But at the moment he only felt severely the crushing of his hopes and frustration of his plans. Sebituane’s daughter, who succeeded to the chieftainship, was full of kindly promises; but difficulties multiplied in the way of a settlement, which further exploration of the district did not diminish. Penetrating a hundred and thirty miles to the north, Oswell and Livingstone came upon the broad channel of a noble river, called by the natives the Seshéke. It was the Zambesi, and some three hundred yards wide even there, more than a thousand miles from the mouth. Clearly the swamps round the great river afforded no healthy land for settling. There must be more exploration done, and meantime his wife and children must be cared for. They were hundreds of miles from any white settlement. Even so, Livingstone might still have debated his destiny. But revelations came to him that the slaver was even now establishing his accursed hold on this district. Sebituane’s people, the Makololo, finest and loyallest of tribesmen, had begun to sell children, plundered from their native villages, for guns and calicoes. “It is broken-heartedness,” he wrote much later, “of which the slaves die. Even children, who showed wonderful endurance in keeping up with the chained gangs, would sometimes hear the sound of dancing and the merry tinkle of drums in passing near a village; then the memory of home and happy days proved too much for them, they cried and sobbed, the broken heart came on, and they rapidly sank.” This was the awful revelation that came to Livingstone in the land of the Makololo. Little more than a year before, such an idea as the barter of human beings for guns had never been known among this tribe. “Had we been here sooner the slave traffic would never have existed,” argued Livingstone. He began to have a vision of Christian settlements standing sentinel over the lives and happiness of the natives of the interior. If the slaver could make his way from the coast to the centre, so could the missionary. It was the one effective counterstroke in the battle for human liberty. But it meant separation from wife and bairns. He must return and do this work alone. He could risk no one’s life but his own. His decision was taken. He devotes only a single paragraph to the long and arduous journey to Cape Town. It was a matter of fifteen hundred miles, and part of it was through territory where a so-called Caffre War was being waged, which excited Livingstone’s scorn for the waste of blood and treasure. He was an object of suspicion at the Cape. The State authorities suspected his humanitarian sympathies, and the Church officials his theological orthodoxy. He was in debt, and had anticipated his small salary for more than a year in advance. But he had written to the Directors of the London Missionary Society in the most resolute terms. “Consider the multitudes that in the Providence of God have been brought to light in