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
About 10 P.M. the fever had gone. All were asleep in the tembe but
myself, and an unutterable loneliness came on me as I reflected on my
position, and my intentions, and felt the utter lack of sympathy with me
in all around. It requires more nerve than I possess, to dispel all the
dark presentiments that come upon the mind. But probably what I call
presentiments are simply the impress on the mind of the warnings which
these false-hearted Arabs have repeated so often. This melancholy and
loneliness I feel, may probably have their origin from the same cause.
The single candle, which barely lights up the dark shade that fills the
corners of my room, is but a poor incentive to cheerfulness. I feel as
though I were imprisoned between stone walls. But why should I feel
as if baited by these stupid, slow-witted Arabs and their warnings and
croakings? I fancy a suspicion haunts my mind, as I write, that there
lies some motive behind all this. I wonder if these Arabs tell me
all these things to keep me here, in the hope that I might be induced
another time to assist them in their war with Mirambo! If they think
so, they are much mistaken, for I have taken a solemn, enduring oath,
an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to
be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the
search, until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body; and never
to return home without the strongest possible proofs that he is alive,
or that he is dead. No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only
death can prevent me. But death--not even this; I shall not die, I will
not die, I cannot die! And something tells me, I do not know what it
is--perhaps it is the ever-living hopefulness of my own nature, perhaps
it is the natural presumption born out of an abundant and glowing
vitality, or the outcome of an overweening confidence in oneself--anyhow
and everyhow, something tells me to-night I shall find him, and--write
it larger--FIND HIM! FIND HIM! Even the words are inspiring. I feel more
happy. Have I uttered a prayer? I shall sleep calmly to-night.
I have felt myself compelled to copy out of my Diary the above notes,
as they explain, written as they are on the spot, the vicissitudes of my
"Life at Unyanyembe." To me they appear to explain far better than any
amount of descriptive writing, even of the most graphic, the nature
of the life I led. There they are, unexaggerated, in their literality,
precisely as I conceived them at the time they happened. They speak of
fevers without number to myself and men, they relate our dangers, and
little joys, our annoyances and our pleasures, as they occurred.
CHAPTER X. -- TO MRERA, UKONONGO.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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