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
Ferajji, the cook, was ready as usual with excellent tea, and a dish of
smoking cakes; "dampers," as the Doctor called them. I never did care
much for this kind of a cake fried in a pan, but they were necessary
to the Doctor, who had nearly lost all his teeth from the hard fare of
Lunda. He had been compelled to subsist on green ears of Indian corn;
there was no meat in that district; and the effort to gnaw at the
corn ears had loosened all his teeth. I preferred the corn scones of
Virginia, which, to my mind, were the nearest approach to palatable
bread obtainable in Central Africa.
The Doctor said he had thought me a most luxurious and rich man, when he
saw my great bath-tub carried on the shoulders of one of my men; but he
thought me still more luxurious this morning, when my knives and forks,
and plates, and cups, saucers, silver spoons, and silver teapot were
brought forth shining and bright, spread on a rich Persian carpet, and
observed that I was well attended to by my yellow and ebon Mercuries.
This was the beginning of our life at Ujiji. I knew him not as a friend
before my arrival. He was only an object to me--a great item for a daily
newspaper, as much as other subjects in which the voracious news-loving
public delight in. I had gone over battlefields, witnessed revolutions,
civil wars, rebellions, emeutes and massacres; stood close to the
condemned murderer to record his last struggles and last sighs; but
never had I been called to record anything that moved me so much as this
man's woes and sufferings, his privations and disappointments, which now
were poured into my ear. Verily did I begin to perceive that "the Gods
above do with just eyes survey the affairs of men." I began to recognize
the hand of an overruling and kindly Providence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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