The 8th of May saw us with our terribly jaded men and animals winding up the steep slopes of the first line of hills; gaining the summit of which we obtained a view remarkably grand, which exhibited as in a master picture the broad valley of the Makata, with its swift streams like so many cords of silver, as the sunshine played on the unshadowed reaches of water, with its thousands of graceful palms adding not a little to the charm of the scene, with the great wall of the Uruguru and Uswapanga mountains dimly blue, but sublime in their loftiness and immensity—forming a fit background to such an extensive, far-embracing prospect.
Turning our faces west, we found ourselves in a mountain world, fold rising above fold, peak behind peak, cone jostling cone; away to the north, to the west, to the south, the mountain tops rolled like so many vitrified waves; not one adust or arid spot was visible in all this scene. The diorama had no sudden changes or striking contrasts, for a universal forest of green trees clothed every peak, cone, and summit.
To the men this first day's march through the mountain region of Usagara was an agreeable interlude after the successive journey over the flats and heavy undulations of the maritime region, but to the loaded and enfeebled animals it was most trying. We were minus two by the time we had arrived at our camp, but seven miles from Rehenneko, our first instalment of the debt we owed to Makata. Water, sweet and clear, was abundant in the deep hollows of the mountains, flowing sometimes over beds of solid granite, sometimes over a rich red sandstone, whose soft substance was soon penetrated by the aqueous element, and whose particles were swept away constantly to enrich the valley below; and in other ravines it dashed, and roared, miniature thunder, as it leaped over granite boulders and quartz rock.
The 9th of May, after another such an up-and-down course, ascending hills and descending into the twilight depths of deepening valleys, we came suddenly upon the Mukondokwa, and its narrow pent-up valley crowded with rank reedy grass, cane, and thorny bushes; and rugged tamarisk which grappled for existence with monster convolvuli, winding their coils around their trunks with such tenacity and strength that the tamarisk seemed grown but for their support.
The valley was barely a quarter of a mile broad in some places—at others it widened to about a mile. The hills on either side shot up into precipitous slopes, clothed with mimosa, acacia, and tamarisk, enclosing a river and valley whose curves and folds were as various as a serpent's.
Shortly after debouching into the Mukondokwa valley, we struck the road traversed by Captains Buxton and Speke in 1857, between Mbumi and Kadetamare (the latter place should be called Misonghi, Kadetamare being but the name of a chief). After following the left bank of the Mukondokwa, during which our route diverged to every point from south-east to west, north and northeast, for about an hour, we came to the ford. Beyond the ford, a short half-hour's march, we came to Kiora.
At this filthy village of Kiora, which was well-grounded with goat-dung, and peopled with a wonderful number of children for a hamlet that did not number twenty families, with a hot sun pouring on the limited open space, with a fury that exceeded 128 degrees Fahrenheit; which swarmed with flies and insects of known and unknown species; I found, as I had been previously informed, the third caravan, which had started out of Bagamoyo so well fitted and supplied. The leader, who was no other than the white man Farquhar, was sick-a-bed with swollen legs (Bright's disease), unable to move.
As he heard my voice, Farquhar staggered out of his tent, so changed from my spruce mate who started from Bagamoyo, that I hardly knew him at first. His legs were ponderous, elephantine, since his leg-illness was of elephantiasis, or dropsy. His face was of a deathly pallor, for he had not been out of his tent for two weeks.
A breezy hill, overlooking the village of Kiora, was chosen by me for my camping-ground, and as soon as the tents were pitched, the animals attended to, and a boma made of thorn bushes, Farquhar was carried up by four men into my tent. Upon being questioned as to the cause of his illness, he said he did not know what had caused it. He had no pain, he thought, anywhere. I asked, "Do you not sometimes feel pain on the right side?"—"Yes, I think I do; but I don't know."—"Nor over the left nipple sometimes—a quick throbbing, with a shortness of breath?"—"Yes, I think I have. I know I breathe quick sometimes." He said his only trouble was in the legs, which were swollen to an immense size. Though he had a sound appetite, he yet felt weak in the legs.
From the scant information of the disease and its peculiarities, as given by Farquhar himself, I could only make out, by studying a little medical book I had with me, that "a swelling of the legs, and sometimes of the body, might result from either heart, liver, or kidney disease." But I did not know to what to ascribe the disease, unless it was to elephantiasis—a disease most common in Zanzibar; nor did I know how to treat it in a man who, could not tell me whether he felt pain in his head or in his back, in his feet or in his chest.