Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 12
General
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 12
Literature -- Collections
interminable foot-path ends with a canoe on the shores of Tanganyika.
Crossing the lake, landing near some native village, he picks up the
thread once more. Again he plods on and on, now on foot, now by canoe,
but always keeping his line of villages, until one day suddenly he
sniffs the sea-breeze again, and his faithful foot-wide guide lands
him on the Atlantic seaboard.
Nor is there any art in finding out these successive villages with
their intercommunicating links. He _must_ find them out. A whole army
of guides, servants, carriers, soldiers, and camp-followers accompany
him in his march, and this nondescript regiment must be fed. Indian
corn, cassava, mawere, beans, and bananas--these do not grow wild even
in Africa. Every meal has to be bought and paid for in cloth and
beads; and scarcely three days can pass without a call having to be
made at some village where the necessary supplies can be obtained. A
caravan, as a rule, must live from hand to mouth, and its march
becomes simply a regulated procession through a chain of markets. Not
however that there are any real markets--there are neither bazaars nor
stores in native Africa. Thousands of the villages through which the
traveler eats his way may never have victualed a caravan before. But
with the chief's consent, which is usually easily purchased for a
showy present, the villagers unlock their larders, the women flock to
the grinding-stones, and basketfuls of food are swiftly exchanged for
unknown equivalents in beads and calico.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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