After this followed a number of telegrams to the “Herald” from the expedition, but their substance has been given in what has preceded, to show the general outline of explorations up to the time of the meeting of Livingstone and Stanley at Ujiji. There are, however, but few accounts of travel more interesting and valuable than the letter to the “Herald” narrating the events of the journey from Unyanyembe to Ujiji, and the meeting with Livingstone. The greater portion of this remarkable narrative is appended:
“Bunder, Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika,
“Central Africa, November 23, 1871.
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“Only two months gone, and what a change in my feelings! But two months ago, what a peevish, fretful soul was mine! What a hopeless prospect presented itself before your correspondent! Arabs vowing that I would never behold the Tanganyika; Sheikh, the son of Nasib, declaring me a madman to his fellows because I would not heed his words. My men deserting, my servants whining day by day, and my white man endeavoring to impress me with the belief that we were all doomed men! And the only answer to it all is, Livingstone, the hero traveller, is alongside of me, writing as hard as he can to his friends in England, India, and America, and I am quite safe and sound in health and limb.
“September 23 I left Unyanyembe, driving before me fifty well-armed black men, loaded with the goods of the expedition, and dragging after me one white man. Once away from the hateful valley of Kwihara, my enthusiasm for my work rose as newborn as when I left the coast. But my enthusiasm was shortlived, for before reaching camp I was almost delirious with fever. When I had arrived, burning with fever, my pulse bounding many degrees too fast and my temper made more acrimonious by my sufferings, I found the camp almost deserted. The men as soon as they had arrived at Mkwenkwe, the village agreed upon, had hurried back to Kwihara. Livingstone’s letter-carrier had not made his appearance—it was an abandoned camp. I instantly dispatched six of the best of those who had refused to return to ask Sheikh, the son of Nasib, to lend or sell me the longest slave chain he had, then to hunt up the runaways and bring them back to camp bound, and promised them that for every head captured they should have a brand new cloth.
“Next morning fourteen out of twenty of those who had deserted back to their wives and huts (as is generally the custom) had reappeared, and, as the fever had left me, I only lectured them, and they gave me their promise not to desert me again under any circumstances. Livingstone’s messenger had passed the night in bonds, because he had resolutely refused to come. I unloosed him and gave him a paternal lecture, painting in glowing colors the benefits he would receive if he came along quietly and the horrible punishment of being chained up until I reached Ujiji if he was still resolved not to come. ‘Kaif Halleck’ Arabic for ‘How do you do?’ melted, and readily gave me his promise to come and obey me as he would his own master—Livingstone—until we should see him, ‘which Inshallah we shall! Please God, please God, we shall,’ I replied, ‘and you will be no loser.’ During the day my soldiers had captured the others, and as they all promised obedience and fidelity in future, they escaped punishment.
“It is possible for any of your readers so disposed to construct a map of the road on which the ‘Herald’ expedition was now journeying, if they draw a line 150 miles long south by west from Unyanyembe, then 150 miles west northwest, then ninety miles north, half east, then seventy miles west by north, and that will take them to Ujiji.
“We were about entering the immense forest that separates Unyanyembe from the district of Ugunda, In lengthy undulating waves the land stretches before us—the new land which no European knew, the unknown, mystic land. The view which the eyes hurry to embrace as we ascend some ridge higher than another is one of the most disheartening that can be conceived. Away, one beyond another, wave the lengthy rectilinear ridges, clad in the same garb of color. Woods, woods, woods, forests, leafy branches, green and sere, yellow and dark red and purple, then an indefinable ocean, bluer than the blueest sky. The horizon all around shows the same scene—a sky dropping into the depths of the endless forest, with but two or three tall giants of the forest higher than their neighbors, which are conspicuous in their outlines, to break the monotony of the scene. On no one point do our eyes rest with pleasure; they have viewed the same outlines, the same forest and the same horizon day after day, week after week; and again, like Noah’s dove from wandering over a world without a halting place, return wearied with the search.
SKETCH OF AN AFRICAN FOREST SCENE.