Great African Travellers: From Mungo Park to Livingstone and StanleyKingston, William Henry Giles
History
Great African Travellers: From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley
Kingston, William Henry Giles
Africa -- Description and travel; Africa -- Discovery and exploration; Explorers
These demon-like savages came round them, gesticulating and yelling,
pretending to attack them with spears and shields, and then engaged in
sham fights with each other.
Mr Baker, however, soon got rid of his satanic escort. Poor Mrs Baker
was naturally alarmed, fearing that it was the intention of the king to
waylay them and perhaps carry her off.
Soon after this, while crossing the Kafue river, the heat being
excessive, what was Mr Baker's horror to see his wife sink from her ox
as though shot dead. He, with his attendants, carried her through the
yielding vegetation, up to their waists in water, above which they could
just keep her head, till they reached the banks. He then laid her under
a tree, and now discovered that she had received a _coup de soleil_. As
there was nothing to eat on the spot, it was absolutely necessary to
move on. A litter was procured, on which Mrs Baker was carried, her
husband mechanically following by its side. For seven days continuously
he thus proceeded on his journey. Her eyes at length opened, but, to
his infinite grief, he found that she was attacked by a brain fever.
One evening they reached a village. She was in violent convulsions. He
believed all was over, and, while he sank down insensible by her side,
his men went out to seek for a spot to dig her grave. On awakening, all
hope having abandoned him, as he gazed at her countenance her chest
gently heaved; she was asleep. When at a sudden noise she opened her
eyes, they were calm and clear: she was saved.
Having rested for a couple of days, they continued their course, Mrs
Baker being carried on her litter. At length they reached the village
of Parkani. To his joy, as he gazed at some lofty mountains, he was
told that they formed the western side of the Luta Nzige, and that the
lake was actually within a march of the village. Their guide announced
that if they started early in the morning, they might wash in the lake
by noon. That night Baker hardly slept.
The following morning, the 14th of March, starting before sunrise, on
ox-back, he and his wife, with their attendants, following his guide, in
a few hours reached a hill from the summit of which "he beheld beneath
him a grand expanse of water, a boundless sea horizon on the south and
south-west, glittering in the noonday sun, while on the west, at fifty
or sixty miles distant, blue mountains rose from the bosom of the lake
to a height of about seven thousand feet above its level."
Hence they descended on foot, supported by stout bamboos, for two hours,
to the white pebbly beach on which the waves of the lake were rolling.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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