How I Found Livingstone. Henry M. StanleyЧитать онлайн книгу.
constantly increased in numbers. The three species above named are, according to natives, fatal to cattle; and this may perhaps be the reason why such a vast expanse of first-class pasture is without domestic cattle of any kind, a few goats only being kept by the villagers. This fly I subsequently found to be the "tsetse."
On the second morning, instead of proceeding, I deemed it more prudent to await the fourth caravan. Burton experimented sufficiently for me on the promised word of the Banyans of Kaole and Zanzibar, and waited eleven months before he received the promised articles. As I did not expect to be much over that time on my errand altogether, it would be ruin, absolute and irremediable, should I be detained at Unyanyembe so long a time by my caravan. Pending its arrival, I sought the pleasures of the chase. I was but a tyro in hunting, I confess, though I had shot a little on the plains of America and Persia; yet I considered myself a fair shot, and on game ground, and within a reasonable proximity to game, I doubted not but I could bring some to camp.
After a march of a mile through the tall grass of the open, we gained the glades between the jungles. Unsuccessful here, after ever so much prying into fine hiding-places and lurking corners, I struck a trail well traversed by small antelope and hartebeest, which we followed. It led me into a jungle, and down a watercourse bisecting it; but, after following it for an hour, I lost it, and, in endeavouring to retrace it, lost my way. However, my pocket-compass stood me in good stead; and by it I steered for the open plain, in the centre of which stood the camp. But it was terribly hard work—this of plunging through an African jungle, ruinous to clothes, and trying to the cuticle. In order to travel quickly, I had donned a pair of flannel pyjamas, and my feet were encased in canvas shoes. As might be expected, before I had gone a few paces a branch of the acacia horrida—only one of a hundred such annoyances—caught the right leg of my pyjamas at the knee, and ripped it almost clean off; succeeding which a stumpy kolquall caught me by the shoulder, and another rip was the inevitable consequence. A few yards farther on, a prickly aloetic plant disfigured by a wide tear the other leg of my pyjamas, and almost immediately I tripped against a convolvulus strong as ratline, and was made to measure my length on a bed of thorns. It was on all fours, like a hound on a scent, that I was compelled to travel; my solar topee getting the worse for wear every minute; my skin getting more and more wounded; my clothes at each step becoming more and more tattered. Besides these discomforts, there was a pungent, acrid plant which, apart from its strong odorous emissions, struck me smartly on the face, leaving a burning effect similar to cayenne; and the atmosphere, pent in by the density of the jungle, was hot and stifling, and the perspiration transuded through every pore, making my flannel tatters feel as if I had been through a shower. When I had finally regained the plain, and could breathe free, I mentally vowed that the penetralia of an African jungle should not be visited by me again, save under most urgent necessity.
The second and third day passed without any news of Maganga. Accordingly, Shaw and Bombay were sent to hurry him up by all means. On the fourth morning Shaw and Bombay returned, followed by the procrastinating Maganga and his laggard people. Questions only elicited an excuse that his men had been too sick, and he had feared to tax their strength before they were quite equal to stand the fatigue. Moreover he suggested that as they would be compelled to stay one day more at the camp, I might push on to Kingaru and camp there, until his arrival. Acting upon which suggestion I broke camp and started for Kingaru, distant five miles.
On this march the land was more broken, and the caravan first encountered jungle, which gave considerable trouble to our cart. Pisolitic limestone cropped out in boulders and sheets, and we began to imagine ourselves approaching healthy highlands, and as if to give confirmation to the thought, to the north and north-west loomed the purple cones of Udoe, and topmost of all Dilima Peak, about 1,500 feet in height above the sea level. But soon after sinking into a bowl-like valley, green with tall corn, the road slightly deviated from north-west to west, the country still rolling before us in wavy undulations.
In one of the depressions between these lengthy land-swells stood the village of Kingaru, with surroundings significant in their aspect of ague and fever. Perhaps the clouds surcharged with rain, and the overhanging ridges and their dense forests dulled by the gloom, made the place more than usually disagreeable, but my first impressions of the sodden hollow, pent in by those dull woods, with the deep gully close by containing pools of stagnant water, were by no means agreeable.
Before we could arrange our camp and set the tents up, down poured the furious harbinger of the Masika season in torrents sufficient to damp the ardor and newborn love for East Africa I had lately manifested. However, despite rain, we worked on until our camp was finished and the property was safely stored from weather and thieves, and we could regard with resignation the raindrops beating the soil into mud of a very tenacious kind, and forming lakelets and rivers of our camp-ground.
Towards night, the scene having reached its acme of unpleasantness, the rain ceased, and the natives poured into camp from the villages in the woods with their vendibles. Foremost among these, as if in duty bound, came the village sultan—lord, chief, or head—bearing three measures of matama and half a measure of rice, of which he begged, with paternal smiles, my acceptance. But under his smiling mask, bleared eyes, and wrinkled front was visible the soul of trickery, which was of the cunningest kind. Responding under the same mask adopted by this knavish elder, I said, "The chief of Kingaru has called me a rich sultan. If I am a rich sultan why comes not the chief with a rich present to me, that he might get a rich return?" Said he, with another leer of his wrinkled visage, "Kingaru is poor, there is no matama in the village." To which I replied that since there was no matama in the village I would pay him half a shukka, or a yard of cloth, which would be exactly equivalent to his present; that if he preferred to call his small basketful a present, I should be content to call my yard of cloth a present. With which logic he was fain to be satisfied.
April 1st.—To-day the Expedition suffered a loss in the death of the grey Arab horse presented by Seyd Burghash, Sultan of Zanzibar. The night previous I had noticed that the horse was suffering. Bearing in mind what has been so frequently asserted, namely, that no horses could live in the interior of Africa because of the tsetse, I had him opened, and the stomach, which I believed to be diseased, examined. Besides much undigested matama and grass there were found twenty-five short, thick, white worms, sticking like leeches into the coating of the stomach, while the intestines were almost alive with the numbers of long white worms. I was satisfied that neither man nor beast could long exist with such a mass of corrupting life within him.
In order that the dead carcase might not taint the valley, I had it buried deep in the ground, about a score of yards from the encampment. From such a slight cause ensued a tremendous uproar from Kingaru—chief of the village—who, with his brother-chiefs of neighbouring villages, numbering in the aggregate two dozen wattled huts, had taken counsel upon the best means of mulcting the Musungu of a full doti or two of Merikani, and finally had arrived at the conviction that the act of burying a dead horse in their soil without "By your leave, sir," was a grievous and fineable fault. Affecting great indignation at the unpardonable omission, he, Kingaru, concluded to send to the Musungu four of his young men to say to him that "since you have buried your horse in my ground, it is well; let him remain there; but you must pay me two doti of Merikani." For reply the messengers were told to say to the chief that I would prefer talking the matter over with himself face to face, if he would condescend to visit me in my tent once again. As the village was but a stone's throw from our encampment, before many minutes had elapsed the wrinkled elder made his appearance at the door of my tent with about half the village behind him.
The following dialogue which took place will serve to illustrate the tempers of the people with whom I was about to have a year's trading intercourse:
White Man.—"Are you the great chief of Kingaru?"
Kingaru.—"Huh-uh. Yes."
W. M.—"The great, great chief?"
Kingaru.—"Huh-uh. Yes."
W. M.—"How many soldiers have you?"
Kingaru.—" Why?"
W. M.—"How many fighting men have you?"
Kingaru.—"None."
W. M.—"Oh! I thought