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
Shortly after debouching into the Mukondokwa valley, we struck the
road traversed by Captains Buxton and Speke in 1857, between Mbumi and
Kadetamare (the latter place should be called Misonghi, Kadetamare
being but the name of a chief). After following the left bank of
the Mukondokwa, during which our route diverged to every point from
south-east to west, north and northeast, for about an hour, we came to
the ford. Beyond the ford, a short half-hour's march, we came to Kiora.
At this filthy village of Kiora, which was well-grounded with goat-dung,
and peopled with a wonderful number of children for a hamlet that did
not number twenty families, with a hot sun pouring on the limited open
space, with a fury that exceeded 128 degrees Fahrenheit; which swarmed
with flies and insects of known and unknown species; I found, as I had
been previously informed, the third caravan, which had started out of
Bagamoyo so well fitted and supplied. The leader, who was no other
than the white man Farquhar, was sick-a-bed with swollen legs (Bright's
disease), unable to move.
As he heard my voice, Farquhar staggered out of his tent, so changed
from my spruce mate who started from Bagamoyo, that I hardly knew him at
first. His legs were ponderous, elephantine, since his leg-illness was
of elephantiasis, or dropsy. His face was of a deathly pallor, for he
had not been out of his tent for two weeks.
A breezy hill, overlooking the village of Kiora, was chosen by me for
my camping-ground, and as soon as the tents were pitched, the animals
attended to, and a boma made of thorn bushes, Farquhar was carried up
by four men into my tent. Upon being questioned as to the cause of his
illness, he said he did not know what had caused it. He had no pain, he
thought, anywhere. I asked, "Do you not sometimes feel pain on the right
side?"--"Yes, I think I do; but I don't know."--"Nor over the left
nipple sometimes--a quick throbbing, with a shortness of
breath?"--"Yes, I think I have. I know I breathe quick sometimes." He
said his only trouble was in the legs, which were swollen to an immense
size. Though he had a sound appetite, he yet felt weak in the legs.
From the scant information of the disease and its peculiarities, as
given by Farquhar himself, I could only make out, by studying a little
medical book I had with me, that "a swelling of the legs, and sometimes
of the body, might result from either heart, liver, or kidney disease."
But I did not know to what to ascribe the disease, unless it was to
elephantiasis--a disease most common in Zanzibar; nor did I know how
to treat it in a man who, could not tell me whether he felt pain in his
head or in his back, in his feet or in his chest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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