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
At night they seek the shore, and wander several miles over the country,
luxuriating among its rank grasses. To within four miles of the town
of Bagamoyo (the Kingani is eight miles distant) their wide tracks are
seen. Frequently, if not disturbed by the startling human voice, they
make a raid on the rich corn-stalks of the native cultivators, and a
dozen of them will in a few minutes make a frightful havoc in a large
field of this plant. Consequently, we were not surprised, while delayed
at the ferry, to hear the owners of the corn venting loud halloos, like
the rosy-cheeked farmer boys in England when scaring the crows away from
the young wheat.
The caravan in the meanwhile had crossed safely--bales, baggage,
donkeys, and men. I had thought to have camped on the bank, so as to
amuse myself with shooting antelope, and also for the sake of procuring
their meat, in order to save my goats, of which I had a number
constituting my live stock of provisions; but, thanks to the awe and
dread which my men entertained of the hippopotami, I was hurried on to
the outpost of the Baluch garrison at Bagamoyo, a small village called
Kikoka, distant four miles from the river.
The western side of the river was a considerable improvement upon the
eastern. The plain, slowly heaving upwards, as smoothly as the beach of
a watering-place, for the distance of a mile, until it culminated in
a gentle and rounded ridge, presented none of those difficulties which
troubled us on the other side. There were none of those cataclysms
of mire and sloughs of black mud and over-tall grasses, none of that
miasmatic jungle with its noxious emissions; it was just such a scene
as one may find before an English mansion--a noble expanse of lawn
and sward, with boscage sufficient to agreeably diversify it. After
traversing the open plain, the road led through a grove of young ebony
trees, where guinea-fowls and a hartebeest were seen; it then wound,
with all the characteristic eccentric curves of a goat-path, up and
down a succession of land-waves crested by the dark green foliage of
the mango, and the scantier and lighter-coloured leaves of the enormous
calabash. The depressions were filled with jungle of more or less
density, while here and there opened glades, shadowed even during noon
by thin groves of towering trees. At our approach fled in terror flocks
of green pigeons, jays, ibis, turtledoves, golden pheasants, quails and
moorhens, with crows and hawks, while now and then a solitary pelican
winged its way to the distance.
Nor was this enlivening prospect without its pairs of antelope, and
monkeys which hopped away like Australian kangaroos; these latter were
of good size, with round bullet heads, white breasts, and long tails
tufted at the end.
We arrived at Kikoka by 5 P.M., having loaded and unloaded our pack
animals four times, crossing one deep puddle, a mud sluice, and a river,
and performed a journey of eleven miles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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