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
It requires a very good rifle to kill an African elephant. A No. 8 bore
with a Frazer's shell, planted in the temple, I believe, would drop an
elephant each shot. Faulkner makes some extraordinary statements,
about walking up in front of an elephant and planting a bullet in his
forehead, killing him instantly. The tale, however, is so incredible
that I would prefer not to believe it; especially when he states that
the imprint of the muzzle of his rifle was on the elephant's trunk.
African travellers--especially those with a taste for the chase--are too
fond of relating that which borders on the incredible for ordinary men
to believe them. Such stories must be taken with a large grain of salt,
for the sake of the amusement they afford to readers at home. In future,
whenever I hear a man state how he broke the back of an antelope at 600
yards, I shall incline to believe a cipher had been added by a slip of
the pen, or attribute it to a typographical error, for this is almost an
impossible feat in an African forest. It may be done once, but it could
never be done twice running. An antelope makes a very small target at
600 yards distance; but, then, all these stories belong by right divine
to the chasseur who travels to Africa for the sake only of sport.
On the 13th we continued our march across several ridges; and the series
of ascents and descents revealed to us valleys and mountains never
before explored streams; rushing northward, swollen by the rains, and
grand primeval forests, in whose twilight shade no white man ever walked
before.
On the 14th the same scenes were witnessed--an unbroken series of
longitudinal ridges, parallel one with another and with Lake Tanganika.
Eastward the faces of these ridges present abrupt scarps and terraces,
rising from deep valleys, while the western declivities have gradual
slopes. These are the peculiar features of Ukawendi, the eastern
watershed of the Tanganika.
In one of these valleys on this day we came across a colony of
reddish-bearded monkeys, whose howls, or bellowing, rang amongst the
cliffs as they discovered the caravan. I was not able to approach
them, for they scrambled up trees and barked their defiance at me, then
bounded to the ground as I still persisted in advancing; and they would
have soon drawn me in pursuit if I had not suddenly remembered that my
absence was halting the Expedition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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