The year opens with “a _set-in_ rain.” He records that he feels always hungry, and is constantly dreaming of better food when he should be sleeping. On the 10th he takes his belt up three holes to relieve hunger. On the 15th he suffers the loss of his “poor little dog, Chitané,” to which he was greatly attached. Everywhere it is famine, and famine prices for wretched food. They boil grain and pretend it is coffee. The ground is all sloppy--feet constantly wet. The natives are living on mushrooms and leaves. Then comes the crowning disaster. Two men who had joined the expedition deserted, and absconded with the medicine chest. It was in the midst of the forest and there was not the shadow of a chance of recovering it. There is little doubt that the lack of any proper medicines to counteract the fever poison was a main contributory cause to Livingstone’s serious loss of health. “I felt as if I had now received sentence of death, like poor Bishop Mackenzie,” he writes. Yet even in the hour of despair he searches for some support for optimism, and the Providential order which he knows to exist. “This may turn out for the best by taking away a source of suspicion among more superstitious, charm-dreading people further north.” On January 23rd he remarks that “an incessant hunger teases us ... real, lasting hunger and faintness.” Yet next day it was a case of “four hours through unbroken, dark forest.” But they have reached the Chambezé now, lean and starved and desperate, and there is prospect of food on the other side. They found the food a little later, but “in changing my dress this morning I was frightened at my own emaciation.”