He had difficulty in believing that this “unpresuming, mild-eyed man, of inoffensive exterior, so calm of gesture, so generous and open-handed,” was the terrible man of blood who wasted villages, slaughtered his foes by the thousand, and kept a district of ninety thousand square miles in continual terror. Incontinently, the impulsive explorer resolved to swear “blood brother-hood” with the other wandering warrior, and the ceremony was gone through with all due solemnity. The marauding chief presented his new brother with a quantity of cloth, and the explorer gave him in return a revolver and a quantity of ammunition; and then, mutually pleased with each other, they parted—Mirambo and his merry men to the gay greenwood, where, doubtless, they had a pressing engagement to meet some other party of travellers, and Stanley for Ujiji.
Ujiji is on Lake Tanganyika. Here we have to leave Stanley, for he is now done with the sources of the Nile, and midway on that wonderful journey which revealed the secrets of the Congo. We will follow him thence and see what he discovered and how he lifted the fog amid which Livingstone died, but that will have to be under the head of the “Congo Country” whose mystery he solved more clearly even than that of the “Nile Reservoirs.”
PORTRAIT OF LIVINGSTONE.
THE ZAMBESI.
The great river Zambesi runs eastward across Southern Africa and empties, by many mouths, into the Indian Ocean. It is an immense water system, with its head far toward the Atlantic Ocean, yet draining on its north side that mysterious lake region which occupies Central Africa, and on its south side an almost equally mysterious region.
Its lower waters have been known for a long time, but its middle waters and its sources have been shrouded in a cloud of doubts as dense as that which overhung the reservoirs of the Nile. Livingstone has contributed more than any other explorer to the lifting of these doubts.