A serious obstacle to the development of this beautiful highland region is probably the exceptionally deadly climate of the country through which it must be approached. Already many precious lives have been sacrificed in the attempt to open up the Nyassa. Livingstone got here his “death-sentence.” The German Roscher, who, travelling in the guise of an Arab from the east coast, viewed the lake only two months later than the great missionary, was
basely murdered at a little village near its shores. Bishop Mackenzie is buried in the Shiré swamps; and near him lie nearly the whole staff of the University Mission to this region, all stricken down with marsh fever. Thornton, the intrepid companion of Livingstone on his first visit to the Nyassa, after having ascended half-way up the snow-capped mountain Kilimandjaro, far to the northward, returned to this quarter, only to die at the foot of the Murchison Rapids. Mrs. Livingstone, the devoted wife of the missionary, rests under a gigantic baobab tree a little way below the Shiré mouth; and near her grave is that of Kirkpatrick, of the Zambesi Survey Expedition of 1826. Another baobab, in Ugogo, shades the resting-place of Consul Elton, whom we have just seen full of life and hope, at the head of the pass overhanging the north end of the lake. Only a few marches to the northward of the pass, while toiling across a droughty plain, and weak from hunger and fever, he succumbed to sunstroke, and a most useful and promising career closed at the early age of thirty-seven. Still younger was Mr. Keith Johnston, who died from dysentery, while leading an expedition from Zanzibar territory to Nyassa. Dr. Black is buried on Cape Maclear, the rocky promontory cleaving the southern end of the lake, where the Free Church of Scotland Mission Station of Livingstonia has been planted; and the little cemetery contains many other graves of white persons.
The Scottish mission stations on the Shiré and Lake Nyassa are not the only outposts which Christianity has planted in the far interior of the “Dark Continent.” Similar colonies, for the moral improvement and industrial training of the natives of Africa, have been placed on the shores of the Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika by the London and University Missionary Societies. The example is being followed by similar associations in France and America; and the Zambesi country has been mapped out for a renewal of the long-abandoned work of the Jesuit fathers. Science, commerce, and philanthropy have enlisted by the side of religion in the task of opening up Africa. The chief outlets of the slave-trade have at length, it is hoped, been closed, thanks mainly to the efforts of England, and the hearty co-operation of the government of Portugal, Egypt and Zanzibar.
AFRICAN RESOURCES.
Though the coasts of Africa lie within sight of the most civilized countries, its depths are still mysteries. Though the valley of the Nile was, in the earliest ages of history, the seat of commerce, the arts and sciences, it is only now that we read of a new source for that sacred stream in Lake Edward Nyanza.
This wonderful continent, the Negroland of our school books, the marvel of modern times as the light of exploration pierces its forests and reveals its lakes, rivers and peoples, is a vast peninsula, triangular in shape, containing 12,300,000 square miles. This vast area renders a conception of its geographic details difficult, yet by taking several plain views of it, the whole may be brought out so that one can grasp it with a fair degree of intelligence. One way to look at it is to regard the entire seacoast as the rind of the real Africa. Follow its Mediterranean boundary on the north, its Red Sea and Indian Ocean boundary on the east, its Atlantic Ocean boundary on the south and west, and the lowland rind is always present, in some places quite thin, in others many miles thick.
This rind, low, swampy, reedy, channeled by oozy creeks, or many mouthed rivers, is the prelude to something wholly different within. On the north, north-east and north-west, we know it introduces us to the barren Sahara. In all other parts it introduces us to an upland Africa, which, for height and variety of plateaus, has no equal in the world. These plateaus are variegated with immense mountain chains, like those of the Atlas, the Moon, the Kong, the Gupata, and those just revealed by Stanley extending between the two great lakes Albert Nyanza and Victoria Nyanza, and to a height of 18,000 feet, fully 6,000 of which are clad in perpetual snow, even
though lying under the Equator. Here too are those vast stretches of water which vie in size and depth with the lake systems of any other continent, and which feed mighty rivers, even though evaporation be constantly lifting their volume into the tropical air. No traveler has ever looked with other than awe upon those superb lakes Albert Nyanza, Edward Nyanza, Victoria Nyanza, Tanganyika, Leopold II., Nyassa, Bangweola, and dozens of smaller ones whose presence came upon him like a revelation. And then out of these plateaus, thousands of feet high, run all those mighty rivers which constitute the most unique and mightiest water system in the world—the Zambezi, the Congo, the Niger, the Senegal and the Nile.