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
On the 12th the caravan reached Mussoudi, on the Ungerengeri river.
Happily for our patient donkeys this march was free from all the
annoying troubles of the jungle. Happily for ourselves also, for we had
no more the care of the packs and the anxiety about arriving at camp
before night. The packs once put firmly on the backs of our good
donkeys, they marched into camp--the road being excellent--without a
single displacement or cause for one impatient word, soon after leaving
Kisemo. A beautiful prospect, glorious in its wild nature, fragrant with
its numerous flowers and variety of sweetly-smelling shrubs, among which
I recognised the wild sage, the indigo plant, &c., terminated only
at the foot of Kira Peak and sister cones, which mark the boundaries
between Udoe and Ukami, yet distant twenty miles. Those distant
mountains formed a not unfit background to this magnificent picture
of open plain, forest patches, and sloping lawns--there was enough of
picturesqueness and sublimity in the blue mountains to render it one
complete whole. Suppose a Byron saw some of these scenes, he would be
inclined to poetize in this manner:
Morn dawns, and with it stern Udoe's hills, Dark Urrugum's rocks, and
Kira's peak, Robed half in mist, bedewed with various rills, Arrayed in
many a dun and purple streak.
When drawing near the valley of Ungerengeri, granite knobs and
protuberances of dazzling quartz showed their heads above the reddish
soil. Descending the ridge where these rocks were prominent, we found
ourselves in the sable loam deposit of the Ungerengeri, and in the midst
of teeming fields of sugar-cane and matama, Indian corn, muhogo,
and gardens of curry, egg, and cucumber plants. On the banks of the
Ungerengeri flourished the banana, and overtopping it by seventy feet
and more, shot up the stately mparamusi, the rival in beauty of the
Persian chenar and Abyssinian plane. Its trunk is straight and comely
enough for the mainmast of a first, class frigate, while its expanding
crown of leafage is distinguished from all others by its density and
vivid greenness. There were a score of varieties of the larger kind of
trees, whose far-extending branches embraced across the narrow but swift
river. The depressions of the valley and the immediate neighbourhood of
the river were choked with young forests of tiger-grass and stiff reeds.
Mussoudi is situated on a higher elevation than the average level of the
village, and consequently looks down upon its neighbours, which number a
hundred and more. It is the western extremity of Ukwere. On the western
bank of the Ungerengeri the territory of the Wakami commences. We had to
halt one day at Mussoudi because the poverty of the people prevented us
from procuring the needful amount of grain. The cause of this scantiness
in such a fertile and populous valley was, that the numerous caravans
which had preceded us had drawn heavily for their stores for the
upmarches.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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