How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. LivingstoneStanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
History
How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone
Stanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Livingstone, David, 1813-1873
From each of the principals of the caravans, the Mnyamwezi had received
as tribute for his drunken master fifteen doti, and from the other
six caravans six doti each, altogether fifty-one doti, yet on the next
morning when we took the road he was not a whit disposed to deduct a
single cloth from the fine imposed on Hamed, and the unfortunate Sheikh
was therefore obliged to liquidate the claim, or leave his donkeys
behind.
After travelling through the corn-fields of Pembera Pereh we emerged
upon a broad flat plain, as level as the still surface of a pond, whence
the salt of the Wagogo is obtained. From Kanyenyi on the southern
road, to beyond the confines of Uhumba and Ubanarama, this saline field
extends, containing many large ponds of salt bitter water whose low
banks are covered with an effervescence partaking of the nature of
nitrate. Subsequently, two days afterwards, having ascended the elevated
ridge which separates Ugogo from Uyanzi, I obtained a view of this
immense saline plain, embracing over a hundred square miles. I may
have been deceived, but I imagined I saw large expanses of greyish-blue
water, which causes me to believe that this salina is but a corner of
a great salt lake. The Wahumba, who are numerous, from Nyambwa to the
Uyanzi border, informed my soldiers that there was a "Maji Kuba" away to
the north.
Mizanza, our next camp after Nyambwa, is situated in a grove of palms,
about thirteen miles from the latter place. Soon after arriving I had
to bury myself under blankets, plagued with the same intermittent fever
which first attacked me during the transit of Marenga Mkali. Feeling
certain that one day's halt, which would enable me to take regular doses
of the invaluable sulphate of quinine, would cure me, I requested Sheikh
Thani to tell Hamed to halt on the morrow, as I should be utterly unable
to continue thus long, under repeated attacks of a virulent disease
which was fast reducing me into a mere frame of skin and bone. Hamed, in
a hurry to arrive at Unyanyembe in order to dispose of his cloth before
other caravans appeared in the market, replied at first that he would
not, that he could not, stop for the Musungu. Upon Thani's reporting his
answer to me, I requested him to inform Hamed that, as the Musungu did
not wish to detain him, or any other caravan, it was his express wish
that Hamed would march and leave him, as he was quite strong enough in
guns to march through Ugogo alone. Whatever cause modified the Sheikh's
resolution and his anxiety to depart, Hamed's horn signal for the march
was not heard that night, and on the morrow he had not gone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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