For such comfort as could be obtained in such dark days he turned again to his work. The fight against slavery is becoming more and more desperate. Even the navigation of the river is now a horror. The waters are ghastly with corpses. “The paddles had to be cleared of bodies caught in the floats at night.” Human skeletons were found in all directions. “Many had ended their misery under shady trees, others under projecting crags in the hills, while others lay in their huts with closed doors which, when opened, disclosed the mouldering corpse with the poor cloth round the loins, the skull fallen off the pillow, the little skeleton of the child that had perished first rolled up in a mat between two large skeletons.” Eighteen months before, this was a well-peopled valley, now it is a desert “literally strewn with human bones.” To complete his despair the mission of Bishop Mackenzie is removed, by order, to Zanzibar, despite Livingstone’s urgent entreaty; and finally, in July, 1863, he himself received from Lord Russell the news that he was recalled. He does not blame the Government. He has expected this. But the bitterness is that “900 miles of coast are abandoned to those who were the first to begin the slave-trade, and seem determined to be the last to abandon it.” His instructions as to handing back the “Pioneer” to the Government men were quite explicit, and it was clear that he had little time left in Africa. Yet before he returned to England he accomplished two feats that would have made the reputation of any other man. With only one white colleague and five Makololo he marched seven hundred and sixty miles in fifty-five days, getting to within ten days’ march of Lake Bangweolo or Bemba, and the village of Ilala, where years later his own heart was to be buried. He would have reached the lake but for the duty of fulfilling his instructions from the Government. The second great feat was on the ocean. He had to face the problem of his own admirable little steamer, the “Lake Nyassa.” She had cost him a fortune and he needed the money. He could have sold her as a slave-vessel, but sooner than do that he would sink her in the Indian Ocean. After many adventures he gets her to Zanzibar, but cannot get a fair price. The one chance left is to sail her across the Indian Ocean and sell her in Bombay. It was the wildest adventure, but it was worthy of him. He could take but fourteen tons of coal, and the distance was 2,500 miles. The crew consisted of himself, a stoker, a carpenter, and a sailor, seven native Zanzibarians, and two “boys,” one of whom was Chumah, who was with him on his last march. The voyage took forty-five days, much of it marked by dead calm, but the latter part by furious squalls. The sails were torn, and the little boat nearly rolled right over. But “God’s good providence” is “over us,” and on June 13th, 1864, they creep into the harbour through the fog, their entrance being unobserved.