we rounded the bluff northern point of the island, put into “Mtuwwa,” a little bay on its western shore, pitched the tent, and slept at ease.
Another halt was required on the 22nd April. The Sultan Kisesa demanded his blackmail, which amounted to one coil-bracelet and two cloths; provisions were hardly procurable, because his subjects wanted white beads, with which, being at a discount at Ujiji, we had not provided ourselves; and Kannena again successfully put in a tyrannical claim for 460 khete of blue-porcelains to purchase rations.
On the 23rd April we left Mtuwwa, and made for the opposite or western shore of the lake, which appeared about fifteen miles distant; the day’s work was nine hours. The two canoes paddled far apart, there was therefore little bumping, smoking, or quarrelling, till near our destination. At Murivumba the malaria, the mosquitoes, the crocodiles, and the men are equally feared. The land belongs to the Wabembe, who are correctly described in the “Mombas Mission Map” as “Menschenfresser—anthropophagi.” The practice arises from the savage and apathetic nature of the people, who devour, besides man, all kinds of carrion and vermin, grubs and insects, whilst they abandon to wild growths a land of the richest soil and of the most prolific climate. They prefer man raw, whereas the Wadoe of the coast eat him roasted. The people of a village which backed the port, assembled as usual to “sow gape-seed;” but though
“A hungry look hung upon them all,”—
and amongst cannibals one always fancies oneself considered in the light of butcher’s meat,—the poor devils, dark and stunted, timid and degraded, appeared less dangerous to the living than to the dead. In order to keep them quiet, the bull-headed Mabruki, shortly before dusk, fired a charge of duck-shot into the village; ensued loud cries and deprecations to the “Murungwana,” but happily no man was hurt. Sayfu the melancholist preferred squatting through the night on the bow of the canoe, to trusting his precious person on shore. We slept upon a reed-margined spit of sand, and having neglected to pitch the tent, were rained upon to our heart’s content.
We left Murivumba of the man-eaters early on the morning of the 24th April, and stood northwards along the western shore of the Lake: the converging trend of the two coasts told that we were fast approaching our destination. After ten hours’ paddling, halts included, we landed at the southern frontier of Uvira, in a place called Mamaletua, Ngovi, and many other names. Here the stream of commerce begins to set strong; the people were comparatively civil, they cleared for us a leaky old hut with a floor like iron,—it appeared to us a palace!—and they supplied, at moderate prices, sheep and goats, fish-fry, eggs, and poultry, grain, manioc and bird-pepper.
After another long stretch of fifteen rainy and sunny hours, a high easterly wind compelled the hard-worked crews to put into Muikamba (?) of Uvira. A neighbouring hamlet, a few hovels built behind a thick wind-wrung plantain-grove, backed a reed-locked creek, where the canoes floated in safety and a strip of clean sand on which we passed the night as pleasantly as the bright moonlight and the violent gusts would permit. On the 26th April, a paddle of three hours and a half landed us in the forenoon at the sandy baystand, where the trade of Uvira is carried on.
Great rejoicings ushered in the end of our outward-bound voyage. Crowds gathered on the shore to gaze at the new merchants arriving at Uvira, with the usual concert, vocal and instrumental, screams, shouts, and songs, shaums, horns, and tom-toms. The captains of the two canoes performed with the most solemn gravity a bear-like dance upon the mat-covered benches, which form the “quarter-decks,” extending their arms, pirouetting upon both heels, and springing up and squatting down till their hams touched the mats. The crews, with a general grin which showed all their ivories, rattled their paddles against the sides of their canoes in token of greeting, a custom derived probably from the ceremonious address of the Lakists, which is performed by rapping their elbows against their ribs. Presently Majid and Bekkari, two Arab youths sent from Ujiji by their chief, Said bin Majid, to collect ivory, came out to meet me; they gave me, as usual, the news, and said that having laid in the store of tusks required, they intended setting out southwards on the morrow. We passed half the day of our arrival on the bare landing-place, a strip of sand foully unclean, from the effect of many bivouacs. It is open to the water and backed by the plain of Uvira; one of the broadest of these edges of gently-inclined ground which separate the Lake from its trough of hills. Kannena at once visited the Mwami or Sultan Maruta, who owns a village on a neighbouring elevation; this chief invited me to his settlement, but the outfit was running low and the crew and party generally feared to leave their canoes. We therefore pitched our tents upon the sand, and prepared for the last labour, that of exploring the head of the Lake.
We had now reached the “ne plus ultra,” the northernmost station to which merchants have as yet been admitted. The people are generally on bad terms with the Wavira, and in these black regions a traveller coming direct from an enemy’s territory is always suspected of hostile intentions,—no trifling bar to progress. Opposite us still rose, in a high broken line, the mountains of inhospitable Urundi, apparently prolonged beyond the northern extremity of the waters. The head, which was not visible from the plain, is said to turn N.N. westwards, and to terminate after a voyage of two days, which some informants, however, reduce to six hours. The breadth of the Tanganyika is here between seven and eight miles. On the 28th April, all my hopes—which, however, I had hoped against hope—were rudely dashed to the ground. I received a visit from the three stalwart sons of the Sultan Maruta: they were the noblest type of Negroid seen near the Lake, with symmetrical heads, regular features and pleasing countenances; their well-made limbs and athletic frames of a shiny jet black, were displayed to advantage by their loose aprons of red and dark-striped bark-cloth, slung, like game-bags, over their shoulders, and were set off by opal-coloured eyeballs, teeth like pearls, and a profusion of broad massive rings of snowy ivory round their arms, and conical ornaments like dwarf marling-spikes of hippopotamus tooth suspended from their necks. The subject of the mysterious river issuing from the Lake, was at once brought forward. They all declared that they had visited it, they offered to forward me, but they unanimously asserted, and every man in the host of bystanders confirmed their words, that the “Rusizi” enters into, and does not flow out of the Tanganyika. I felt sick at heart. I had not, it is true, undertaken to explore the Coy Fountains by this route; but the combined assertions of the cogging Shaykh and the false Msawahili had startled me from the proprieties of reason, and—this was the result!
Bombay, when questioned, declared that my companion had misunderstood the words of Hamid bin Sulayyam, who spoke of a river falling into, not issuing from the lake; and added his own conviction that the Arab had never sailed north of Ubwari Island. Sayfu, who at Ujiji had described, as an eye-witness, the mouth of the déversoir and its direction for two days, now owned that he had never been beyond Uvira, and that he never intended to do so. Briefly, I had been deceived by a strange coincidence of deceit.