“I’LL SHOOT YOU, IF YOU DROP THAT BOX.”
“Some of the numerous rivers which in this region flow into Lualaba are covered with living vegetable bridges—a species of dark glossy-leaved grass, with its roots and leaves, felts itself into a mat that covers the whole stream. When stepped upon it yields twelve or fifteen inches, and that amount of water rises upon the leg. At every step the foot has to be raised high enough to place it on the unbent mass in front. This high stepping fatigues like walking on deep snow. Here and there holes appear which we could not sound with a stick six feet long; they gave the impression that anywhere one might plump through and finish the chapter. Where the water is shallow the lotus, or sacred lily, sends its roots to the bottom and spreads its broad leaves over the floating bridge so as to make believe that the mat is its own, but the grass referred to is the real felting and supporting agent, for it often performs duty as bridge where no lilies grow. The bridge is called by Manyema ‘kintefwetefwe,’ as if he who first coined it was gasping for breath after plunging over a mile of it.
“Between each district of Manyema large belts of the primeval forest still stand. Into these the sun, though vertical, cannot penetrate, except by sending down at midday thin pencils of rays into the gloom. The rain water stands for months in stagnant pools made by the feet of elephants; and the dead leaves decay on the damp soil, and make the water of the numerous rivulets of the color of strong tea. The climbing plants, from the size of whipcord to that of a man-of-war’s hawser, are so numerous the ancient path is the only passage. When one of the giant trees falls across the road it forms a wall breast high to be climbed over, and the mass of tangled ropes brought down makes cutting a path round it a work of time which travellers never undertake.”
At this time, Dr. Livingstone was not persuaded that the Manyema were men-eaters. Toward the conclusion of his letter to Lord Stanley, he thus describes them:
“I lived in what may be called the Tipperary of Manyema, and they are certainly a bloody people among themselves. But they are very far from being in appearance like the ugly negroes on the West Coast. Finely formed heads are common, and generally men and women are vastly superior to the slaves of Zanzibar and elsewhere. We must go deeper than phrenology to account for their low moral tone. If they are cannibals they are not ostentatiously so. The neighboring tribes all assert that they are men-eaters, and they themselves laughingly admit the charge. But they like to impose on the credulous, and they showed the skull of a recent victim to horrify one of my people. I found it to be the skull of a gorilla, or soko—the first I knew of its existence here—and this they do eat. If I had believed a tenth of what I heard from traders, I might never have entered the country. Their people told tales with shocking circumstantiality, as if of eye witnesses, that could not be committed to paper, or even spoken about beneath the breath. Indeed, one wishes them to vanish from memory. I have not yet been able to make up my mind whether the Manyema are cannibals or not. I have offered goods of sufficient value to tempt any of them to call me to see a cannibal feast in the dark forests where these orgies are said to be held, but hitherto in vain. All the real evidence yet obtained would elicit from a Scotch jury the verdict only of ‘not proven.’”
The second despatch, a year later, is devoted to the expression of thanks to Lord Clarendon, on account of the expedition of search under Mr. Young, of which an account has already been given; to an explanation of Ali Moosa’s story of the explorer’s death, and an earnest request that the money expended on him and his fellow-impostors might be regained.
The third document of the series, being also a letter to Lord Clarendon, presents an account of Dr. Livingstone’s explorations and views on the watershed of the Nile more in extenso than anywhere else given. It is certainly one of the most interesting and valuable contributions to modern science. The readers of this volume cannot but feel that a large share of this interesting document may appropriately be quoted here.
“I have ascertained that the watershed of the Nile is a broad upland between ten degrees and twelve degrees south latitude, and from 4,000 to 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. Mountains stand on it at various points, which, though not apparently very high, are between 6,000 and 7,000 feet of actual altitude. The watershed is over 700 miles in length, from west to east. The springs that rise on it are almost innumerable—that is, it would take a large part of a man’s life to count them. A bird’s-eye view of some parts of the watershed would resemble the frost vegetation on window panes. They all begin in an ooze at the head of a slightly depressed valley. A few hundred yards down the quantity of water from oozing earthen sponge forms a brisk perennial burn or brook a few feet broad, and deep enough to require a bridge. These are the ultimate or primary sources of the great rivers that flow to the north in the great Nile valley. The primaries unite and form streams in general larger than the Isis at Oxford or Avon at Hamilton, and may be called secondary sources. They never dry, but unite again into four large lines of drainage, the head waters or mains of the river of Egypt. These four are each called by the natives Lualaba, which, if not too pedantic, may be spoken of as lacustrine rivers, extant specimens of those which, in pre-historic times, abounded in Africa, and which in the south are still called by Bechuanas ‘Melapo,’ in the north, by Arabs, ‘Wadys;’ both words meaning the same thing—river bed in which no water ever now flows. Two of the four great rivers mentioned fall into the central Lualaba, or Webb’s Lake River, and then we have but two main lines of drainage as depicted nearly by Ptolemy.
“In passing over sixty miles of latitude I waded thirty-two primary sources from calf to waist deep, and requiring from twenty minutes to an hour and a quarter to cross stream and sponge. This would give about one source to every two miles. A Suaheli friend in passing along part of the Lake Bangweolo during six days counted twenty-two from thigh to waist deep. This lake is on the watershed, for the village at which I observed on its northwest shore was a few seconds into eleven degrees south. I tried to cross it in order to measure the breadth accurately. The first stage to an inhabited island was about twenty-four miles. From the highest point here the tops of the trees, evidently lifted by the mirage, could be seen on the second stage and the third stage; the mainland was said to be as far as this beyond it. But my canoe men had stolen the canoe and got a hint that the real owners were in pursuit, and got into a flurry to return home.
“The length of this lake is, at a very moderate estimate, 150 miles. It gives forth a large body of water in the Luapula; yet lakes are in no sense sources for no large river begins in a lake; but this and others serve an important purpose in the phenomena of the Nile. It is one large lake, and, unlike the Okara, which, according to Suaheli, who travelled long in our company, is three or four lakes run into one huge Victoria Nianza, gives out a large river which, on departing out of Moero, is still larger. These men had spent many years east of Okara, and could scarcely be mistaken in saying that of the three or four lakes there only one (the Okara) gives off its waters to the north. The ‘White Nile’ of Speke, less by a full half than the Shire out of Nyassa (for it is only eighty or ninety yards broad), can scarcely be named in comparison with the central or Webb’s Lualaba, of from two thousand to six thousand yards, in relation to the phenomena of the Nile. The structure and economy of the watershed answer very much the same end as the great lacustrine rivers, but I cannot at present copy a lost despatch which explained that. The mountains on the watershed are probably what Ptolemy, for reasons now unknown, called the Mountains of the Moon. From their bases I found that the springs of the Nile do unquestionably arise. This is just what Ptolemy put down, and is true geography. We must accept the fountains, and nobody but Philistines will reject the mountains, though we cannot conjecture the reason for the name.