12th October.—Got under weigh at early dawn. Much shirking and dodging among the men for light loads. Formerly sudden and suspicious fevers used to develop at this critical juncture—by a not unaccountable coincidence among the men with the heaviest loads; but my now well-known mixture, compounded of pepper, mustard, cold tea, citrate of magnesia, Epsom salts, anything else that might be handy, and a flavoring pinch of cinchona, has miraculously stayed the epidemic. But I forgive these merry fellows everything for wasting none of the morning coolness over toilet or breakfast. I need not say the African never washes in the morning; but, what is of more importance, he never eats, he rises suddenly from the ground where he has lain like a log all night, gives himself a shake, shoulders his load, and is off. Even at the mid-day halt he eats little; but, if he can get it, will regale himself with a draught of water and a smoke. This last is a perfunctory performance, and one pipe usually serves for a dozen men. Each takes a whiff or two from the great wooden bowl, then passes it to his neighbor, and the pipe seldom makes a second round.
I often wondered how the natives produced a light when camping by themselves, and at last resolved to test it. So when the usual appeal was made to me for "motu," I handed them my vesta-box with a single match in it. I generally struck the match for them, this being considered a very daring experiment, and I felt pretty sure they would make a mess of their one chance. It turned out as I anticipated, and when they handed back the empty box, I looked as abstracted and unapproachable as possible. After a little suspense, one of them slowly drew from the sewn-up monkey skin, which served for his courier-bag, a small piece of wood about three inches long. With a spear-head he cut in it a round hole the size of a threepenny-piece. Placing his spear-blade flat on the ground to serve as a base, he stretched over it a scrap of bark-cloth torn from his girdle, and then pinned both down with the perforated piece of wood, which a second native held firmly in position. Next he selected from among his arrows a slender stick of very hard wood, inserted it vertically in the hole, and proceeded to twirl it round with great velocity between his open palms. In less than half a minute the tinder was smoking sulkily, and after a few more twirls it was ready for further treatment by vigorous blowing, when it broke into active flame. The fire originates, of course, in the small soft piece of wood, from which sparks fall upon the more inflammable bark-cloth at the bottom of the hole.
Our daily programme, on the march, was something like this. At the first streak of dawn my tent was struck. There is no time for a meal, for the cool early hour is too precious in the tropics to waste over eating; but a hasty coffee while the loads were packing kept up the tradition of breakfast. In twenty minutes the men were marshalled, quarrels about an extra pound weight adjusted, and the procession started. At the head of the column I usually walked myself, partly to see the country better, partly to look out for game, and partly, I suppose, because there was no one else to do it. Close behind me came my own special valet—a Makololo—carrying my geological hammer, water-bottle, and loaded rifle. The white man, as a rule, carries nothing except himself and a revolver, and possibly a double-awned umbrella, which, with a thick pith helmet, makes sunstrokes impossible. Next Jingo marched the cook, a plausible Mananja, who could cook little, except the version of where the missing victuals went to. After the cook came another gentleman's gentleman carrying a gun and the medicine chest, and after him the rank and file, with another gun-bearer looking out for deserters at the rear. From half-past five I usually trudged on till the sun made moving torture, about ten or eleven. When I was fortunate enough to find shade and water there was a long rest till three in the afternoon, and an anomalous meal, followed by a second march till sunset. The dreadful part of the day was the interval. Then observations were made, and specimens collected and arranged, each man having to fill a collecting-box before sunset. When this was over there was nothing else to do that it was not too hot to do. It was too hot to sleep, there was nothing to read, and no one to speak to; the nearest post-office was a thousand miles off, and the only amusement was to entertain the native chiefs, who used occasionally to come with their followers to stare at the white man. These interviews at first entertained one vastly, but the humbling performances I had to go through became most intolerable. Think of having to stand up before a gaping crowd of savages and gravely button your coat—they had never seen a coat; or, wonder of wonders, strike a match, or snap a revolver, or set fire to somebody's bark clothes with a burning-glass. Three or four times a day often I had to go through these miserable performances, and I have come home with a new sympathy for sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, the man with the iron jaw, and all that ilk.
The interview commenced usually with the approach of two or three terror-stricken slaves, sent by the chief as a preliminary to test whether or not the white man would eat them. Their presents, native grains of some kind, being accepted, they concluded I was at least partly vegetarian, and the great man with his courtiers, armed with long spears, would advance and kneel down in a circle. A little speechifying followed, and then my return presents were produced—two or three yards of twopence-halfpenny calico; and if he was a very great chief an empty Liebig pot or an old jam tin was also presented with great ceremony. None of my instruments, I found, at all interested these people—they were quite beyond them; and I soon found that in my whole outfit there were not half a dozen things which conveyed any meaning to them whatever. They did not know enough even to be amazed. The greatest wonder of all perhaps was the burning-glass. They had never seen glass before, and thought it was mazi or water, but why the mazi did not run over when I put it in my pocket passed all understanding. When the light focused on the dry grass and set it ablaze their terror knew no bounds. "He is a mighty spirit!" they cried, "and brings down fire from the sun." This single remark contains the key to the whole secret of a white man's influence and power over all uncivilized tribes. Why a white man, alone and unprotected, can wander among these savage people without any risk from murder or robbery is a mystery at home. But it is his moral power, his education, his civilization. To the African the white man is a supreme being. His commonest acts are miracles; his clothes, his guns, his cooking utensils are supernatural. Everywhere his word is law. He can prevent death and war if he but speak the word. And let a single European settle, with fifty square miles of heathen round him, and in a short time he will be their king, their lawgiver, and their judge. I asked my men one day the question point blank—"Why do you not kill me and take my guns and clothes and beads?" "Oh," they replied, "we would never kill a spirit." Their veneration for the white man indeed is sometimes most affecting. When war is brewing, or pestilence, they kneel before him and pray to him to avert it; and so much do they believe in his omnipotence that an unprincipled man by trading on it, by simply offering pins, or buttons or tacks, or pieces of paper, or anything English, as charms against death, could almost drain a country of its ivory—the only native wealth.
The real dangers to a traveller are of a simpler kind. Central Africa is the finest hunting country in the world. Here are the elephant, the buffalo, the lion, the leopard, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the hyæna, the eland, the zebra, and endless species of small deer and antelope. Then the whole country is covered with traps to catch these animals—deep pits with a jagged stake rising up in the middle, the whole roofed over with turf and grass, so exactly like the forest bed that only the trained eye can detect their presence. I have found myself walking unconsciously on a narrow neck between two of these pits, when a couple of steps to either side would almost certainly have meant death. Snakes too, and especially the hideous and deadly puff adder, may turn up at any moment; and in bathing, which one eagerly does at every pool, the sharpest lookout is scarcely a match for the diabolical craft of the crocodile.
13th October.—Walking through the forest to-day some distance ahead of my men, I suddenly came upon a rhinoceros. The creature—the rhino is solitary in his habits—was poking about the bush with its head down and did not see me, though not ten yards separated us. My only arms were a geological hammer and a revolver, so I had simply to lie down and watch him. Presently my gun-bearer crawled up, but unfortunately by this time the pachyderm had vanished, and was nowhere to be found. I broke my heart over it at the moment, though why in the world I should have killed him I do not in the least know now. In cold blood one resents Mr. Punch's typical Englishman—"What a heavenly morning! let's go and kill something!" but in the presence of temptation one feels the veritable savage.
We are now at an elevation of about four thousand feet, and steadily nearing the equator, although the climate gives little sign of it. It is a popular mistake that the nearer one goes to the equator the temperature must necessarily increase. Were this so, Africa, which is the most tropical continent in the world, would also be the hottest; while the torrid zone, which occupies so large a portion of it, would be almost insupportable to the European. On the contrary, the nearer one goes to the equator in Africa it becomes the cooler. The reasons for this are twofold—the gradual elevation of the continent towards the interior, and the increased amount of aqueous vapor in the air. Central Africa is from three to five thousand feet above the level of the sea. Now for every three hundred feet of ascent the thermometer falls one degree. It is immensely cooler, therefore, in the interior than at the coast; and the equatorial zone all over the world possesses a climate in every way superior to that of the borders of the temperate region. At night, in Equatorial Africa, it is really cold, and one seldom lies down in his tent with less than a couple of blankets and a warm quilt. The heat of New York is often greater than that of Central Africa; for while in America a summer rarely passes without the thermometer reaching three figures, in the hottest month in Africa my thermometer never registered more than two on a single occasion—the highest actual point reached being 96°. Nowhere, indeed, in Africa have I experienced anything like the heat of a summer in Malta, or even of a stifling August in Southern Germany or Italy. On the other hand, the direct rays of the sun are necessarily more powerful in Africa; but so long as one keeps in the shade—and even a good umbrella suffices for this—there is nothing in the climate to disturb one's peace of mind or body. When one really feels the high temperature is when down with fever; or when fever, unknown to one, is coming on. Then, indeed, the heat becomes maddening and insupportable; nor has the victim words to express his feelings towards the glittering ball, whose daily march across the burnished and veilless zenith brings him untold agony.
15th to 22d October.—This camp is so well situated that I have spent the week in it. The programme is the same every day. At dawn Jingo came to my tent with early coffee. Went out with my gun for a morning stroll, and returned in an hour for breakfast. Thereafter I sorted the specimens captured the day before, and hung up the fatter insects to dry in the sun. Routing the ants from the boxes and provision stores was also an important and vexatious item. Some ants are so clever that they can break into every thing, and others so small that they will crawl into anything; and between the clever ones, and the small ones, and the jam-loving ones, and the flour-eating ones and the specimen-devouring ones, subsistence, not to say science, is a serious problem. The only things that have hitherto baffled them are the geological specimens; but I overhaul these regularly every morning along with the rest, in terror of one day finding some precocious creature browsing off my granites. After these labors I repaired to a natural bower in the dry bed of a shaded streamlet, where I spent the entire day. Here, even at high noon, was perfect coolness, and rest, and solitude unutterable. I lay among birds and beasts and flowers and insects, watching their ways, and trying to enter into their unknown lives. To watch uninterruptedly the same few yards of universe unfold its complex history; to behold the hourly resurrection of new living things, and miss no change or circumstance, even of its minuter parts; to look at all, especially the things you have seen before, a hundred times, to do all with patience and reverence—this is the only way to study nature.
Towards the afternoon the men began to drop in with their boxes of insects, each man having to collect a certain number every camp-day. If sufficient were not brought in the delinquent had to go back to the bush for more. At five or six I went back to my tent for dinner, and after an hour over the camp-fire turned in for the night. The chattering of the men all round the tent usually kept me awake for an hour or two. Their merriest time is just after sunset, when the great ufa-feast of the day takes place. The banter between the fires is kept up till the small hours, and the chief theme of conversation is always the white man himself—what the whit man did, and what the white man said, and how the white man held his gun, and everything else the white man thought, looked, willed, wore, ate, or drank. My object in being there was an insoluble riddle to them, and for what witchcraft I collected all the stones and insects was an unending source of speculation.
That they entered to some extent into one at least of these interests was proved that very night. I was roused rather late by a deputation, who informed me that they had just discovered a very uncommon object crawling on a stick among the firewood. Going out to the fire and stirring the embers into a blaze, I was shown one of the most extraordinary insects it has been my lot to look upon. Rather over two inches in length, the creature lay prone upon a branch, adroitly shamming death, after the manner of the Mantidæ, to which it obviously belonged. The striking feature was a glittering coal-black spiral, with a large central spot of the same color, painted on the middle of the back; the whole resembling a gigantic eye, staring out from the body, and presenting the most vivid contrast to the lemon yellows and greens of the rest of the insect. One naturally sought a mimetic explanation of the singular marking, and I at once recalled a large fringed lichen which covered many of the surrounding trees, and of which this whole insect was a most apt copy. That it was as rare as it was eccentric was evident from the astonishment of the natives, who declared that they had never seen it before.