Livingstone struck it from the west side. It was on his last journey through Africa, he had entered upon that journey at Zanzibar, in April 1866, and made for Lake Nyassa and its outlet the Shiré River, both of which have been described in connection with the Zambesi.
BURTON AND SPEKE ON TANGANYIKA.
Then began that almost interminable ramble to which he fell a victim. He was full of the theory that no traveller had yet seen the true head waters of the Nile—in other words that neither Victoria nor Albert Nyanza were its ultimate reservoirs, but that they were to be found far below the equator in that bewildering “Lake Region” which never failed to reveal wonderful secrets to such as sought with a patience and persistency like his own.
He was supported in this by the myths of the oldest historians,
by the earliest guesses which took the shape of maps, by the traditions of the natives that boats had actually passed from Albert Nyanza into Tanganyika, but above all by the delusion that the great river Lualaba, which he afterwards found flowing northward from lakes far to the south of Tanganyika, could not be other than the Nile itself.
On his way westward from Lake Nyassa, he came upon the Loangwa River, a large affluent of the Zambesi from the north. Crossing this, and bearing northwest, he confronted the Lokinga Mountains, from whose crests he looked down into the valley of the Chambesi. It was clear that these mountains formed a shed which divided the waters of the central basin, or lake region, of Africa from those which ran south into the Zambesi. Had he discovered the true sources of the Nile at last? Where did those waters go to, if not to the Mediterranean? The journal of his last travels is full of soliloquies and refrains touching the glory of a discovery which should vindicate his theory and set discussion at rest.
And what was he really looking down upon from that mountain height? The Chambesi—affluent of Lake Bangweola? Yes. But vastly more. He was looking on the head waters of the northward running Lualaba, which proved his ignis fatuus and led him a six year dance through the wilderness and to his grave. The Lualaba has been christened Livingstone River, in honor of the great explorer. Then again it was only the Lualaba in name, which he was pursuing, with the hope that it would turn out to be the Nile. It was really the great Congo, for after the Lualaba runs northeast toward Albert Nyanza, and to a point far above the equator, it makes a magnificent sweep westward, and southwestward, and seeks the Atlantic at a point not ten degrees above the latitude of its source.
Thus was Livingstone perpetually deceived. But for all that we must ever admire his enthusiasm for research and his heroism under extreme difficulties. When he plunged down the mountain side into the depths of the forests that lined the Chambesi, it was to enter a night of wandering which had no star except the meeting of Stanley at Ujiji in 1871, and no