During the six weeks we have been here three men and a baby have died.
This Expedition possesses the rarest doctor in the world. No country in Europe can produce his equal in my opinion. There may be many more learned perhaps, more skilful, older, or younger, as the case may be, but the best of them have something to learn from our doctor. He is such a combination of sweetness and simplicity. So unostentatious, so genuinely unobtrusive. We are all bound to him with cords of love. We have seen him do so much out of pure love for his “cases,” that human nature becomes ennobled by this gem. He is tenderness itself. He has saved many lives by his devoted nursing. We see him each day at 8 A.M.. and 5 P.M. with his selectest circle of “sick” around him. None with tender stomach dare approach it. He sits in the centre as though it were a rare perfume. The sloughing ulcers are exposed to view, some fearful to behold, and presenting a spectacle of horror. The doctor smiles and sweetly sniffs the tainted air, handles the swollen limbs, cleanses them from impurity, pours the soothing lotion, cheers the sufferers, binds up the painful wounds, and sends the patient away with a hopeful and gratified look. May the kindly angels record this nobleness and obliterate all else. I greatly honour what is divine in man. This gift of gentleness and exquisite sensibility appeal to the dullest. At Abu-Klea our doctor was great; the wounded had cause to bless him; on the green sward of Kavalli, daily ministering to these suffering blacks, unknowing and unheeding whether any regarded him, our doctor was greater still.
1889.
March 5.
Kavalli’s.
March 6th.—Some chimpanzees have been discovered in a grove which fills a deep hollow in the Baregga Hills. The Pasha has shown me a carefully prepared skull of one which he procured near Mswa. It exactly resembles one I picked up at Addiguhha, a village between the two branches of the Ihuru River. The chimpanzee is the “soko” of Livingstone, though he grows to an unusual size in the Congo forest.
During the few days we have been here the Pasha has been indefatigable in adding to his collection of birds, larks, thrushes, finches, bee-eaters, plantain eaters, sunbirds, &c., &c.
The Pasha appears to be extraordinarily happy in this vocation of “collecting.” I have ordered the Zanzibaris to carry every strange insect, bird, and reptile to him. Even vermin do not appear amiss to him. We are rewarded by seeing him happy.
Each morning his clerk Rajab roams around to murder every winged fowl of the air, and every victim of his aim he brings to his master, and then after lovingly patting the dead object he coolly gives the order to skin it. By night we see it suspended, with a stuffing of cotton within, to be in a day or two packed up as a treasure for the British Museum!
1889.
March 6.
Kavalli’s.
These “collectors” strike me as being a rare race. Schweinfurth boiled the heads of the slain in Monbuttu once to prepare the skulls for a Berlin museum. Emin Pasha proposes to do the same should we have a brush with the Wanyoro. I suggested to him that the idea was shocking; that possibly the Zanzibaris might object to it. He smiled: “All for science.”
This trait in the scientific man casts some light upon a mystery. I have been attempting to discover the reasons why we two, he and I, differ in our judgments of his men. We have some dwarfs in the camp. The Pasha wished to measure their skulls; I devoted my observations to their inner nature. He proceeded to fold his tape round the circumference of the chest; I wished to study the face. The Pasha wondered at the feel of the body; I marvelled at the quick play of the feelings as revealed in lightning movements of the facial muscles. The Pasha admired the breadth of the frontal bone;[9] I studied the tones of the voice, and watched how beautifully a slight flash of the eye coincided with the slightest twitch of a lip. The Pasha might know to a grain what the body of the pigmy weighed, but I only cared to know what the inner capacity was.