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
An abundance of water, good, sweet, and cool, was found in the bed of
the mtoni in deep stony reservoirs. Here also the traces of furious
torrents were clearly visible as at Mabunguru.
The Nghwhalah commences in Ubanarama to the north--a country famous for
its fine breed of donkeys--and after running south, south-south-west,
crosses the Unyanyembe road, from which point it has more of a westerly
turn.
On the 16th we arrived at Madedita, so called from a village which
was, but is now no more. Madedita is twelve and a half miles from the
Nghwhalah Mtoni. A pool of good water a few hundred yards from the
roadside is the only supply caravans can obtain, nearer than Tura in
Unyamwezi. The tsetse or chufwa-fly, as called by the Wasawahili, stung
us dreadfully, which is a sign that large game visit the pool sometimes,
but must not be mistaken for an indication that there is any in the
immediate neighbourhood of the water. A single pool so often frequented
by passing caravans, which must of necessity halt here, could not be
often visited by the animals of the forest, who are shy in this part of
Africa of the haunts of man.
At dawn the neat day we were on the road striding at a quicker pace
than on most days, since we were about to quit Magunda Mali for the more
populated and better land of Unyamwezi. The forest held its own for
a wearisomely long time, but at the end of two hours it thinned, then
dwarfed into low jungle, and finally vanished altogether, and we
had arrived on the soil of Unyamwezi, with a broad plain, swelling,
subsiding, and receding in lengthy and grand undulations in our front
to one indefinite horizontal line which purpled in the far distance. The
view consisted of fields of grain ripening, which followed the contour
of the plain, and which rustled merrily before the morning breeze that
came laden with the chills of Usagara.
At 8 A.M. we had arrived at the frontier village of Unyamwezi, Eastern
Tura, which we invaded without any regard to the disposition of the few
inhabitants who lived there. Here we found Nondo, a runaway of Speke's,
one of those who had sided with Baraka against Bombay, who, desiring to
engage himself with me, was engaging enough to furnish honey and sherbet
to his former companions, and lastly to the pagazis. It was only a
short breathing pause we made here, having another hour's march to reach
Central Tura.
The road from Eastern Tura led through vast fields of millet, Indian
corn, holcus sorghum, maweri, or panicum, or bajri, as called by
the Arabs; gardens of sweet potatoes, large tracts of cucumbers,
water-melons, mush-melons, and pea-nuts which grew in the deep furrows
between the ridges of the holcus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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