“And may God bring you safe back to us all, my dear friend! Farewell!”
“Farewell!”
This was the last word Doctor Livingstone ever spoke to a white man. They wrung each other’s hands. Stanley was overcome, and turned away. He cried to his men, “Forward March!” and the sad scene closed.
Livingstone waited at Unyanyembe for the escort Stanley had promised to send. They came by August, and on the 14 of the month (1872) he started for the southern point of Tanganyika, which he rounded, to find no outlet there. Then he struck for Lake Bangweolo, intending to solve all its river mysteries. That lake was to him an ultimate reservoir for all waters flowing north, and if the Lualaba should prove to be the Nile, then he felt he had its true source.
This journey was a horrible one in every respect. It rained almost incessantly. The path was miry and amid dripping grass and cane. The country was flat and the rivers all swollen. It was impossible to tell river from marsh. The country was not inhabited. Food grew scarce. The doctor became so weak that he had to be carried across the rivers on the back of his trusty servant Susi. One stream, crossed on January 24, 1873, was 2000 feet wide and so deep that the waters reached Susi’s mouth, and the doctor got as wet as his carrier.
These were the dark, dismal surroundings of Lake Bangweolo. Amid such hardships they skirted the northern side of the lake, crossed the Chambesi at its eastern end, where the river is 300
yards wide and 18 feet deep, and turned their faces westward along the south side.
The doctor was now able to walk no further. When he tried to climb on his donkey he fell to the ground from sheer weakness. His faithful servants took him on their shoulders, or bore him along in a rudely constructed litter. On April 27, 1873, his last entry reads, “Knocked up quite, and remain—recover—sent to buy milch goats. We are on banks of the R. Molilamo.”
THE STREAM CAME UP TO SUSI’S MOUTH.