Ten days' languid steaming from Zanzibar brings the traveller to the Zambesi mouth. The bar here has an evil reputation, and the port is fixed on a little river which flows into the Indian Ocean slightly to the north, but the upper reaches of which almost join the Zambesi at some distance inland. This port is the Portuguese settlement of Quilimane, and here I said good-bye to the steamer and to civilization. Some distance in the interior stands a solitary pioneer Mission station of the Established Church of Scotland, and still farther in, on Lake Nyassa, another outpost of a sister church. My route led past both these stations, and I had the good fortune to pick up on the way two or three young fellow-countrymen who were going up to relieve the mission staff. For the latter part of my journey I was quite alone. All African work, as a rule, is done single-handed. It is not always easy to find a companion for such a project, and the climate is so pestilential that when two go, you and your friend are simply nursing each other time about, and the expedition never gets on. On the whole, however, the solitary course is not to be commended. An unutterable loneliness comes over one at times in the great still forests, and there is a stage in African fever—and every one must have fever—when the watchful hand of a friend may make the difference between life and death.
After leaving Quilimane, the first week of our journey up the Qua-qua was one long picnic. We had two small row-boats, the sterns covered with a sun-proof awning, and under these we basked, and talked, and read and prospected, from dawn to sunset. Each boat was paddled by seven or eight natives—muscular heathens, whose sole dress was a pocket-handkerchief, a little palm oil, and a few mosquitoes. Except at first the river was only a few yards broad, and changed in character and novelty every hour. Now it ran through a grove of cocoa-nut palms—the most wonderful and beautiful tree of the tropics. Now its sullen current oozed through a fœtid swamp of mangroves—the home of the crocodile and the hippopotamus, whose slimy bodies wallowed into the pools with a splash as our boats sped past. Again the banks became green and graceful, the long plumed grasses bending to the stream, and the whole a living aviary of birds—the white ibis and the gaunt fish eagle, and the exquisite blue and scarlet kingfisher watching its prey from the overhanging boughs. The businesslike air of this last bird is almost comical, and somehow sits ill on a creature of such gorgeous beauty. One expects him to flutter away before the approach of so material a thing as a boat, display his fairy plumage in a few airy movements, and melt away in the sunshine. But there he sits, stolid and impassive, and though the spray of the paddles almost dashes in his face, the intent eyes never move, and he refuses to acknowledge the intruder by so much as a glance. His larger ally, the black and white spotted kingfisher, if less beautiful, is much more energetic, and darts about the bank incessantly, coquetting with the boat from reach to reach, and seldom allowing an inspection close enough to take in the details of his piebald coat.
One interests oneself in these things more particularly because there is nothing at first especially striking about the river scenery itself. Ten or twenty feet of bank cuts off the view on either side, and large and varied features are wanting. The banks are lined with the densest jungle of mangroves and aquatic grasses, while creepers of a hundred kinds struggle for life among the interlacing stems. We saw crocodiles here in such numbers that count was very soon lost. They were of all sizes, from the baby specimen which one might take home in a bottle to the enormous bullet-proof brute the size of an 81-ton gun. These revolting animals take their siesta in the heat of the day, lying prone upon the bank, with their wedge-shaped heads directed towards the water. When disturbed they scuttle into the river with a wriggling movement, the precipitancy of which defies the power of sight. The adjustment of the adult crocodile to its environment in the matter of color is quite remarkable. The younger forms are lighter yellow, and more easily discoverable, but it takes the careful use of a good pair of eyes to distinguish in the gnarled slime-covered log lying among the rotting stumps the living form of the mature specimen. Between the African crocodiles and the alligators there is the slightest possible external difference; although the longer head, the arrangement of scales, the fringed feet with their webbed toes, the uniform teeth, and the protrusion of the large canine, distinguish them from their American allies.
Many of the ibises I shot as we moved along, for food for the men, who, like all Africans, will do anything for flesh in whatever form. For ourselves, we lived upon emaciated fowls and tinned meats, cooking them at a fire on the bank when the boat stopped. Eggs are never eaten by the natives, but always set; although, if you offer to buy them, the natives will bring you a dozen from a sitting hen, which they assure you were laid that very morning. In the interior, on many occasions afterwards, these protestations were tested, and always proved false. One time, when nearly famished and far from camp, I was brought a few eggs which a chief himself guaranteed had that very hour been laid. With sincere hope that he might be right, but with much misgiving, I ordered the two freshest looking to be boiled. With the despair of a starving man I opened them. They were cock and hen.
Breakfast and luncheon and dinner are all the same in Africa. There is no beef, nor mutton, nor bread, nor flour, nor sugar, nor salt, nor anything whatever, except an occasional fowl, which an Englishman can eat. Hence the enormous outfit which he must carry with him. No one has any idea of what can be had in tins till he camps out abroad. Every conceivable digestible and indigestible is to be had tinned, every form of fish, flesh, fowl, and game, every species of vegetable, and fruit, every soup, sweet, and entrée; but after two or three months of this sort of thing you learn that this tempting semblance of variety is a gigantic imposition. The sole difference between these various articles lies, like the Rhine wines, in the label. Plum pudding or kippered herring taste just the same. Whether you begin dinner with tinned calves-foot jelly or end with tinned salmon makes no difference; and after six months it is only by a slight feeling of hardness that you do not swallow the tins themselves.
At the end of a too short week we left our boats behind. Engaging an army of shy natives at a few huts near the bank, we struck across a low neck of land, and after an hour's walk found ourselves suddenly on the banks of the Zambesi. A solitary bungalow was in sight, and opposite it the little steamer of the African Lakes Company, which was to take us up the Shiré. There is more in the association, perhaps, than in the landscape, to strike one as he first furrows the waters of this virgin river. We are fifty miles from its mouth, the mile-wide water shallow and brown, the low sandy banks fringed with alligators and wild birds. The great deltoid plain, yellow with sun-tanned reeds and sparsely covered with trees, stretches on every side; the sun is blistering hot; the sky, as it will be for months, a monotonous dome of blue—not a frank bright blue like the Canadian sky, but a veiled blue, a suspicious and malarious blue, partly due to the perpetual heat haze and partly to the imagination, for the Zambesi is no friend to the European, and this whole region is heavy with depressing memories.
This impression, perhaps, was heightened by the fact that we were to spend that night within a few yards of the place where Mrs. Livingstone died. Late in the afternoon we reached the spot—a low ruined hut a hundred yards from the river's bank, with a broad verandah shading its crumbling walls. A grass-grown path straggled to the doorway, and the fresh print of a hippopotamus told how neglected the spot is now. Pushing the door open, we found ourselves in a long dark room, its mud floor broken into fragments, and remains of native fires betraying its latest occupants. Turning to the right, we entered a smaller chamber, the walls bare and stained, with two glassless windows facing the river. The evening sun setting over the far-off Morumballa mountains, filled the room with its soft glow, and took our thoughts back to that Sunday evening twenty years ago, when in this same bedroom, at this same hour, Livingstone knelt over his dying wife, and witnessed the great sunset of his life.
Under a huge baobab tree—a miracle of vegetable vitality and luxuriance—stands Mrs. Livingstone's grave. The picture in Livingstone's book represents the place as well kept and surrounded with neatly-planted trees. But now it is an utter wilderness, matted with jungle grass and trodden by the beasts of the forest; and as I looked at the forsaken mound and contrasted it with her husband's tomb in Westminster Abbey, I thought perhaps the woman's love which brought her to a spot like this might be not less worthy of immortality.
The Zambesi is the great river of Eastern Africa, and, after the Congo, the Nile, and the Niger, the most important on the continent. Rising in the far interior among the marshes of Lake Dilolo, and, gathering volume from the streams which flow from the high lands connecting the north of Lake Nyassa with Inner Angola, it curves across the country for over a thousand miles like an attenuated letter S, and before its four great mouths empty the far-travelled waters into the Indian Ocean, drains an area of more than half a million square miles. As it cuts its way down the successive steps of the central plateaux its usually placid current is interrupted by rapids, narrows, cascades, and cataracts, corresponding to the plateau edges, so that like all the rivers of Africa it is only navigable in stretches of one or two hundred miles at a time. From the coast the Zambesi might be stemmed by steam-power to the rapids of Kebrabasa; and from above that point intermittently, as far as the impassable barrier of the Victoria Falls. Above this, for some distance, again follow rapids and waterfalls, but these are at length succeeded by an unbroken chain of tributaries which together form an inland waterway of a thousand miles in length. The broad lands along the banks of this noble river are subject to annual inundations like the region of the Nile, and hence their agricultural possibilities are unlimited. On the lower Zambesi, indigo, the orchila weed, and caluraba-root abound, and oil-seeds and sugar-cane could be produced in quantity to supply the whole of Europe. At present, owing to apathy and indifferent government, these magnificent resources are almost wholly undeveloped.
Next afternoon our little vessel left the Zambesi in its wake and struck up a fine lake-like expansion to the north, which represents the mouth of the Shiré. Narrower and deeper, the tributary is a better stream for navigation than the Zambesi. The scenery also is really fine, especially as one nears the mountains of the plateau, and the strange peoples and animals along the banks occupy the mind with perpetual interests. The hippopotami, prowling round the boat and tromboning at us within pistol-shot, kept us awake at night; and during the day we could see elephants, buffaloes, deer, and other large game wandering about the banks. To see the elephant at home is a sight to remember. The stupendous awkwardness of the menagerie animal, as if so large a creature were quite a mistake, vanishes completely when you watch him in his native haunts. Here he is as nimble as a kitten, and you see how perfectly this moving mountain is adapted to its habitat—how such a ponderous monster, indeed, is as natural to these colossal grasses as a rabbit to an English park. We were extremely fortunate in seeing elephants at all at this stage, and I question whether there is any other part of Africa where these animals may be observed leisurely and in safety within six weeks of London. Mr. Stanley in his Livingstone expedition was ten months in the country before he saw any; and Mr. Joseph Thomson, during his long journey to Tanganyika and back, never came across a single elephant. It is said that the whale which all travellers see in crossing the Atlantic is kept up by the steamboat companies, but I vouch that these Shiré valley elephants are independent of subsidy.