Agreeably to this determination, for twenty-two days we travelled in a south-westerly direction, during which I estimated we had performed a journey of two hundred and forty miles. At a place called Mpokwa, Mirambo’s capital lying due north ten days distant, I turned westward, and after thirty-five miles, gradually turned a little to the westward of north. At the 105th mile of this northerly journey we came to the ferry of the Malagarazi River, Mirambo being, at that point, eight days’ march direct east of us, from whence I took a north-westerly course, straight for the port of the Arab colony on the great Lake. With the exception of a mutiny among my own people, which was soon forcibly crushed, and considerable suffering from famine, I had met with no adventures which detained me, or interrupted my rapid advance on the Lake. At the river just mentioned, however, a rumour reached me, by a native caravan, of a white man having reached Ujiji from Manyuema, a country situated a few hundred miles west of the lake, which startled us all greatly. The caravan did not stay long. The ferriage of the river is always exciting. The people were natives of West Tanganyika. The evidence, such as it was,--brief, and given in a language few of my people could understand,--was conclusive that the stranger was elderly, grey-bearded, white, and that he was a man wearing clothes somewhat of the pattern of those I wore; that he had been at Ujiji before, but had been years absent in the western country; and that he had only arrived either the same day they had left Ujiji with their caravan, or the day before. To my mind, startling as it was to me, it appeared that he could be no other than Livingstone. True, Sir Samuel Baker was known to be in Central Africa in the neighbourhood of the Nile lakes--but he was not grey-bearded; a traveller might have arrived from the West Coast,--he might be a Portuguese, a German, or a Frenchman,--but then none of these had ever been heard of in the neighbourhood of Ujiji. Therefore, as fast as doubts arose as to his personality, arguments were as quickly found to dissipate them. Quickened by the hope that was inspired in my mind by this vague rumour, I crossed the Malagarazi River, and soon after entered the country of the factious and warlike Wahha.