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
Sometimes this fever is preceded by a violent shaking fit, during which
period blankets may be heaped on the patient's form, with but little
amelioration of the deadly chill he feels. It is then succeeded by an
unusually severe headache, with excessive pains about the loins and
spinal column, which presently will spread over the shoulder-blades,
and, running up the neck, find a final lodgment in the back and front
of the head. Usually, however, the fever is not preceded by a chill,
but after languor and torpitude have seized him, with excessive heat and
throbbing temples, the loin and spinal column ache, and raging thirst
soon possesses him. The brain becomes crowded with strange fancies,
which sometimes assume most hideous shapes. Before the darkened vision
of the suffering man, float in a seething atmosphere, figures of created
and uncreated reptiles, which are metamorphosed every instant into
stranger shapes and designs, growing every moment more confused, more
complicated, more hideous and terrible. Unable to bear longer the
distracting scene, he makes an effort and opens, his eyes, and dissolves
the delirious dream, only, however, to glide again unconsciously
into another dream-land where another unreal inferno is dioramically
revealed, and new agonies suffered. Oh! the many many hours, that I have
groaned under the terrible incubi which the fits of real delirium evoke.
Oh! the racking anguish of body that a traveller in Africa must
undergo! Oh! the spite, the fretfulness, the vexation which the horrible
phantasmagoria of diabolisms induce! The utmost patience fails to
appease, the most industrious attendance fails to gratify, the deepest
humility displeases. During these terrible transitions, which induce
fierce distraction, Job himself would become irritable, insanely
furious, and choleric. A man in such a state regards himself as the
focus of all miseries. When recovered, he feels chastened, becomes
urbane and ludicrously amiable, he conjures up fictitious delights from
all things which, but yesterday, possessed for him such awful portentous
aspects. His men he regards with love and friendship; whatever is trite
he views with ecstasy. Nature appears charming; in the dead woods and
monotonous forest his mind becomes overwhelmed with delight. I speak
for myself, as a careful analysation of the attack, in all its severe,
plaintive, and silly phases, appeared to me. I used to amuse myself
with taking notes of the humorous and the terrible, the fantastic and
exaggerated pictures that were presented to me--even while suffering the
paroxysms induced by fever.
We arrived at a large pool, known as the Ziwani, after a four hours'
march in a S.S.W. direction, the 1st of October. We discovered an old
half-burnt khambi, sheltered by a magnificent mkuyu (sycamore), the
giant of the forests of Unyamwezi, which after an hour we transformed
into a splendid camp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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