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
basalt, or by rock masses, which had parted from a precipitous scarp,
where clung the kolquall with a sure hold, drawing nourishment where
every other green thing failed; clad in others by the hardy mimosa,
which rose like a sloping bank of green verdure almost to the summit.
And, happy sight to me so long a stranger to it, there were hundreds of
cattle grazing, imparting a pleasing animation to the solitude of the
deep folds of the mountain range.
But the fairest view was obtained by looking northward towards the dense
group of mountains which buttressed the front range, facing towards
Rubeho. It was the home of the winds, which starting here and sweeping
down the precipitous slopes and solitary peaks on the western side,
and gathering strength as they rushed through the prairie-like Marenga
Mkali, howled through Ugogo and Unyamwezi with the force of a storm,
It was also the home of the dews, where sprang the clear springs which
cheered by their music the bosky dells below, and enriched the populous
district of Mpwapwa. One felt better, stronger, on this breezy height,
drinking in the pure air and feasting the eyes on such a varied
landscape as it presented, on spreading plateaus green as lawns, on
smooth rounded tops, on mountain vales containing recesses which
might charm a hermit's soul, on deep and awful ravines where reigned
a twilight gloom, on fractured and riven precipices, on huge
fantastically-worn boulders which overtopped them, on picturesque tracts
which embraced all that was wild, and all that was poetical in Nature.
Mpwapwa, though the traveller from the coast will feel grateful for the
milk it furnished after being so long deprived of it, will be kept in
mind as a most remarkable place for earwigs. In my tent they might
be counted by thousands; in my slung cot they were by hundreds; on my
clothes they were by fifties; on my neck and head they were by scores.
The several plagues of locusts, fleas, and lice sink into utter
insignificance compared with this fearful one of earwigs. It is true
they did not bite, and they did not irritate the cuticle, but what their
presence and numbers suggested was something so horrible that it drove
one nearly insane to think of it. Who will come to East Africa without
reading the experiences of Burton and Speke? Who is he that having read
them will not remember with horror the dreadful account given by Speke
of his encounters with these pests? My intense nervous watchfulness
alone, I believe, saved me from a like calamity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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