstone is?” was Mr. Bennett’s query when Stanley arrived. The latter confessed his ignorance. The world in general seemed to be content to go on, regardless of Livingstone’s fate. Nobody knew for certain whether he was alive or dead. Mr. Bennett approached the question as a journalist. To find Livingstone was the most sensational feat that could be performed. Mr. Bennett probably underrated his own motive of humanity; but he felt that David Livingstone was good “copy,” and that if he were discovered the world would ring with the enterprise of the great paper with which he was honourably associated. His instructions to Mr. Stanley were of the simplest: “Spare no expense; spend all the money you want; only find Livingstone.” By a curious arrangement, Stanley was first of all to make a grand tour through Constantinople, Palestine, Egypt, India. That is why he did not cross to Zanzibar till the beginning of 1871. Livingstone might have reappeared in the interval, but there was no sign. Accordingly, Stanley organised an imposing expedition of nearly 200 persons in five caravans, with all kinds of stores, necessary and luxurious, and made for the interior by way of Unyanyembe. There he himself all but perished of fever, and afterwards escaped by a hand’s-breadth being made the victim of a war between the Arabs and the natives. However, he stuck to his errand and, as we have seen, arrived in Ujiji and greeted Livingstone just when the latter was most in need of the kind of
STANLEY FINDS LIVINGSTONE.