Observations were taken with unremitting diligence, except when, as was now common, nothing could be seen in the heavens. As they advanced, the weather became worse. It rained as if nothing but rain were ever known in the watershed. The path lay across flooded rivers, which were distinguished by their currents only from the flooded country along their banks. Dr. Livingstone had to be carried over the rivers on the back of one of his men, in the fashion so graphically depicted on the cover of the Last Journals. The stretches of sponge that came before and after the rivers, with their long grass and elephant-holes, were scarcely less trying. The inhabitants were, commonly, most unfriendly to the party; they refused them food, and, whenever they could, deceived them as to the way. Hunger bore down on the party with its bitter gnawing. Once a mass of furious ants attacked the Doctor by night, driving him in despair from hut to hut. Any frame but one of Iron must have succumbed to a single month of such a life, and before a week was out, any body of men, not held together by a power of discipline and a charm of affection unexampled in the history of difficult expeditions, would have been scattered to the four winds. Livingstone's own sufferings were beyond all previous example.
About this time he began an undated letter--his last--to his old friends Sir Thomas Maclear and Mr. Mann. It was never finished, and never despatched; but as one of the latest things he ever wrote, it is deeply interesting, as showing how clear, vigorous, and independent his mind was to the very last:
"LAKE BANGWEOLO, SOUTH CENTRAL AFRICA.
"MY DEAR FRIENDS MACLEAR AND MANN,--... My work at present is mainly retracing my steps to take up the thread of my exploration. It counts in my lost time, but I try to make the most of it by going round outside this lake and all the sources, so that no one may come afterward and cut me out. I have a party of good men, selected by H. M. Stanley, who, at the instance of James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, acted the part of a good Samaritan truly, and relieved my sore necessities. A dutiful son could not have done more than he generously did. I bless him. The men, fifty-six in number, have behaved as well as Makololo. I cannot award them higher praise, though they have not the courage of that brave kind-hearted people. From Unyanyembe we went due south to avoid an Arab war which had been going on for eighteen months. It is like one of our Caffre wars, with this difference--no one is enriched thereby, for all trade is stopped, and the Home Government pays nothing. We then went westward to Tanganyika, and along its eastern excessively mountainous bank to the end. The heat was really broiling among the rocks. No rain had fallen, and the grass being generally burned off, the heat rose off the black ashes as if out of an oven, yet the flowers persisted in coming out of the burning soil, and generally without leaves, as if it had been a custom that they must observe by a law of the Medes and Persians. This part detained us long; the men's limbs were affected with a sort of subcutaneous inflammation,--black rose or erysipelas,--and when I proposed mildly and medically to relieve the tension it was too horrible to be thought of, but they willingly carried the helpless. Then we mounted up at once into the high, cold region Urungu, south of Tanganyika, and into the middle of the rainy season, with well-grown grass and everything oppressively green; rain so often that no observations could be made, except at wide intervals. I could form no opinion as to our longitude, and but little of our latitudes. Three of the Baurungu chiefs, one a great friend of mine, Nasonso, had died, and the population all turned topsy-turvy, so I could make no use of previous observations. They elect sisters' or brothers' sons to the chieftainship, instead of the heir-apparent. Food was not to be had for either love or money.
"I was at the mercy of guides who did not know their own country, and when I insisted on following the compass, they threatened, 'no food for five or ten days in that line.' They brought us down to the back or north side of Bangweolo, while I wanted to cross the Chambeze and go round its southern side. So back again southeastward we had to bend. The Portuguese crossed this Chambeze a long time ago, and are therefore the first European discoverers. We were not black men with Portuguese names like those for whom the feat of crossing the continent was eagerly claimed by Lisbon statesmen. Dr. Lacerda was a man of scientific attainments, and Governor of Tette, but finding Cazembe at the rivulet called Chungu, he unfortunately succumbed to fever ten days after his arrival. He seemed anxious to make his way across to Angola. Misled by the similarity of Chambeze to Zambesi, they all thought it to be a branch of the river that flows past Tette, Senna, and Shupanga, by Luabo and Kongoné to the sea.
"I rather stupidly took up the same idea from a map saying 'Zambesi' (eastern branch), believing that the map printer had some authority for his assertion. My first crossing was thus as fruitless as theirs, and I was less excusable, for I ought to have remembered that while Chambeze is the true native name of the northern river, Zambesi is not the name of the southern river at all. It is a Portugese corruption of Dombazi, which we adopted rather than introduce confusion by new names, in the same way that we adopted Nyassa instead of Nyanza ia Nyinyesi == Lake of the Stars, which the Portuguese, from hearsay, corrupted into Nyassa. The English have been worse propagators of nonsense than Portuguese. 'Geography of Nyassa' was thought to be a learned way of writing the name, though 'Nyassi' means long grass and nothing else. It took me twenty-two months to eliminate the error into which I was led, and then it was not by my own acuteness, but by the chief Cazembe, who was lately routed and slain by a party of Banyamwezi. He gave me the first hint of the truth, and that rather in a bantering strain: 'One piece of water is just like another; Bangweolo water is just like Moero water, Chambeze water like Luapula water; they are all the same; but your chief ordered you to go to the Bangweolo, therefore by all means go, but wait a few days, till I have looked out for good men as guides, and good food for you to eat,' etc. etc.
"I was not sure but that it was all royal chaff, till I made my way back south to the head-waters again, and had the natives of the islet Mpabala slowly moving the hands all around the great expanse, with 183° of sea horizon, and saying that is Chambeze, forming the great Bangweolo, and disappearing behind that western headland to change its name to Luapula, and run down past Cazembe to Moero. That was the moment of discovery, and not my passage or the Portuguese passage of the river. If, however, any one chooses to claim for them the discovery of Chambeze as one line of drainage of the Nile Valley, I shall not fight with him; Culpepper's astrology was in the same way the forerunner of the Herschels' and the other astronomers that followed."
To another old friend, Mr. James Young, he wrote about the same time: "Opere peracto ludemus--the work being finished, we will play--you remember in your Latin Rudiments lang syne. It is true for you, and I rejoice to think it is now your portion, after working nobly, to play. May you have a long spell of it! I am differently situated; I shall never be able to play.... To me it seems to be said, 'If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that be ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold we knew it not, doth not He that pondereth the heart consider, and He that keepeth thy soul doth He not know, and shall He not give to every one according to his works?' I have been led, unwittingly, into the slaving field of the Banians and Arabs in Central Africa. I have seen the woes inflicted, and I must still work and do all I can to expose and mitigate the evils. Though hard work is still to be my lot, I look genially on others more favored in their lot. I would not be a member of the 'International,' for I love to see and think of others enjoying life.
"During a large part of this journey I had a strong presentiment that I should never live to finish it. It is weakened now, as I seem to see the end toward which I have been striving looming in the distance. This presentiment did not interfere with the performance of any duty; it only made me think a great deal more of the future state of being."
In his latest letters there is abundant evidence that the great desire of his heart was to expose the slave-trade, rouse public feeling, and get that great hindrance to all good for ever swept away.
"Spare no pains," he wrote to Dr. Kirk in 1871, "in attempting to persuade your superior to this end, and the Divine blessing will descend on you and yours."
To his daughter Agnes he wrote (15th August, 1872): "No one can estimate the amount of God-pleasing good that will be done, if, by Divine favor, this awful slave-trade, into the midst of which I have come, be abolished. This will be something to have lived for, and the conviction has grown in my mind that it was for this end I have been detained so long."
To his brother in Canada he says (December, 1872): "If the good Lord permits me to put a stop to the enormous evils of the inland slave-trade, I shall not grudge my hunger and toils. I shall bless his name with all my heart. The Nile sources are valuable to me only as a means of enabling me to open my mouth with power among men. It is this power I hope to apply to remedy an enormous evil, and join my poor little helping hand in the enormous revolution that in his all-embracing Providence He has been carrying on for ages, and is now actually helping forward. Men may think I covet fame, but I make it a rule never to read aught written in my praise."
Livingstone's last birthday (19th March, 1873) found him in much the same circumstances as before. "Thanks to the Almighty Preserver of men for sparing me thus far on the journey of life. Can I hope for ultimate success? So many obstacles have arisen. Let not Satan prevail over me, O my good Lord Jesus." A few days after (24th March): "Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair. I encourage myself in the Lord my God, and go forward."