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
Emerging after a short hour's march out of the forest, we welcome the
sight of a murmuring translucent stream, swiftly flowing towards the
north-west, which we regard with the pleasure which only men who have
for a long time sickened themselves with that potable liquid of the
foulest kind, found in salinas, mbugas, pools, and puddle holes, can
realize. Beyond this stream rises a rugged and steep ridge, from the
summit of which our eyes are gladdened with scenes that are romantic,
animated and picturesque. They form an unusual feast to eyes sated with
looking into the depths of forests, at towering stems of trees, and at
tufted crowns of foliage. We have now before us scores of cones, dotting
the surface of a plain which extends across Southern Ukonongo to the
territory of the Wafipa, and which reaches as far as the Rikwa Plain.
The immense prospect before which we are suddenly ushered is most
varied; exclusive of conical hills and ambitious flat-topped and
isolated mountains, we are in view of the watersheds of the Rungwa
River, which empties into the Tanganika south of where we stand, and of
the Malagarazi River, which the Tanganika receives, a degree or so north
of this position. A single but lengthy latitudinal ridge serves as a
dividing line to the watershed of the Rungwa and Malagarazi; and a score
of miles or so further west of this ridge rises another, which runs
north and south.
We camped on this day in the jungle, close to a narrow ravine with a
marshy bottom, through the oozy, miry contents of which the waters from
the watershed of the Rungwa slowly trickled southward towards the Rikwa
Plain. This was only one of many ravines, however, some of which were
several hundred yards broad, others were but a few yards in width, the
bottoms of which were most dangerous quagmires, overgrown with dense
tall reeds and papyrus. Over the surface of these great depths of mud
were seen hundreds of thin threads of slimy ochre-coloured water, which
swarmed with animalculae. By-and-by, a few miles south of the base
of this ridge (which I call Kasera, from the country which it cuts in
halves), these several ravines converge and debouch into the
broad, [marshy?], oozy, spongy "river" of Usense, which trends in a
south-easterly direction; after which, gathering the contents of the
watercourses from the north and northeast into its own broader channel,
it soon becomes a stream of some breadth and consequence, and meets a
river flowing from the east, from the direction of Urori, with which it
conflows in the Rikwa Plain, and empties about sixty rectilineal miles
further west into the Tanganika Lake. The Rungwa River, I am informed,
is considered as a boundary line between the country of Usowa on the
north, and Ufipa on the south.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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