The homeward march lay through miles of villages, all burned; and it was impossible to convince the wretched survivors that he himself had not been guilty. Ambushes were laid to murder him and his party. A large spear “almost grazed my back.” Another spear missed him by only a foot. Two of his men were slain. A huge tree had been loosened at the roots, and almost fell upon him. Three times in one day he escaped death by a hair’s-breadth. So impressed were his people that they cried, “Peace! peace! you will finish your work in spite of everything.” He took it as an omen, and gave thanks to the “Almighty Preserver of men.” For five hours he ran the gauntlet, “perfectly indifferent whether I were killed or not.” The march was pursued in great suffering through August and September, and on into October. Once, he says, he felt like dying on his feet. He was profoundly shaken and depressed. The infamous traders succeeded, but he had failed, he alone, “and experienced worry, thwarting, baffling, when almost in sight of the end for which I strained.” On the 23rd of October, reduced to a skeleton, “a mere ruckle of bones,” he arrived at Ujiji. Shereef, who had custody of his goods, had sold them all off. Shereef, says Livingstone, is “a moral idiot.” Little wonder that he feels like the man in the parable who fell among thieves, only, alas! there was no Good Samaritan. So he felt; but this time he was mistaken. “When my spirits were at their lowest ebb, the Good Samaritan was close at hand.” No part of his amazing story is better known. On the morning of October 28, 1871, Susi came running to him “at the top of his speed and gasped out, ‘an Englishman. I see him!’” A caravan was approaching with the American flag flying over it. A few minutes and the stranger was in front of him, holding out his hand, with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!” It was Henry Morton Stanley, who had undertaken to find him, alive or dead. He had engaged to do so two years before; and he had kept his word. CHAPTER IX