morning at all. What a story of heroic adventure lies in those years!
Ere his death, his followers had deserted him, carrying back to the coast lying stories of his having been murdered. Trusted servants ran away with his medicine chest, leaving him no means of fighting the deadly diseases which from that hour began to break down his strength. The country ahead had been wasted and almost emptied of inhabitants by the slave-traders. Hunger and thirst were the daily companions of his march. Constant exposure to wet brought on rheumatism and ague; painful ulcers broke out in his feet; pneumonia, dysentery, cholera, miasmatic fever, attacked him by turns; but still, so long as his strength was not utterly prostrated, the daily march had to be accomplished. Still more trying than the fatigue were the vexatious delays, extending sometimes over many months, caused by wars, epidemics, or inundation, that frequently compelled him to retrace his steps when apparently on the verge of some great discovery. Often, in order to make progress, he had no alternative but to attach his party to some Arab expedition which, under pretence of ivory-trading, had come out to plunder, to kidnap, and to murder. The terrible scenes of misery and slaughter of which he was thus compelled to be the witness, had perhaps a stronger and more depressing effect on his mind than all the other trials that fell to his lot. “I am heart-broken and sick of the sight of human blood,” he writes, as he turns, baffled, weary, and broken in health from one line of promising exploration to another.
He has left us only rough jottings of this story of wild adventure and strange discovery. For weeks at a time no entries are found in his journal. The hand that should have written them was palsied with fever, the busy brain stunned into unconsciousness, and the tortured body borne by faithful attendants through novel scenes on which the eager explorer could no longer open his eyes. His letters were stolen by Arabs—both those going to and coming from him. Yet his disjointed notes, written on scraps of old newspapers with ink manufactured by himself out of the seeds of native plants, tell a
more affecting tale of valuable discovery than many a carefully written narrative.
He gives us glimpses into the Chambesi jungles, whose population has been almost swept away by the slave dealers. Fires sweep over the virgin lands in the dry season. A single year restores to them their wonted verdure. Song birds relieve the stillness of the African forests, but those of gayest plumage are silent. The habits of bees, ants, beetles and spiders are noted, and of the ants, found in all parts of Africa, those in these central regions build the most palatial structures. The most ferocious enemy of the explorer is not the portentous weapon of lion’s claw, rhinoceros’ horn, or elephant’s tusk, but a small fly—the notorious tsetse, whose bite is death to baggage animals, whose swarms have brought ruin to many a promising expedition, and whose presence is a more effectual barrier to the progress of civilization than an army of a million natives.
ANT HILL 13 FEET HIGH.
Then he is full of quaint observations on the lion, for which he had little respect, and on the more lordly elephant and rhinoceros. A glade suddenly opens where a group of shaggy buffaloes are grazing, or a herd of startled giraffes scamper away through the foliage with their long necks looking like “locomotive obelisks.” Then comes a description of a hippopotamus hunt—“the bravest thing I ever saw.”
TOP: GIBBON. LEFT: CHIMPANZEE. RIGHT: ORANG. BOTTOM: GORILLA.