elsewhere to study, working part of the time, to earn enough to pay his way.
On a visit to London Livingstone met Doctor Moffat, a leading missionary in South Africa, and soon decided to work in Africa himself. He had prepared himself to help men’s bodies as well as their souls. So he went first as a medical missionary.
Doctor Livingstone’s first mission station, or center, was seven hundred miles farther north than Doctor Moffat’s, in a region which was dangerous because of savage men, wild beasts, and, worst of all, an unhealthful climate. In this lonely place the new missionary began to tell the ignorant black people about the one true God. He cured them of their illnesses, and showed them how to dig canals and build dams to water their little farms. He also taught them to till these farms in a better way than they had known.
In the region there were many lions. One day, when the missionary was out with a band of natives, he met one of the big beasts. Livingstone and one of his black men shot at the lion, which sprang up with a roar and bounded into the bushes, through the circle the men had made around him. Then two more lions appeared. Before Livingstone could reload his gun, he saw one great brute with bristling mane and angry eyes springing upon him. Its weight bore him to the earth. The lion seized his shoulder with jaws strong enough to carry off an ox. When some one asked him afterward what he thought just then, Doctor Livingstone replied, “I was wondering what part of me he would eat first.” In a letter the doctor described this adventure:
“With his terrible roar sounding in my ear, the lion shook me as a dog does a rat; but, strange to say, I felt neither pain nor fear, though fully conscious of all that passed. As I turned to escape the weight of his paw, which was resting on my head, I saw his eyes turn toward Mebalwe [one of the natives], who was about to fire, but his gun missed fire in both barrels. Instantly the lion quitted his hold of me and leaped on Mebalwe, biting him badly in the thigh; then he dashed at another man who was about to attack him with his spear. But at that moment the previous shots the lion had received took effect and he dropped to the ground dead.”
Livingstone was bitten in eleven places, his arm was badly mangled, and bones were broken in several places. It was many months before he was well. The broken arm was always weak, and he bore the marks of that big lion’s teeth to his dying day.