“‘I would like very much to go home and see my children once again, but I cannot bring my heart to abandon the task I have undertaken when it is so nearly completed. It only requires six or seven months more to trace the true source that I have discovered with Petherick’s branch of the White Nile, or with the Albert Nyanza of Sir Samuel Baker. Why should I go before my task is ended, to have to come back again to do what I can very well do now?’ ‘And why,’ I asked, ‘did you come so far back without finishing the short task which you say you have yet to do?’ ‘Simply because I was forced; my men would not budge a step forward. They mutinied and formed a secret resolution that if I still insisted on going on to raise a disturbance in the country, and after they had effected it to abandon me, in which case I should be killed. It was dangerous to go any farther. I had explored six hundred miles of the watershed, had traced all the principal streams which discharged their waters into the central line of drainage, and when about starting to explore the last one hundred miles the hearts of my people failed, and they set about frustrating me in every possible way. Now, having returned seven hundred miles to get a new supply of stores and another escort, I find myself destitute of even the means to live but for a few weeks, and sick in mind and body.’ “Again, about a week after I had arrived in Ujiji, I asked Livingstone if he had examined the northern head of the Tanganyika. He answered immediately he had not, and then asked if people expected he had.