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)
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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
We ascended a ridge bristling with syenite boulders of massive size,
appearing above a forest of dwarf trees. The view which we saw was
similar to that we had often seen elsewhere. An illimitable forest
stretching in grand waves far beyond the ken of vision--ridges,
forest-clad, rising gently one above another until they receded in the
dim purple-blue distance--with a warm haze floating above them, which,
though clear enough in our neighbourhood, became impenetrably blue in
the far distance. Woods, woods, woods, leafy branches, foliage globes,
or parachutes, green, brown, or sere in colour, forests one above
another, rising, falling, and receding--a very leafy ocean. The horizon,
at all points, presents the same view, there may be an indistinct
outline of a hill far away, or here and there a tall tree higher than
the rest conspicuous in its outlines against the translucent sky--with
this exception it is the same--the same clear sky dropping into the
depths of the forest, the same outlines, the same forest, the same
horizon, day after day, week after week; we hurry to the summit of a
ridge, expectant of a change, but the wearied eyes, after wandering over
the vast expanse, return to the immediate surroundings, satiated with
the eversameness of such scenes. Carlyle, somewhere in his writings,
says, that though the Vatican is great, it is but the chip of an
eggshell compared to the star-fretted dome where Arcturus and Orion
glance for ever; and I say that, though the grove of Central Park, New
York, is grand compared to the thin groves seen in other great cities,
that though the Windsor and the New Forests may be very fine and noble
in England, yet they are but fagots of sticks compared to these eternal
forests of Unyamwezi.
We marched three hours, and then halted for refreshments. I perceived
that the people were very tired, not yet inured to a series of long
marches, or rather, not in proper trim for earnest, hard work after our
long rest in Kwihara. When we resumed our march again there were several
manifestations of bad temper and weariness. But a few good-natured
remarks about their laziness put them on their mettle, and we reached
Ugunda at 2 P.M. after another four hours' spurt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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