The really appalling mortality of Europeans is a fact with which all who have any idea of casting in their lot with Africa should seriously reckon. None but those who have been on the spot, or have followed closely the inner history of African exploration and missionary work can appreciate the gravity of the situation. The malaria spares no man; the strong fall as the weak; no number of precautions can provide against it; no kind of care can do more than make the attacks less frequent; no prediction can be made beforehand as to which regions are haunted by it and which are safe. It is not the least ghastly feature of this invisible plague that the only known scientific test for it at present is a human life. That test has been applied in the Congo region already with a recklessness which the sober judgment can only characterize as criminal. It is a small matter that men should throw away their lives, in hundreds, if need be, for a holy cause; but it is not a small matter that man after man, in long and in fatal succession, should seek to overleap what is plainly a barrier of Nature. And science has a duty in pointing out that no devotion or enthusiasm can give any man a charmed life, and that those who work for the highest ends will best attain them in humble obedience to the common laws. Transcendentally, this may be denied; the warning finger may be despised as the hand of the coward and the profane. But the fact remains—the fact of an awful chain of English graves stretching across Africa. This is not spoken, nevertheless, to discourage missionary enterprise. It is only said to regulate it.
To the head of Lake Nyassa in a little steam yacht is quite a sea-voyage. What with heavy seas, and head-winds, and stopping to wood, and lying-to at nights, it takes longer time than going from England to America. The lake is begirt with mountains, and storms are so incessant and so furious that Livingstone actually christened Nyassa the "Lake of Storms." The motion on anchoring at night was generally so unpleasant that one preferred then to be set on shore. My men—for I had already begun to pick up my caravan whenever I could find a native willing to go—would kindle fires all round to keep off beasts of prey, and we slept in peace upon the soft lake sand.
Instead of being one hundred and fifty miles long, as first supposed, Lake Nyassa is now known to have a length of three hundred and fifty miles, and a breadth varying from sixteen to sixty miles. It occupies a gigantic trough of granite and gneiss, the profoundly deep water standing at a level of sixteen hundred feet above the sea, with the mountains rising all around it, and sometimes sheer above it, to a height of one, two, three, and four thousand feet. The mountains along the west coast form an almost unbroken chain, while the north-east and north are enclosed by the vast range of the Livingstone Mountains. The anchorages on the lake are neither so numerous nor so sheltered as might be wished, but the Ilala has picked out some fair harbors on the west coast, and about half as many are already known on the east.
I only visited one native village on the lake, and I should hope there are none others like it—indeed it was quite exceptional for Africa. I tumbled into it early one morning, out of the Ilala's dingy, and lost myself at once in an endless labyrinth of reeking huts. Its filth was indescribable, and I met stricken men, at the acute stage of smallpox, wandering about the place at every turn, as if infection were a thing unknown. The chief is the greatest slaver and the worst villain on the lake, and impaled upon poles all round his lodge, their ghastly faces shrivelling in the sun, I counted forty human heads.
This village was not African, however. It was Arab. The native villages on Nyassa are rarely so large, seldom so compact, and never so dirty. Everywhere they straggle along the shore and through the forest, and altogether there must be many hundreds of them scattered about the lake. On the western shore alone there are at least fifteen different tribes, speaking as many different languages, and each of them with dialects innumerable.
The bright spot on Lake Nyassa is Bandawé, the present headquarters of the Scotch Livingstonia Mission. The phrase "headquarters of a mission" suggests to the home Christian a street and a square, with its overshadowing church; a decent graveyard; and a reverent community in its Sunday clothes. But Bandawé is only a lodge or two in a vast wilderness, and the swarthy worshippers flock to the seatless chapel on M'lunga's day dressed mostly in bows and arrows. The said chapel, nevertheless, is as great an achievement in its way as Cologne Cathedral, and its worshippers are quite as much interested, and some of them at least to quite as much purpose. In reality no words can be a fit witness here to the impression made by Dr. Laws, Mrs. Laws, and their few helpers, upon this singular and apparently intractable material. A visit to Bandawé is a great moral lesson. And I cherish no more sacred memory of my life than that of a communion service in the little Bandawé chapel, when the sacramental cup was handed to me by the bare black arm of a native communicant—a communicant whose life, tested afterwards in many an hour of trial with me on the Tanganyika plateau, gave him perhaps a better right to be there than any of us.
III.
THE HEART OF AFRICA.
THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE.
We are now far enough into the interior to form some general idea of the aspect of the heart of Africa. I shall not attempt to picture any particular spot. The description about to be given applies generally to Shirwa, the Shiré Highlands, Nyassa, and the Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau—regions which together make up one of the great lobes of the heart of Africa.