Poor Sechele in his despair resolved on a personal appeal for justice to the great White Queen, and actually travelled to the Cape to take ship to England. He was shown much kindness there, and eventually returned, gathered the people around him, and became a stronger chief than before, while he continued to instruct his tribe in the Bible, without any assistance from a missionary. There are few more striking proofs of the enduring power of Livingstone’s personal influence and Christian faith. The journey through our old friend the desert to the Chobe river, and across it to where Sekeletu, the son of Sebituane, was now reigning, was more arduous and perilous than it had been previously. The floods from the annual inundation of the Chobe were an almost invincible obstacle; yet where the waters did not lie the heat was torrid. “At the surface of the ground in the sun the thermometer registered 125°. The hand cannot be held on the earth, and even the horny feet of the natives must be protected by sandals of hide.” The battle with the waters of the Chobe and its tributaries would have ended in the defeat of anyone less lion-hearted than this traveller. Many of the natives retired from the encounter on the easy pretext of throwing dice and declaring that the gods willed their return. Some of them feigned sickness, to ride in the waggons; and it required infinite patience and humouring to get them forward. Part of the journey lay through dense forest, and laborious days were spent swinging the axe to make a waggon track. The rivers effectually stopped the waggons; and Livingstone took to a pontoon, and afterwards to canoes. But there was much wading to do under a blistering sun, and through reeds that “made our hands all raw and bloody,” and thorns that tore even leather trousers. They were glad to sleep in a filthy deserted hut; and at night the cold dews descended, and the mosquitoes gathered in clouds. They were disturbed by the hippopotami, and the eerie waters were alive with water-snakes. But no combination of perils had any terror for one the alphabet of whose creed was that “man is immortal till his work is done.” At twilight of one day, a village was descried on the river bank. It was Morémi, and Livingstone had reached his beloved Makololo at last. “The inhabitants looked like people who had seen a ghost,” he says; but what he himself really looked like he forbears to add. “He has dropped among us from the clouds, yet came riding on the back of a hippopotamus,”--this was their appropriate description of the pontoon. “We Makololo thought no one could cross the Chobe without our knowledge, but here he drops among us like a bird.” They returned with him, “took the waggons to pieces and carried them across on a number of canoes lashed together.” On the 23rd of May, 1853, they reached Linyanti, the capital town of the Makololo, where the new chief, Sekeletu, received them “in royal style.”