Stanley in Africa / The Wonderful Discoveries and Thrilling Adventures of the Great African Explorer, and Other Travelers, Pioneers and Missionaries

by James P. Boyd

LIVINGSTONE AND STANLEY AT UJIJI.

It was an enterprise as bold as any of those undertaken by hardy mariners to rescue their brother sailors who had met shipwreck while striving to unfold the icy mysteries which surround the North Pole. And, unlike many of these, it was successful. The two great explorers shook hands in October 1871, at Ujiji, on the banks of Lake Tanganyika, in the very heart of the great forest and river system of Africa, and amid dark skinned, but not unkind, strangers, who constitute a native people as peculiar in all respects as their natural surroundings.

We mention this because it was a great achievement in the name of humanity. Livingstone had started on this, his last, exploring tour in 1866, and had been practically lost in African wilds for nearly four years. But it was a greater achievement in the name of science and civilization, for it not only proved that “The Dark Continent” was more easily traversable than had been supposed, but it may be set down as the beginning of a new era in African exploration.

In all ages Africa has been a wonderland to the outside world. As the land of Cush, in Bible story, it was a mystery. It had no bounds, but was the unknown country off to the south of the world where dim legend had fixed the dark races to work out a destiny under the curse laid upon the unfortunate Ham.

Even after Egypt took somewhat definite meaning and shape in Hebrew geography as “The Land of Mizriam,” or the “Land of Ham,” all else in Africa was known vaguely as Ethiopia, marvellous in extent, filled with a people whose color supported the Hamitic tradition, wonderful in animal, vegetable and mineral resources. Thence came Sheba’s queen to see the splendors of Solomon’s court, and thence emanated the long line of Candaces who rivalled Cleopatra in wealth and beauty and far surpassed her in moral and patriotic traits of character.

In olden times the gateway to Africa was Egypt and the Nile. As an empire, history furnishes nothing so curious as Egypt; as a river nothing so interesting as her Nile. We may give to the civilization of China and India whatever date we please, yet that of Egypt will prove as old. And then what a difference in tracing it. That of China and India rests, with a

few exceptions, on traditions or on broken crockery tablets and confused shreds of ruins. That of Egypt has a distinct tracery in monuments which have defied the years, each one of which is a book full of grand old stories. We can read to-day, by the light of huge pillar and queer hieroglyphic, back to Menes, the first Egyptian King, and to Abydos, the oldest Egyptian city, and though the period be 4500 years before Christ, scarcely a doubt arises about a leading fact. There was wealth then, art, civilization, empire, and one is ever tempted to ascribe to Egypt the motherhood of that civilization which the Hebrew, Indian, Etruscan, Persian, Roman, Greek and Christian, carved into other shapes.

Says the learned Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, who has spent thirty years among Egyptian monuments and who has mastered their inscriptions, “Literature, the arts, and the ideas of morality and religion, so far as we know, had their birth in the Nile valley. The alphabet, if it was constructed in Phœnicia, was conceived in Egypt, or developed from Egyptian characters. Language, doubtless, is as old as man, but the visible symbols of speech were first formulated from the hieroglyphic figures. The early architecture of the Greeks, the Doric, is a development of the Egyptian. Their vases, ewers, jewelry and other ornaments, are copies from the household luxury of the Pharaohs.”

The influence of Egypt on the Hebrew race has a profound interest for the whole Christian world. Let the time of Abraham be fixed at 1900 B.C. The Great Pyramid of Egypt, built by the first Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, had then been standing for 1500 years. Egypt had a school of architecture and sculpture, a recorded literature, religious ceremonies, mathematics, astronomy, music, agriculture, scientific irrigation, the arts of war, ships, commerce, workers in gold, ivory, gems and glass, the appliances of luxury, the insignia of pride, the forms of government, the indices of law and justice, 2000 years before the “Father of the Faithful” was born, and longer still before the fierce Semitic tribes of the desert gave forth their Hebrew branch, and placed it in the track of authentic history.