THE BATTLE OF THE BOATS NEAR THE CONFLUENCE OF THE ARUWIMI AND THE LIVINGSTONE RIVERS.
“An hour afterwards we were camped on a bit of level plateau to the south of the villages of Ndambi Mbongo. A strong healthy man would reach Embomma in three days. Three days! Only three days off from food—from comforts—luxuries even! Ah me!
“The next morning we lifted our weakened limbs for another march. And such a march!—the path all thickly strewn with splinters of suet-colored quartz, which increased the fatigue and pain. The old men and the three mothers, with their young infants born at the cataracts of Massassa and Zinga, and another near the market town of Manyanga, in the month of June, suffered greatly. Then might be seen that affection for one another which appealed to my sympathies, and endeared them to me still more. Two of the younger men assisted each of the old, and the husbands and fathers lifted their infants on their shoulders and tenderly led their wives along.
“Up and down the desolate and sad land wound the poor, hungry caravan. Bleached whiteness of ripest grass, grey rock-piles here and there, looming up solemn and sad in their greyness, a thin grove of trees now and then visible on the heights and in the hollows—such were the scenes that with every uplift of a ridge or rising crest of a hill met our hungry eyes. Eight miles our strength enabled us to make, and then we camped in the middle of an uninhabited valley, where we were supplied with water from the pools which we discovered in the course of a dried-up stream.”
The experiences of the third day were but a repetition of the previous one, and by the close of that day they had reached the settlement of Nsanda. Here, through the aid of the chief, who furnished him with two messengers to accompany Uledi and Kachéché to Embomma, as bearers, Stanley wrote and sent a letter asking for immediate relief in the shape of food. On the 5th the expedition resumed its march, and at 3 o’clock P. M. covered a further distance of twelve miles, reaching the village of Mbinda. On the 6th, they were aroused for a further effort and at 9 o’clock A. M. reached Banza Mbuko.
“Ah! in what part of all the Japhetic world would such a distressed and woeful band as we were then have been regarded with such hard, steel-cold eyes?” writes Stanley. “Yet not one word of reproach issued from the starving people; they threw themselves upon the ground with an indifference begotten of despair and misery. They did not fret nor bewail aloud the tortures of famine, nor vent the anguish of their pinched bowels in cries, but with stony resignation surrendered themselves to rest under the scant shade of some dwarf acacia or sparse bush. Now and then I caught the wail of an infant and the thin voice of a starving mother, or the petulant remonstrance of an elder child; but the adults remained still and apparently lifeless, each contracted within the exclusiveness of individual suffering.”
In this condition these people were found by Uledi and Kachéché who had returned from Embomma with relief in the shape of provisions, forwarded through bearers, rapidly despatched by the proprietors of the English factory into whose hand Stanley’s letter had fallen. And it may be readily imagined what a change was wrought in the camp by the timely arrival of these provisions.
REPELLING THE ATTACK OF THE PIRATICAL BANGALA.