CHAPTER X.

A METEOROLOGICAL NOTE

PREFACE.

It is the genial tax of literature upon Travel that those who have

explored the regions of the uncivilised should open their bag of

wonders before the world and celebrate their return to clothing in

three or four volumes and a map. This exaction, in the nature of

things, must shortly abolish itself.

As a minor traveller, whose assets are few, I have struggled to evade

even this obligation, but having recently had to lecture on African

subjects to various learned and unlearned Societies in England and

America, it has been urged upon me that a few of the lecture-notes

thrown into popular form might be useful as a general sketch of East

Central Africa. Great books of travel have had their day. But small

books, with the larger features of a country lightly sketched, and

just enough of narrative to make you feel that you are really there,

have a function in helping the imagination of those who have not

breath enough to keep up with the great explorers.

The publication of "The White Ant" and "Mimicry" has been already

forestalled by one of the monthly magazines; and the "Geological

Sketch" is rescued, and duly dusted, from the archives of the British

Association. If the dust of science has been too freely shaken from

the other chapters, the scientific reader will overlook it for the

sake of an over-worked public which has infinite trouble in getting

itself mildly instructed and entertained without being disheartened

by the heavy pomp of technical expression.

If anything in a work of this class could pretend to a serious

purpose, I do not conceal that, in addition to the mere desire to

inform, a special reason exists just now for writing about Africa--a

reason so urgent that I excuse myself with difficulty for introducing

so grave a problem in so slight a setting. The reader who runs his

eye over the "Heart-Disease of Africa" will discover how great the

need is for arousing afresh that truer interest in the Dark Continent

which since Livingstone's time has almost died away. To many modern

travellers Africa is simply a country to be explored; to Livingstone

it was a land to be pitied and redeemed. And recent events on Lake

Nyassa have stirred a new desire in the hearts of those who care for

native Africa that "the open sore of the world" should have a last

and decisive treatment at the hands of England.

HENRY DRUMMOND.

TROPICAL AFRICA.

I

THE WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA.

THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE.

Three distinct Africas are known to the modern world--North Africa,

where men go for health; South Africa, where they go for money; and

Central Africa, where they go for adventure. The first, the old

Africa of Augustine and Carthage, every one knows from history; the

geography of the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, has

been taught us by two Universal Educators--War and the

Stock-Exchange; but our knowledge of the third, the Africa of

Livingstone and Stanley, is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look

upon our maps which tells how long this mysterious land has kept its

secret.

Into the heart of this mysterious Africa I wish to take you with me

now. And let me magnify my subject by saying at once that it is a

wonderful thing to see. It is a wonderful thing to start from the

civilization of Europe, pass up these mighty rivers, and work your

way into that unknown land--work your way alone, and on foot, mile

after mile, month after month, among strange birds and beasts and

plants and insects, meeting tribes which have no name, speaking

tongues which no man can interpret, till you have reached its secret

heart, and stood where white man has never trod before. It is a

wonderful thing to look at this weird world of human beings--half

animal half children, wholly savage and wholly heathen; and to turn

and come back again to civilization before the impressions have had

time to fade, and while the myriad problems of so strange a spectacle

are still seething in the mind. It is an education to see this

sight--an education in the meaning and history of man. To have been

here is to have lived before Menes. It is to have watched the dawn

of evolution. It is to have the great moral and social problems of

life, of anthropology, of ethnology, and even of theology, brought

home to the imagination in the most new and startling light.

On the longest day of a recent summer--midwinter therefore in the

tropics--I left London. A long railway run across France,

Switzerland, and Italy brings one in a day or two to the

Mediterranean. Crossing to Alexandria, the traveller strikes across

Egypt over the Nile, through the battlefield of Tel-el-Kebir, to the

Red Sea, steams down its sweltering length to Aden, tranships, and,

after three lifetimes of deplorable humiliation in the south-west

Monsoons, terminates his sufferings at Zanzibar.

Zanzibar is the focus of all East African exploration. No matter

where you are going in the interior, you must begin at Zanzibar.

Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in

its morals, this cesspool of wickedness is a fit capital for the Dark

Continent. But Zanzibar is Zanzibar simply because it is the only

apology for a town on the whole coast. An immense outfit is required

to penetrate this shopless and foodless land, and here only can the

traveller make up his caravan. The ivory and slave trades have made

caravaning a profession, and everything the explorer wants is to be

had in these bazaars, from a tin of sardines to a repeating rifle.

Here these black villains, the porters, the necessity and the despair

of travellers, the scum of old slave gangs, and the fugitives from

justice from every tribe, congregate for hire. And if there is one

thing on which African travellers are for once agreed, it is that for

laziness, ugliness, stupidness, and wickedness, these men are not to

be matched on any continent in the world. Their one strong point is

that they will engage themselves for the Victoria Nyanza or for the

Grand Tour of the Tanganyika with as little ado as a Chamounix guide

volunteers for the Jardin; but this singular avidity is mainly due to

the fact that each man cherishes the hope of running away at the

earliest opportunity. Were it only to avoid requiring to employ

these gentlemen, having them for one's sole company month after

month, seeing them transgress every commandment in turn before your

eyes--you yourself being powerless to check them except by a

wholesale breach of the sixth--it would be worth while to seek

another route into the heart of Africa.

But there is a much graver objection to the Zanzibar route to the

interior. Stanley started by this route on his search for

Livingstone, two white men with him; he came back without them.

Cameron set out by the same path to cross Africa with two companions;

before he got to Tanganyika he was alone. The Geographical Society's

late expedition, under Mr. Keith Johnstone, started from Zanzibar

with two Europeans; the hardy and accomplished leader fell within a

couple of months. These expeditions have all gone into the interior

by this one fatal way, and probably every second man, by fever or by

accident, has left his bones to bleach along the road. Hitherto

there has been no help for it. The great malarious coast-belt must

be crossed, and one had simply to take his life in his hands and go

through with it.

But now there is an alternative. There is a rival route into the

interior, which, though it is not without its dark places too, will

probably yet become the great highway from the East to Central

Africa. Let me briefly sketch it:

Africa, speaking generally, is a vast, ill-formed triangle. It has

no peninsulas; it has almost no islands or bays or fjords. But three

great inlets, three mighty rivers piercing it to the very heart, have

been allocated by a kind Nature, one to each of its solid sides. On

the north is the river of the past, flowing through Egypt, as Leigh

Hunt says, "like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream"; on

the west, the river of the future, the not less mysterious Congo; and

on the east the little known Zambesi.

The physical features of this great continent are easily grasped.

From the coast a low scorched plain, reeking with malaria, extends

inland in unbroken monotony for two or three hundred miles. This is

succeeded by mountains slowly rising into a plateau some 2000 or 3000

feet high; and this, at some hundreds of miles distance, forms the

pedestal for a second plateau, as high again. This last plateau,

4000 to 5000 feet high, may be said to occupy the whole of Central

Africa. It is only on the large scale, however, that these are to be

reckoned plateaux at all. When one is upon them he sees nothing but

mountains and valleys and plains of the ordinary type, covered for

the most part with forest.

I have said that Nature has supplied each side of Africa with one

great river. By going some hundreds of miles southward along the

coast from Zanzibar the traveller reaches the mouth of the Zambesi.

Livingstone sailed up this river once, and about a hundred miles from

its mouth discovered another river twisting away northwards among the

mountains. The great explorer was not the man to lose such a chance

of penetrating the interior. He followed this river up, and after

many wanderings found himself on the shores of a mighty lake. The

river is named the Shiré, and the lake--the existence of which was

quite unknown before, is Lake Nyassa. Lake Nyassa is 350 miles long;

so that, with the Zambesi, the Shiré, and this great lake, we have

the one thing required to open up East Central Africa--a water-route

to the interior. But this is not all. Two hundred and fifty miles

from the end of Lake Nyassa another lake of still nobler proportions

takes up the thread of communication. Lake Tanganyika is 450 miles

in length. Between the lakes stands a lofty plateau, cool, healthy,

accessible, and without any physical barrier to interrupt the

explorer's march. By this route the Victoria Nyanza and the Albert

Nyanza may be approached with less fatigue, less risk, and not less

speed, than by the overland trail from Zanzibar. At one point also,

along this line, one is within a short march of that other great

route which must ever be regarded as the trunk-line of the African

continent. The watershed of the _Congo_ lies on this

Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau. This is the stupendous natural highway on

which so much of the future of East Central Africa must yet depend.

Ten days' languid steaming from Zanzibar brings the traveller to the

Zambesi mouth. The bar here has an evil reputation, and the port is

fixed on a little river which flows into the Indian Ocean slightly to

the north, but the upper reaches of which almost join the Zambesi at

some distance inland. This port is the Portuguese settlement of

Quilimane, and here I said good-bye to the steamer and to

civilization. Some distance in the interior stands a solitary

pioneer Mission station of the Established Church of Scotland, and

still farther in, on Lake Nyassa, another outpost of a sister church.

My route led past both these stations, and I had the good fortune to

pick up on the way two or three young fellow-countrymen who were

going up to relieve the mission staff. For the latter part of my

journey I was quite alone. All African work, as a rule, is done

single-handed. It is not always easy to find a companion for such a

project, and the climate is so pestilential that when two go, you and

your friend are simply nursing each other time about, and the

expedition never gets on. On the whole, however, the solitary course

is not to be commended. An unutterable loneliness comes over one at

times in the great still forests, and there is a stage in African

fever--and every one must have fever--when the watchful hand of a

friend may make the difference between life and death.

After leaving Quilimane, the first week of our journey up the Qua-qua

was one long picnic. We had two small row-boats, the sterns covered

with a sun-proof awning, and under these we basked, and talked, and

read and prospected, from dawn to sunset. Each boat was paddled by

seven or eight natives--muscular heathens, whose sole dress was a

pocket-handkerchief, a little palm oil, and a few mosquitoes. Except

at first the river was only a few yards broad, and changed in

character and novelty every hour. Now it ran through a grove of

cocoa-nut palms--the most wonderful and beautiful tree of the

tropics. Now its sullen current oozed through a fœtid swamp of

mangroves--the home of the crocodile and the hippopotamus, whose

slimy bodies wallowed into the pools with a splash as our boats sped

past. Again the banks became green and graceful, the long plumed

grasses bending to the stream, and the whole a living aviary of

birds--the white ibis and the gaunt fish eagle, and the exquisite

blue and scarlet kingfisher watching its prey from the overhanging

boughs. The businesslike air of this last bird is almost comical,

and somehow sits ill on a creature of such gorgeous beauty. One

expects him to flutter away before the approach of so material a

thing as a boat, display his fairy plumage in a few airy movements,

and melt away in the sunshine. But there he sits, stolid and

impassive, and though the spray of the paddles almost dashes in his

face, the intent eyes never move, and he refuses to acknowledge the

intruder by so much as a glance. His larger ally, the black and

white spotted kingfisher, if less beautiful, is much more energetic,

and darts about the bank incessantly, coquetting with the boat from

reach to reach, and seldom allowing an inspection close enough to

take in the details of his piebald coat.

One interests oneself in these things more particularly because there

is nothing at first especially striking about the river scenery

itself. Ten or twenty feet of bank cuts off the view on either side,

and large and varied features are wanting. The banks are lined with

the densest jungle of mangroves and aquatic grasses, while creepers

of a hundred kinds struggle for life among the interlacing stems. We

saw crocodiles here in such numbers that count was very soon lost.

They were of all sizes, from the baby specimen which one might take

home in a bottle to the enormous bullet-proof brute the size of an

81-ton gun. These revolting animals take their siesta in the heat of

the day, lying prone upon the bank, with their wedge-shaped heads

directed towards the water. When disturbed they scuttle into the

river with a wriggling movement, the precipitancy of which defies the

power of sight. The adjustment of the adult crocodile to its

environment in the matter of color is quite remarkable. The younger

forms are lighter yellow, and more easily discoverable, but it takes

the careful use of a good pair of eyes to distinguish in the gnarled

slime-covered log lying among the rotting stumps the living form of

the mature specimen. Between the African crocodiles and the

alligators there is the slightest possible external difference;

although the longer head, the arrangement of scales, the fringed feet

with their webbed toes, the uniform teeth, and the protrusion of the

large canine, distinguish them from their American allies.

Many of the ibises I shot as we moved along, for food for the men,

who, like all Africans, will do anything for flesh in whatever form.

For ourselves, we lived upon emaciated fowls and tinned meats,

cooking them at a fire on the bank when the boat stopped. Eggs are

never eaten by the natives, but always set; although, if you offer to

buy them, the natives will bring you a dozen from a sitting hen,

which they assure you were laid that very morning. In the interior,

on many occasions afterwards, these protestations were tested, and

always proved false. One time, when nearly famished and far from

camp, I was brought a few eggs which a chief himself guaranteed had

that very hour been laid. With sincere hope that he might be right,

but with much misgiving, I ordered the two freshest looking to be

boiled. With the despair of a starving man I opened them. They were

cock and hen.

Breakfast and luncheon and dinner are all the same in Africa. There

is no beef, nor mutton, nor bread, nor flour, nor sugar, nor salt,

nor anything whatever, except an occasional fowl, which an Englishman

can eat. Hence the enormous outfit which he must carry with him. No

one has any idea of what can be had in tins till he camps out abroad.

Every conceivable digestible and indigestible is to be had tinned,

every form of fish, flesh, fowl, and game, every species of

vegetable, and fruit, every soup, sweet, and _entrée_; but after two

or three months of this sort of thing you learn that this tempting

semblance of variety is a gigantic imposition. The sole difference

between these various articles lies, like the Rhine wines, in the

label. Plum pudding or kippered herring taste just the same.

Whether you begin dinner with tinned calves-foot jelly or end with

tinned salmon makes no difference; and after six months it is only by

a slight feeling of hardness that you do not swallow the tins

themselves.

At the end of a too short week we left our boats behind. Engaging an

army of shy natives at a few huts near the bank, we struck across a

low neck of land, and after an hour's walk found ourselves suddenly

on the banks of the Zambesi. A solitary bungalow was in sight, and

opposite it the little steamer of the African Lakes Company, which

was to take us up the Shiré. There is more in the association,

perhaps, than in the landscape, to strike one as he first furrows the

waters of this virgin river. We are fifty miles from its mouth, the

mile-wide water shallow and brown, the low sandy banks fringed with

alligators and wild birds. The great deltoid plain, yellow with

sun-tanned reeds and sparsely covered with trees, stretches on every

side; the sun is blistering hot; the sky, as it will be for months, a

monotonous dome of blue--not a frank bright blue like the Canadian

sky, but a veiled blue, a suspicious and malarious blue, partly due

to the perpetual heat haze and partly to the imagination, for the

Zambesi is no friend to the European, and this whole region is heavy

with depressing memories.

This impression, perhaps, was heightened by the fact that we were to

spend that night within a few yards of the place where Mrs.

Livingstone died. Late in the afternoon we reached the spot--a low

ruined hut a hundred yards from the river's bank, with a broad

verandah shading its crumbling walls. A grass-grown path straggled

to the doorway, and the fresh print of a hippopotamus told how

neglected the spot is now. Pushing the door open, we found ourselves

in a long dark room, its mud floor broken into fragments, and remains

of native fires betraying its latest occupants. Turning to the

right, we entered a smaller chamber, the walls bare and stained, with

two glassless windows facing the river. The evening sun setting over

the far-off Morumballa mountains, filled the room with its soft glow,

and took our thoughts back to that Sunday evening twenty years ago,

when in this same bedroom, at this same hour, Livingstone knelt over

his dying wife, and witnessed the great sunset of his life.

Under a huge baobab tree--a miracle of vegetable vitality and

luxuriance--stands Mrs. Livingstone's grave. The picture in

Livingstone's book represents the place as well kept and surrounded

with neatly-planted trees. But now it is an utter wilderness, matted

with jungle grass and trodden by the beasts of the forest; and as I

looked at the forsaken mound and contrasted it with her husband's

tomb in Westminster Abbey, I thought perhaps the woman's love which

brought her to a spot like this might be not less worthy of

immortality.

The Zambesi is the great river of Eastern Africa, and, after the

Congo, the Nile, and the Niger, the most important on the continent.

Rising in the far interior among the marshes of Lake Dilolo, and,

gathering volume from the streams which flow from the high lands

connecting the north of Lake Nyassa with Inner Angola, it curves

across the country for over a thousand miles like an attenuated

letter S, and before its four great mouths empty the far-travelled

waters into the Indian Ocean, drains an area of more than half a

million square miles. As it cuts its way down the successive steps

of the central plateaux its usually placid current is interrupted by

rapids, narrows, cascades, and cataracts, corresponding to the

plateau edges, so that like all the rivers of Africa it is only

navigable in stretches of one or two hundred miles at a time. From

the coast the Zambesi might be stemmed by steam-power to the rapids

of Kebrabasa; and from above that point intermittently, as far as the

impassable barrier of the Victoria Falls. Above this, for some

distance, again follow rapids and waterfalls, but these are at length

succeeded by an unbroken chain of tributaries which together form an

inland waterway of a thousand miles in length. The broad lands along

the banks of this noble river are subject to annual inundations like

the region of the Nile, and hence their agricultural possibilities

are unlimited. On the lower Zambesi, indigo, the orchila weed, and

caluraba-root abound, and oil-seeds and sugar-cane could be produced

in quantity to supply the whole of Europe. At present, owing to

apathy and indifferent government, these magnificent resources are

almost wholly undeveloped.

Next afternoon our little vessel left the Zambesi in its wake and

struck up a fine lake-like expansion to the north, which represents

the mouth of the Shiré. Narrower and deeper, the tributary is a

better stream for navigation than the Zambesi. The scenery also is

really fine, especially as one nears the mountains of the plateau,

and the strange peoples and animals along the banks occupy the mind

with perpetual interests. The hippopotami, prowling round the boat

and tromboning at us within pistol-shot, kept us awake at night; and

during the day we could see elephants, buffaloes, deer, and other

large game wandering about the banks. To see the elephant at home is

a sight to remember. The stupendous awkwardness of the menagerie

animal, as if so large a creature were quite a mistake, vanishes

completely when you watch him in his native haunts. Here he is as

nimble as a kitten, and you see how perfectly this moving mountain is

adapted to its habitat--how such a ponderous monster, indeed, is as

natural to these colossal grasses as a rabbit to an English park. We

were extremely fortunate in seeing elephants at all at this stage,

and I question whether there is any other part of Africa where these

animals may be observed leisurely and in safety within six weeks of

London. Mr. Stanley in his Livingstone expedition was ten months in

the country before he saw any; and Mr. Joseph Thomson, during his

long journey to Tanganyika and back, never came across a single

elephant. It is said that the whale which all travellers see in

crossing the Atlantic is kept up by the steamboat companies, but I

vouch that these Shiré valley elephants are independent of subsidy.

The question of the disappearance of the elephant here and throughout

Africa is, as every one knows, only one of a few years. It is hard

to think why this kindly and sagacious creature should have to be

exterminated; why this vast store of animal energy, which might be

turned into so much useful work, should be lost to civilization. But

the causes are not difficult to understand. The African elephant has

never been successfully tamed, and is therefore a failure as a source

of energy. As a source of ivory, on the other hand, he has been but

too great a success. The cost of ivory at present is about

half-a-sovereign per pound. An average tusk weighs from twenty to

thirty pounds. Each animal has two, and in Africa both male and

female carry tusks. The average elephant is therefore worth in

pounds sterling the weight in pounds avoirdupois of one of his tusks.

I have frequently seen single tusks turning the scale upon ninety

pounds, the pair in this case being worth nearly £100 sterling,--so

that a herd of elephants is about as valuable as a gold mine. The

temptation to sacrifice the animal for his tusks is therefore great;

and as he becomes scarcer he will be pursued by the hunter with

ever-increasing eagerness. But the truth is, sad though the

confession be, the sooner the last elephant falls before the hunters

bullet the better for Africa. Ivory introduces into the country at

present an abnormal state of things. Upon this one article is set so

enormous a premium that none other among African products secures the

slightest general attention; nor will almost anyone in the interior

condescend to touch the normal wealth, or develop the legitimate

industries of the country, so long as a tusk remains. In addition to

this, of half the real woes which now exist in Africa ivory is at the

bottom. It is not only that wherever there is an article to which a

fictitious value is attached the effect upon the producer is apt to

be injurious; nor that wherever there is money there is temptation,

covetousness, and war; but that unprincipled men, and especially

Arabs, are brought into contact with the natives in the worst

relation, influence them only in one, and that the lowest, direction,

and leave them always worse than they find them--worse in greed, in

knavery, in their belief in mankind, and in their suspicion of

civilization. Further, for every tusk an Arab trader purchases he

must buy, borrow, or steal a slave to carry it to the coast.

Domestic slavery is bad enough, but now begins the long slave-march

with its untold horrors--horrors instigated and perpetuated almost

solely by the traffic in ivory. The extermination of the elephant,

therefore, will mark one stage at least in the closing up of the

slave-trade. The elephant has done much for Africa. The best he can

do now for his country is to disappear forever.

In books of travel great chiefs are usually called kings, their wives

queens, while their mud-huts are always palaces. But after seeing my

first African chief at home, I found I must either change my views of

kings or of authors. The regal splendor of Chipitula's court--and

Chipitula was a very great chief indeed, and owned all the Shiré

district--may be judged of by the fact that when I paid my respects

to his highness his court-dress consisted almost exclusively of a

pair of suspenders. I made this king happy for life by the gift of a

scarlet tennis-cap and a few buttons. But poor Chipitula had not

long to enjoy his treasures,--and I mention the incident to show what

is going on every day in Africa. When I came back that way, on my

return journey, I called again to receive a leopard skin which this

chief had promised to trap for me, and for which he was to get in

exchange certain dilapidated remnants of my wardrobe. He gave me the

skin; I duly covered his, and we parted. A few days after, another

white man came that way; he was a trader--the only one who has yet

plied this hazardous calling in East Central Africa. He quarrelled

with Chipitula over some bargain, and in a moment of passion drew his

revolver and shot the chief dead on the spot. Of course he himself

was instantly speared by Chipitula's men; and all his black porters,

according to native etiquette, were butchered with their master.

There is absolutely no law in Africa, and you can kill anybody and

anybody can kill you, and no one will ask any questions.

Our next stoppage was to pay another homage--truly this is a tragic

region--at another white man's grave. A few years ago Bishop

Mackenzie and some other missionaries were sent to Africa by the

English Universities, with instructions to try to establish a Mission

in the footsteps of Livingstone. They came here; the climate

overpowered them; one by one they sickened and died. With the death

of the Bishop himself the site was abandoned, and the few survivors

returned home. Among the hippopotamus-trampled reeds on the banks of

the Shiré under a rough iron cross, lies the first of three brave

bishops who have already made their graves in Equatorial Africa.

I have spoken of the Shiré as the great waterway into the interior of

Eastern Africa. It has one defect. After sailing for five or six

days we came to rapids which no boat can pass. These rapids were

named by Livingstone the Murchison Cataracts, and they extend for

seventy miles. This distance, accordingly, must be traversed

overland. Half-way up this seventy miles, and a considerable

distance inland from the river, stands the first white settlement in

East Central Africa--the Blantyre Mission. Bribing about a hundred

natives with a promise of a fathom of calico each, to carry our

luggage, we set off on foot for Blantyre. The traditional

characteristics of African caravaning were displayed in full

perfection during this first experience, and darkness fell when we

were but half-way to our destination. It was our first night in the

bush, and a somewhat unusual introduction to African travelling

marked it. At midnight we were roused by startling cries from our

men, who lay sleeping on the ground around us. The watch-fires must

have burned down, for a lion had suddenly sprung into the camp.

Seizing the man who lay nearest the forest, the animal buried its

claws in his breast, and was making off into the darkness, when the

shouting frightened it and made it drop its prey. Twice during the

night the lion came back, and we whites had to keep watch by turns

till morning with loaded rifles. This is altogether an exceptional

case, for with a good fire one can generally spread his mat anywhere

in the tropics without fear of midnight attack. This is a famous

place, however, for lions, and one can as certainly depend on their

gruesome concert in the early morning as on the sparrows' chirp in

England.

Towards sunset the following evening our caravan filed into Blantyre.

On the beauty and interest of this ideal mission I shall not dwell.

But if anyone wishes to find out what can be done with the virgin

African, what can be done by broad and practical missionary methods,

let him visit the Rev. D. Clement Scott and his friends at Blantyre.

And if he wishes to observe the possibilities of civilization and

colonization among an average African tribe living on an average

African soil, let him examine the mission plantations, and those of

Mr. John and Mr. Frederick Moir at Mandala, and of the Brothers

Buchanan at Zomba. And, further, if he desires to know what the milk

of human kindness is, let him time his attack of fever so that haply

it may coincide with his visit to either of these centres of

self-denying goodness and hospitality.

II.

THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY.

LAKES SHIRWA AND NYASSA.

Somewhere in the Shiré Highlands, in 1859, Livingstone saw a large

lake--Lake Shirwa--which is still almost unknown. It lies away to

the East, and is bounded by a range of mountains whose lofty summits

are visible from the hills round Blantyre. Thinking it might be a

useful initiation to African travel if I devoted a short time to its

exploration, I set off one morning accompanied by two members of the

Blantyre staff and a small retinue of natives. Steering across

country in the direction in which it lay, we found, two days before

seeing the actual water, that we were already on the ancient bed of

the lake. Though now clothed with forest, the whole district has

obviously been under water at a comparatively recent period, and the

shores of Lake Shirwa probably reached at one time to within a few

miles of Blantyre itself. On reaching the lake a very aged female

chief came to see us, and told us how, long, long ago, a white man

came to her village and gave her a present of cloth. Of the white

man, who must have been Livingstone, she spoke very kindly; and,

indeed, wherever David Livingstone's footsteps are crossed in Africa

the fragrance of his memory seems to remain.

The waters of Shirwa are brackish to the taste, and undrinkable; but

the saltness must have a peculiar charm for game, for nowhere else in

Africa did I see such splendid herds of the larger animals as here.

The zebra was especially abundant; and so unaccustomed to be

disturbed are these creatures, that with a little care one could

watch their movements safely within a very few yards. It may seem

unorthodox to say so, but I do not know if among the larger animals

there is any thing handsomer in creation than the zebra. At close

quarters his striped coat is all but as fine as the tiger's, while

the form and movement of his body are in every way nobler. The gait

certainly, is not to be compared for gracefulness with that of the

many species of antelope and deer who nibble the grass beside him,

and one can never quite forget that scientifically he is an ass; but

taking him all in all, this fleet and beautiful animal ought to have

a higher place in the regard of man than he has yet received.

We were much surprised, considering that this region is almost

uninhabited, to discover near the lake shore a native path so beaten,

and so recently beaten by multitudes of human feet, that it could

only represent some trunk route through the continent. Following it

for a few miles, we soon discovered its function. It was one of the

great slave routes through Africa. Signs of the horrid traffic soon

became visible on every side; and from symmetrical arrangements of

small piles of stones and freshly-cut twigs, planted semaphore-wise

upon the path, our native guides made out that a slave-caravan was

actually passing at the time. We were, in fact, between two portions

of it, the stones and twigs being telegraphic signals between front

and rear. Our natives seemed much alarmed at this discovery, and

refused to proceed unless we promised not to interfere--a proceeding

which, had we attempted it, would simply have meant murder for

ourselves and slavery for them. Next day, from a hill-top, we saw

the slave encampment far below, and the ghastly procession

marshalling for its march to the distant coast, which many of the

hundreds who composed it would never reach alive.

Talking of native footpaths leads me to turn aside for a moment to

explain to the uninitiated the true mode of African travel. In spite

of all the books that have been lavished upon us by our great

explorers, few people seem to have any accurate understanding of this

most simple process. Some have the impression that everything is

done in bullock-wagons--an idea borrowed from the Cape, but

hopelessly inapplicable to Central Africa, where a wheel at present

would be as great a novelty as a polar bear. Others at the opposite

extreme suppose that the explorer works along solely by compass,

making a bee-line for his destination, and steering his caravan

through the trackless wilderness like a ship at sea. Now it may be a

surprise to the unenlightened to learn that probably no explorer in

forcing his passage through Africa has ever, for more than a few days

at a time, been off some beaten track. Probably no country in the

world, civilized or uncivilized, is better supplied with paths than

this unmapped continent. Every village is connected with some other

village, every tribe with the next tribe, every state with its

neighbor, and therefore with all the rest. The explorer's business

is simply to select from this network of tracks, keep a general

direction, and hold on his way. Let him begin at Zanzibar, plant his

foot on a native footpath, and set his face towards Tanganyika. In

eight months he will be there. He has simply to persevere. From

village to village he will be handed on, zigzagging it may be

sometimes to avoid the impassable barriers of nature or the rarer

perils of hostile tribes, but never taking to the woods, never guided

solely by the stars, never in fact leaving a beaten track, till

hundreds and hundreds of miles are between him and the sea, and his

interminable footpath 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 inarch, 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 traveller eats his way may never have

victualled a caravan before. But, with the chief's consent, which is

usually easily purchased for a showy present, the villages unlock

their larders, the women flock to the grinding stones, and basketfuls

of food are swiftly exchanged for unknown equivalents in beads and

calico.

The native tracks which I have just described are the same in

character all over Africa. They are veritable footpaths, never over

a foot in breadth, beaten as hard as adamant, and rutted beneath the

level of the forest bed by centuries of native traffic. As a rule

these footpaths are marvellously direct. Like the roads of the old

Romans, they run straight on through everything, ridge and mountain

and valley, never shying at obstacles, nor anywhere turning aside to

breathe. Yet within this general straightforwardness there is a

singular eccentricity and indirectness in detail. Although the

African footpath is on the whole a bee-line, no fifty yards of it are

ever straight. And the reason is not far to seek. If a stone is

encountered no native will ever think of removing it. Why should he?

It is easier to walk round it. The next man who comes that way will

do the same. He knows that a hundred men are following him; he looks

at the stone; a moment, and it might be unearthed and tossed aside,

but no; he also holds on his way. It is not that he resents the

trouble, it is the idea that is wanting. It would no more occur to

him that that stone was a displaceable object, and that for the

general weal he might displace it, than that its feldspar was of the

orthoclase variety. Generations and generations of men have passed

that stone, and it still waits for a man with an altruistic idea.

But it would be a very stony country indeed--and Africa is far from

stony--that would wholly account for the aggravating obliqueness and

indecision of the African footpath. Probably each four miles, on an

average path, is spun out by an infinite series of minor sinuosities,

to five or six. Now these deflections are not meaningless. Each has

some history--a history dating back, perhaps, a thousand years, but

to which all clue has centuries ago been lost. The leading cause,

probably, is fallen trees. When a tree falls across a path no man

ever removes it. As in the case of the stone, the native goes round

it. It is too green to burn in his hut; before it is dry, and the

white ants have eaten it, the new detour has become part and parcel

of the path. The smaller irregularities, on the other hand,

represent the trees and stumps of the primeval forest where the track

was made at first. But whatever the cause, it is certain that for

persistent straightforwardness in the general, and utter vacillation

and irresolution in the particular, the African roads are unique in

engineering.

Though one of the smaller African lakes, Shirwa is probably larger

than all the lakes of Great Britain put together. With the splendid

environment of mountains on three of its sides, softened and

distanced by perpetual summer haze, it reminds one somewhat of the

Great Salt Lake simmering in a July sun. We pitched our tent for a

day or two on its western shore among a harmless and surprised people

who had never gazed on the pallid countenances of Englishmen before.

Owing to the ravages of the slaver the people of Shirwa are few,

scattered and poor, and live in abiding terror. The densest

population is to be found on the small island, heavily timbered with

baobabs, which forms a picturesque feature of the northern end.

These Wa-Nyassa, or people of the lake, as they call themselves, have

been driven here by fear, and they rarely leave their Lake-Dwelling

unless under cover of night. Even then they are liable to capture by

any man of a stronger tribe who happens to meet them, and numbers who

have been kidnapped in this way are to be found in the villages of

neighboring chiefs. This is an amenity of existence in Africa that

strikes one as very terrible. It is impossible for those at home to

understand how literally savage man is a chattel, and how much his

life is spent in the more safeguarding of his main asset, _i.e._,

himself. There are actually districts in Africa where _three_

natives cannot be sent a message in case two should combine and sell

the third before they return.

After some time spent in the Lake Shirwa and Shiré districts, I set

out for the Upper Shiré and Lake Nyassa. Two short days' walk from

the settlement at Blantyre brings one once more to the banks of the

Shiré. Here I found waiting the famous little _Ilala_, a tiny

steamer, little bigger than a large steam launch. It belonged

originally to the missionaries on Lake Nyassa, and was carried here a

few years ago from England in seven hundred pieces, and bolted

together on the river bank. No chapter in romance is more

interesting than the story of the pioneer voyage of the _Ilala_, as

it sailed away for the first time towards the unknown waters of

Nyassa. No keel had ever broken the surface of this mighty lake

before, and the wonderment of the natives as the Big Canoe hissed

past their villages is described by those who witnessed it as a

spectacle of indescribable interest. The _Ilala_ is named, of

course, after the village where David Livingstone breathed his last.

It indicates the heroic mission of the little ship--to take up the

work of Civilization and Christianity where the great explorer left

it. The _Ilala_ now plies at intervals between the Upper

Shiré--above the cataracts--and the shores of Lake Nyassa, carrying

supplies to the handful of missionaries settled on the western shore.

Though commanded by a white man, the work on board is entirely done

by natives from the locality. The confidence of the black people

once gained, no great difficulty seems to have been found in getting

volunteers enough for this novel employment. Singularly enough,

while deck hands are often only enlisted after some persuasion, the

competition for the office of fireman--a disagreeable post at any

time, but in the tropical heat the last to be coveted--is so keen

that any number of natives are at all times ready to be frizzled in

the stokehole. Instead of avoiding heat, the African native

everywhere courts it. His nature expands and revels in it; while a

breath of cold on a mountain slope, or a sudden shower of rain,

transforms him instantly into a most woebegone object.

After leaving Matope, just above the Murchison cataracts, the _Ilala_

steams for a couple of days in the river before Lake Nyassa is

reached. The valley throughout this length is very broad, bounded on

either side by distant mountains which at an earlier period probably

formed the shores of a larger Lake Nyassa. The fact that Lake Nyassa

is silting up at its southern end becomes more apparent as one nears

the lake, for here one finds a considerable expanse already cut off

from the larger portion, and forming a separate sheet of water. The

smaller lake is Lake Pomalombe, and it is already so shallow that in

the dry season the _Ilala's_ screw stirs the gray mud at the bottom.

The friendship of the few villages along the bank is secured by an

occasional present; although the relations between some of them and

the Big Canoe are at times a little strained, and in bad humors

doubtless they would send it to the bottom if they dared. It is to

be remembered that this whole region is as yet altogether beyond the

limits, and almost beyond the knowledge of civilization, and few

white men have ever been in the country, except the few agents

connected with the Lakes Company and the Missions. Beyond an

occasional barter of cloth or beads for firewood and food, the

_Ilala_ has no dealings with the tribes on the Upper Shiré, and at

present they are about as much affected by the passing to and fro of

the white man's steamer as are the inhabitants of Kensington by an

occasional wild-fowl making for Regent's Park. One is apt to

conclude, from the mere presence of such a thing as a steamer in

Central Africa, that the country through which it is passing must be

in some sense civilized, and the hourly reminders to the contrary

which one receives on the spot are among the most startling

experiences of the traveller. It is almost impossible for him to

believe, as he watches the native life from the cabin of the _Ilala_,

that these people are altogether uncivilized; just as it is

impossible for him to believe that that lurch a moment ago was caused

by the little craft bumping against a submerged hippopotamus. A

steel ship, London built, steaming six knots ahead; and grass huts,

nude natives, and a hippopotamus--the ideas refuse to assort

themselves, and one lives in a perpetual state of bewilderment and

interrogation.

It was a brilliant summer morning when the _Ilala_ steamed into Lake

Nyassa, and in a few hours we were at anchor in the little bay at

Livingstonia, My first impression of this famous mission-station

certainly will never be forgotten. Magnificent mountains of granite,

green to the summit with forest, encircled it, and on the silver sand

of a still smaller bay stood the small row of trim white cottages. A

neat path through a small garden led up to the settlement, and I

approached the largest house and entered. It was the Livingstonia

manse--the head missionary's house. It was spotlessly clean; English

furniture was in the room, a medicine chest, familiar-looking dishes

were in the cupboards, books lying about, but there was no missionary

in it. I went to the next house--it was the school, the benches were

there and the blackboard, but there were no scholars and no teacher.

I passed to the next, it was the blacksmith shop; there were the

tools and the anvil, but there was no blacksmith. And so on to the

next, and the next, all in perfect order, and all _empty_. Then a

native approached and led me a few yards into the forest. And there

among the mimosa trees, under a huge granite mountain, were four or

five graves. These were the missionaries.

I spent a day or two in the solemn shadow of that deserted manse. It

is one of the loveliest spots in the world; and it was hard to

believe, sitting under the tamarind trees by the quiet lake shore,

that the pestilence which wasteth at midnight had made this beautiful

spot its home. A hundred and fifty miles north, on the same

lake-coast, the remnant of the missionaries have begun their task

again, and there, slowly, against fearful odds, they are carrying on

their work. Travellers have been pleased to say unkind things of

missionaries. That they are sometimes right, I will not question.

But I will say of the Livingstonia missionaries, and of the Blantyre

missionaries, and count it an honor to say it, that they are brave,

efficient, single-hearted men, who need our sympathy more than we

know, and are equally above our criticism and our praise.

Malarial fever is the one sad certainty which every African traveller

must face. For months he may escape, but its finger is upon him, and

well for him if he has a friend near when it finally overtakes him.

It is preceded for weeks, or even for a month or two, by

unaccountable irritability, depression and weariness. On the march

with his men he has scarcely started when he sighs for the noon-day

rest. Putting it down to mere laziness, he goads himself on by

draughts from the water-bottle, and totters forward a mile or two

more. Next he finds himself skulking into the forest on the pretext

of looking at a specimen, and, when his porters are out of sight,

throws himself under a tree in utter limpness and despair. Roused by

mere shame, he staggers along the trail, and as he nears the mid-day

camp puts on a spurt to conceal his defeat, which finishes him for

the rest of the day. This is a good place for specimens he tells the

men--the tent may be pitched for the night. This goes on day after

day till the crash comes--first cold and pain, then heat and pain,

then every kind of pain, and every degree of heat, then delirium,

then the life-and-death struggle. He rises, if he does rise, a

shadow; and slowly accumulates strength for the next attack, which he

knows too well will not disappoint him. No one has ever yet got to

the bottom of African fever. Its geographical distribution is still

unmapped, but generally it prevails over the whole east and west

coasts within the tropical limit, along all the river-courses, on the

shores of the inland lakes, and in all low-lying and marshy

districts. The higher plateaux, presumably, are comparatively free

from it, but in order to reach these, malarious districts of greater

or smaller area have to be traversed. There the system becomes

saturated with fever, which often develops long after the infected

region is left behind. The known facts with regard to African fever

are these: First, it is connected in some way with drying-up water

and decaying vegetation, though how the germs develop, or what they

are, is unknown. Second, natives suffer from fever equally with

Europeans, and this more particularly in changing from district to

district and from altitude to altitude. Thus, in marching over the

Tanganyika plateau, four or five of my native carriers were down with

fever, although their homes were only two or three hundred miles off,

before I had even a touch of it. Third, quinine is the great and

almost the sole remedy; and, fourth, no European ever escapes it.

The really appalling mortality of Europeans is a fact with which all

who have any idea of casting in their lot with Africa should

seriously reckon. None but those who have been on the spot, or have

followed closely the inner history of African exploration and

missionary work can appreciate the gravity of the situation. The

malaria spares no man; the strong fall as the weak; no number of

precautions can provide against it; no kind of care can do more than

make the attacks less frequent; no prediction can be made beforehand

as to which regions are haunted by it and which are safe. It is not

the least ghastly feature of this invisible plague that the only

known scientific test for it at present is a human life. That test

has been applied in the Congo region already with a recklessness

which the sober judgment can only characterize as criminal. It is a

small matter that men should throw away their lives, in hundreds, if

need be, for a holy cause; but it is not a small matter that man

after man, in long and in fatal succession, should seek to overleap

what is plainly a barrier of Nature. And science has a duty in

pointing out that no devotion or enthusiasm can give any man a

charmed life, and that those who work for the highest ends will best

attain them in humble obedience to the common laws.

Transcendentally, this may be denied; the warning finger may be

despised as the hand of the coward and the profane. But the fact

remains--the fact of an awful chain of English graves stretching

across Africa. This is not spoken, nevertheless, to discourage

missionary enterprise. It is only said to regulate it.

To the head of Lake Nyassa in a little steam yacht is quite a

sea-voyage. What with heavy seas, and head-winds, and stopping to

wood, and lying-to at nights, it takes longer time than going from

England to America. The lake is begirt with mountains, and storms

are so incessant and so furious that Livingstone actually christened

Nyassa the "Lake of Storms." The motion on anchoring at night was

generally so unpleasant that one preferred then to be set on shore.

My men--for I had already begun to pick up my caravan whenever I

could find a native willing to go--would kindle fires all round to

keep off beasts of prey, and we slept in peace upon the soft lake

sand.

Instead of being one hundred and fifty miles long, as first supposed,

Lake Nyassa is now known to have a length of three hundred and fifty

miles, and a breadth varying from sixteen to sixty miles. It

occupies a gigantic trough of granite and gneiss, the profoundly deep

water standing at a level of sixteen hundred feet above the sea, with

the mountains rising all around it, and sometimes sheer above it, to

a height of one, two, three, and four thousand feet. The mountains

along the west coast form an almost unbroken chain, while the

north-east and north are enclosed by the vast range of the

Livingstone Mountains. The anchorages on the lake are neither so

numerous nor so sheltered as might be wished, but the _Ilala_ has

picked out some fair harbors on the west coast, and about half as

many are already known on the east.

I only visited one native village on the lake, and I should hope

there are none others like it--indeed it was quite exceptional for

Africa. I tumbled into it early one morning, out of the _Ilala's_

dingy, and lost myself at once in an endless labyrinth of reeking

huts. Its filth was indescribable, and I met stricken men, at the

acute stage of smallpox, wandering about the place at every turn, as

if infection were a thing unknown. The chief is the greatest slaver

and the worst villain on the lake, and impaled upon poles all round

his lodge, their ghastly faces shrivelling in the sun, I counted

forty human heads.

This village was not African, however. It was Arab. The native

villages on Nyassa are rarely so large, seldom so compact, and never

so dirty. Everywhere they straggle along the shore and through the

forest, and altogether there must be many hundreds of them scattered

about the lake. On the western shore alone there are at least

fifteen different tribes, speaking as many different languages, and

each of them with dialects innumerable.

The bright spot on Lake Nyassa is Bandawé, the present headquarters

of the Scotch Livingstonia Mission. The phrase "headquarters of a

mission" suggests to the home Christian a street and a square, with

its overshadowing church; a decent graveyard; and a reverent

community in its Sunday clothes. But Bandawé is only a lodge or two

in a vast wilderness, and the swarthy worshippers flock to the

seatless chapel on M'lunga's day dressed mostly in bows and arrows.

The said chapel, nevertheless, is as great an achievement in its way

as Cologne Cathedral, and its worshippers are quite as much

interested, and some of them at least to quite as much purpose. In

reality no words can be a fit witness here to the impression made by

Dr. Laws, Mrs. Laws, and their few helpers, upon this singular and

apparently intractable material. A visit to Bandawé is a great moral

lesson. And I cherish no more sacred memory of my life than that of

a communion service in the little Bandawé chapel, when the

sacramental cup was handed to me by the bare black arm of a native

communicant--a communicant whose life, tested afterwards in many an

hour of trial with me on the Tanganyika plateau, gave him perhaps a

better right to be there than any of us.

III.

THE HEART OF AFRICA.

THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE.

We are now far enough into the interior to form some general idea of

the aspect of the heart of Africa. I shall not attempt to picture

any particular spot. The description about to be given applies

generally to Shirwa, the Shiré Highlands, Nyassa, and the

Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau--regions which together make up one of the

great lobes of the heart of Africa.

Nothing could more wildly misrepresent the reality than the idea of

one's school days that the heart of Africa is a desert. Africa rises

from its three environing oceans in three great tiers, and the

general physical geography of these has been already sketched--first,

a coast-line, low and deadly; farther in, a plateau the height of the

Scottish Grampians; farther in still, a higher plateau, covering the

country for thousands of miles with mountain and valley. Now fill in

this sketch, and you have Africa before you. Cover the coast belt

with rank yellow grass, dot here and there a palm; scatter through it

a few demoralized villages; and stock it with the leopard, the hyena,

the crocodile, and the hippopotamus. Clothe the mountainous plateaux

next--both of them--with endless forest,--not grand umbrageous forest

like the forests of South America, nor matted jungle like the forests

of India, but with thin, rather weak forest,--with forest of low

trees, whose half-grown trunks and scanty leaves offer no shade from

the tropical sun. Nor is there anything in these trees to the casual

eye to remind you that you are in the tropics. Here and there one

comes upon a borassus or fan-palm, a candelabra-like euphorbia, a

mimosa aflame with color, or a sepulchral baobab. A close inspection

also will discover curious creepers and climbers; and among the

branches strange orchids hide their eccentric flowers. But the

outward type of tree is the same as we have at home--trees resembling

the ash, the beech, and the elm, only seldom so large, except by the

streams, and never so beautiful.[1] Day after day you may wander

through these forests with nothing except the climate to remind you

where you are. The beasts, to be sure, are different, but unless you

watch for them you will seldom see any; the birds are different, but

you rarely hear them; and as for the rocks, they are our own familiar

gneisses and granites, with honest basalt-dykes boring through them,

and leopard-skin lichens staining their weathered sides. Thousands

and thousands of miles, then, of vast thin forest, shadeless,

trackless, voiceless--forest in mountain and forest in plain--this is

East Central Africa.

[1] The more important of these trees are--_Napaca Kirkii_,

_Brachystegia longifolia_, _Vitex umbrosa_, _Erythrina speciosa_,

_Ficus sycamorus_, _Khaya senegalensis_, _Nuxia congesta_,

_Parinarium mobola_, and _Erythrophlœum guineensis_.

The indiscriminate praise formerly lavished on tropical vegetation

has received many shocks from recent travellers. In Kaffirland,

South Africa, I have seen one or two forests fine enough to justify

the enthusiasm of armchair word-painters of the tropics; but so far

as the central plateau is concerned, the careful judgment of Mr.

Alfred Russel Wallace respecting the equatorial belt in general--a

judgment which has at once sobered all modern descriptions of

tropical lands, and made imaginative people more content to stay at

home--applies almost to this whole area. The fairy labyrinth of

ferns and palms, the festoons of climbing plants blocking the paths

and scenting the forests with their resplendent flowers, the gorgeous

clouds of insects, the gaily-plumaged birds, the paroquets, the

monkey swinging from his trapeze in the shaded bowers--these are

unknown to Africa. Once a week you will see a palm; once in three

months the monkey will cross your path; the flowers on the whole are

few; the trees are poor; and, to be honest, though the endless

forest-clad mountains have a sublimity of their own, and though there

are tropical bits along some of the mountain-streams of exquisite

beauty, nowhere is there anything in grace and sweetness and strength

to compare with a Highland glen. For the most part of the year these

forests are jaded and sun-stricken, carpeted with no moss or

alchemylla or scented woodruff, the bare trunks frescoed with few

lichens, their motionless and unrefreshed leaves drooping sullenly

from their sapless boughs. Flowers there are, small and great, in

endless variety; but there is no display of flowers, no gorgeous show

of blossom in the mass, as when the blazing gorse and heather bloom

at home. The dazzling glare of the sun in the torrid zone has

perhaps something to do with this want of color-effect in tropical

nature; for there is always about ten minutes just after sunset, when

the whole tone of the landscape changes like magic, and a singular

beauty steals over the scene. This is the sweetest moment of the

African day, and night hides only too swiftly the homelike softness

and repose so strangely grateful to the over-stimulated eye.

Hidden away in these endless forests, like birds' nests in a wood, in

terror of one another, and of their common foe, the slaver, are small

native villages; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells the

primeval man, without clothes, without civilization, without

learning, without religion--the genuine child of nature, thoughtless,

careless, and contented. This man is apparently quite happy; he has

practically no wants. One stick, pointed, makes him a spear; two

sticks rubbed together make him a fire; fifty sticks tied together

make him a house. The bark he peels from them makes his clothes; the

fruits which hang on them form his food. It is perfectly astonishing

when one thinks of it what nature can do for the animal-man, to see

with what small capital after all a human being can get through the

world. I once saw an African buried. According to the custom of his

tribe, his entire earthly possessions--and he was an average

commoner--were buried with him. Into the grave, after the body, was

lowered the dead man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a mud bowl, and

last his bow and arrows--the bow string cut through the middle, a

touching symbol that its work was done. This was all. Four items,

as an auctioneer would say, were the whole belongings for half a

century of this human being. No man knows what a man is till he has

seen what a man can be without, and be withal a man. That is to say,

no man knows how great man is till he has seen how small he has been

once.

The African is often blamed for being lazy, but it is a misuse of

words. He does not need to work; with so bountiful a nature round

him it would be gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as

it is called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and

as little blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise. The fact is, Africa

is a nation of the unemployed.

This completeness, however, will be a sad drawback to development.

Already it is found difficult to create new wants; and when labor is

required, and you have already paid your man a yard of calico and a

string of beads, you have nothing in your possession to bribe him to

another hand's turn. Nothing almost that you have would be the

slightest use to him. Among the presents which I took for chiefs, I

was innocent enough to include a watch. I might as well have taken a

grand piano. For months I never looked at my own watch in that land

of sunshine. Besides, the mere idea of time has scarcely yet

penetrated the African mind, and forms no element whatever in his

calculations. I wanted on one occasion to catch the little steamer

on the Shiré, and pleaded this as an excuse to a rather powerful

chief, whom it would have been dangerous to quarrel with, and who

would not let me leave his village. The man merely stared. The idea

of any one being in a hurry was not only preposterous but

inconceivable, and I might as well have urged as my reason for

wishing away that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right

angles.

This difference in ideas is the real obstacle to African travelling,

and it raises all sorts of problems in one's mind as to the nature of

ideas themselves. I often wished I could get inside an African for

an afternoon, and just see how he looked at things; for I am sure our

worlds are as different as the color of our skins.

Talking of skins, I may observe in passing that the highland African

is not a negro, nor is his skin black. It is a deep full-toned

brown, something like the color of a good cigar. The whole surface

is diced with a delicate pattern, which gives it great richness and

beauty, and I often thought how effective a row of books would be

bound in native-morocco.

No one knows exactly who these people are. They belong, of course,

to the great Bantu race; but their origin is obscure, their tribal

boundaries are unmapped, even their names are unknown, and their

languages---for they are many--are unintelligible. A fine-looking

people, quiet and domestic, their life-history from the cradle to the

grave is of the utmost simplicity. Too ill armed to hunt, they live

all but exclusively on a vegetable diet. A small part of the year

they depend, like the monkeys, upon wild fruits and herbs; but the

staple food is a small tasteless millet-seed which they grow in

gardens, crush in a mortar, and stir with water into a thick

porridge. Twice a day, nearly all the year round, each man stuffs

himself with this coarse and tasteless dough, shoveling it into his

mouth in handfuls, and consuming at a sitting a pile the size of an

ant-heap. His one occupation is to grow this millet, and his

gardening is a curiosity. Selecting a spot in the forest, he climbs

a tree, and with a small home-made axe lops off the branches one by

one. He then wades through the litter to the next tree, and hacks it

to pieces also, leaving the trunk standing erect. Upon all the trees

within a circle of thirty or forty yards diameter his axe works

similar havoc, till the ground stands breast-high in leaves and

branches. Next, the whole is set on fire and burned to ashes. Then,

when the first rains moisten the hard ground and wash the fertile

chemical constituents of the ash into the soil, he attacks it with

his hoe, drops in a few handfuls of millet, and the year's work is

over. But a few weeks off and on are required for these operations,

and he may then go to sleep till the rains are over, assured of a

crop which never fails, which is never poor, and which will last him

till the rains return again.

Between the acts he does nothing but lounge and sleep; his wife, or

wives, are the millers and bakers; they work hard to prepare his

food, and are rewarded by having to take their own meals apart, for

no African would ever demean himself by eating with a woman. I have

tried to think of something else that these people habitually do, but

their vacuous life leaves nothing more to tell.

Apart from eating, their sole occupation is to talk, and this they do

unceasingly, emphasizing their words with a marvellous wealth of

gesticulation. Talking, indeed, is an art here--the art it must once

have been in Europe before the newspaper drove it out of fashion.

The native voices are sometimes highly musical, though in the strict

sense the people have no notion whatever of singing; and the

languages themselves are full of melody. Every word, like the

Italian, ends in a vowel, and when well spoken they are exceedingly

effective and full of character.

Notwithstanding their rudimentary estate, the people of Africa have

the beginnings of all the more characteristic things that make up the

life of civilized man. They have a national amusement, the dance; a

national musical instrument, the drum; a national drink, _pombé_; a

national religion, the fear of evil spirits. Their chamber of

justice is a council of head-men or chiefs; their court of appeal,

the _muavi_, or poison cup. No new thing is found here that is not

in some form in modern civilization; no new thing in civilization but

has its embryo and prophecy in the simpler life of these primitive

tribes. To the ignorant these men are animals; but the eye of

evolution looks on them with a kindlier and more instructed sense.

They are what we were once; possibly they may become what we are now.

What, then, is to become of this strange people and their land? With

the glowing figures of a very distinguished traveller in our minds,

are we to expect that the Shiré and Congo routes have but to be

connected with New York and Manchester to cause at once a revolution

among the people of Africa and in the commerce of the world? We hear

two criticisms upon that subject. One complains that while Mr.

Stanley emphasizes in the most convincing way the thousands of miles

of cloth the African is waiting to receive from Europe, he is all but

silent as to what Europe is to get in return. A second remark is

that Africa has nothing to give in return, and never will have.

The facts of the case briefly, as it seems to me, are these:--

First, The only thing of value the interior of Africa produces at

present in any quantity is ivory. There is still, undoubtedly, a

supply of this precious material in the country--a supply which may

last yet for fifteen or twenty years. But it is well to frame future

calculation on the certainty of this abnormal source of wealth

ceasing, as it must do, in the immediate future.

Second, Africa already produces in a wild state a number of vegetable

and other products of considerable commercial value; and although the

soil can only be said to be of average fertility, there is

practically no limit to the extent to which these could be developed.

Wild indigo--the true _indigofera tinctoria_ is already growing on

the hills of the interior. The Londolphia, an indiarubber-bearing

creeper, is to be seen on most of the watercourses; and a variety of

the _Ficus elastica_, the well-known rubber plant, abounds on Lake

Nyassa. The orchilla weed is common. The castor-oil plant, ginger,

and other spices, the tobacco-plant, the cotton-plant, and many

fibre-yielding grasses, are also found; and oil-seeds of every

variety and in endless quantity are grown by the natives for local

use.

The fatal drawback, meantime, to the further development of these

comparatively invaluable products is the transit, carriage to the

coast from Nyassa or Tanganyika being almost prohibitive. Up till

very recently only two native products have ever been exported from

this region--indiarubber and beeswax, and these in but trifling

quantity. But there is no reason why these products should not be

largely developed, and freights must become lower and lower every

year. In addition to the plants named, the soil of Central Africa is

undoubtedly adapted for growing coffee; and the Cinchona would

probably flourish well on the higher grounds of the Tanganyika

plateau.

I must not omit to mention in this connection that an attempt is now

being made, and so far with marked success, to form actual

plantations in the interior of Africa; and the result of the

experiment ought to be watched with exceptional interest. Mr. Moir,

on behalf of the African Lakes Company, and the Brothers Buchanan on

their own account, and also Mr. Scott, with remarkable industry and

enterprise have each formed at Blantyre a coffee plantation of

considerable size. The plants, when I saw them, were still young,

but very healthy and promising, and already a first crop of fine

coffee-berries hung from the trees, and has since been marketed.

These same gentlemen have also grown heavy crops of wheat; and Mr.

Buchanan has succeeded well with sugar-cane, potatoes and other

English vegetables. The manual work here has been entirely done by

natives; and an immense saving to resident Europeans will be effected

when the interior is able to provide its own food supplies, for at

present wheat, coffee, and sugar, have all to be imported from home.

With so satisfactory an account of the possibilities of the country,

the only question that remains is this--Can the African native really

be taught to work?

This question I answer unhesitatingly in the affirmative. I have

described Africa as a nation of the unemployed. But the sole reason

for the current impression that the African is an incorrigible idler

is that at present there is really nothing for him to do. But that

he can work and will work when the opportunity and inducement offer

has been proved by experiment. The coast native, as all must testify

who have seen him in the harbor of Zanzibar, Mozambique, Delagoa Bay,

Natal, or the other eastern ports, is, with all allowances, a

splendid worker; and though the experiment has seldom been tried in

the interior, it is well known that the capacity is there, and

wherever encouraged yields results beyond all expectation. Probably

the severest test to which the native of Central Africa has ever been

put is the construction of the Stevenson road, between Lakes Nyassa

and Tanganyika. Forty-six miles of that road--probably the only

thing of the kind in Central Africa--have already been made entirely

by native labor, and the work could not have been better done had it

been executed by English navvies. I have watched by the day a party

of seventy natives working at a cutting upon that road. Till three

or four years ago none of them had ever looked upon a white man; nor,

till a few months previously, had one of them seen a spade, a

pickaxe, or a crowbar. Yet these savages handled their tools to such

purpose that, with only a single European superintendent, they have

made a road, full of difficult cuttings and gradients, which would

not disgrace a railway contractor at home. The workmen keep regular

hours--six in the morning till five at night, with a rest at

mid-day--work steadily, continuously, willingly, and above all,

merrily. This goes on, observe, in the heart of the tropics, almost

under the equator itself, where the white man's energy evaporates,

and leaves him so limp that he cannot even be an example to his men.

This goes on too without any compulsion; the natives flock from far

and near, sometimes from long distances, to try this new sensation of

work. These men are not slaves, but volunteers; and though they are

paid by the fortnight, many will remain at their post the whole

season through. The only bribe for all this work is a yard or two of

calico per week per man; so that it seems to me one of the greatest

problems of the future of Africa is here solved. In capacity the

African is fit to work, in inclination he is willing to work, and in

actual experiment he has done it; so that with capital enlisted and

wise heads to direct these energies, with considerate employers who

will remember that these men are but children, this vast nation of

the unemployed may yet be added to the slowly growing list of the

world's producers.

Africa at this moment has an impossible access, a perilous climate, a

penniless people, an undeveloped soil. So once had England. It may

never be done; other laws may operate, unforeseen factors may

interfere; but there is nothing in the soil, the products, the

climate, or the people of Africa, to forbid its joining even at this

late day in the great march of civilization.

IV.

THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA.

ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE.

The life of the native African is not all idyll. It is darkened by a

tragedy whose terrors are unknown to any other people under heaven.

Of its mild domestic slavery I do not speak, nor of its revolting

witchcraft, nor of its endless quarrels and frequent tribal wars.

These minor evils are lost in the shadow of a great and national

wrong. Among these simple and unprotected tribes, Arabs--uninvited

strangers of another race and nature--pour in from the North and

East, with the deliberate purpose of making this paradise a hell. It

seems the awful destiny of this homeless people to spend their lives

in breaking up the homes of others. Wherever they go in Africa the

followers of Islam are the destroyers of peace, the breakers up of

the patriarchal life, the dissolvers of the family tie. Already they

hold the whole Continent under one reign of terror. They have

effected this in virtue of one thing--they possess firearms; and they

do it for one object--ivory and slaves, for these two are one. The

slaves are needed to buy ivory with; then more slaves have to be

stolen to carry it. So living man himself has become the commercial

currency of Africa. He is locomotive, he is easily acquired, he is

immediately negotiable.

Arab encampments for carrying on a wholesale trade in this terrible

commodity are now established all over the heart of Africa. They are

usually connected with wealthy Arab traders at Zanzibar and other

places on the coast, and communication is kept up by caravans which

pass, at long intervals, from one to the other. Being always large

and well supplied with the material of war, these caravans have at

their mercy the feeble and divided native tribes through which they

pass, and their trail across the Continent is darkened with every

aggravation of tyranny and crime. They come upon the scene suddenly;

they stay only long enough to secure their end, and disappear only to

return when a new crop has arisen which is worth the reaping.

Sometimes these Arab traders will actually settle for a year or two

in the heart of some quiet community in the remote interior. They

pretend perfect friendship; they molest no one; they barter honestly.

They plant the seeds of their favorite vegetables and fruits--the

Arab always carries seeds with him--as if they meant to stay for

ever. Meantime they buy ivory, tusk after tusk, until great piles of

it are buried beneath their huts and all their barter-goods are gone.

Then one day, suddenly, the inevitable quarrel is picked. And then

follows a wholesale massacre. Enough only are spared from the

slaughter to carry the ivory to the coast; the grass-huts of the

villages are set on fire; the Arabs strike camp; and the slave-march,

worse than death, begins.

This last act in the drama, the slave-march, is the aspect of slavery

which, in the past, has chiefly aroused the passions and the sympathy

of the outside world, but the greater evil is the demoralization and

disintegration of communities by which it is necessarily preceded.

It is essential to the traffic that the region drained by the slaver

should be kept in perpetual political ferment; that, in order to

prevent combination, chief should be pitted against chief; and that

the moment any tribe threatened to assume a dominating strength it

should either be broken up by the instigation of rebellion among its

dependencies, or made a tool of at their expense. The inter-relation

of tribe with tribe is so intricate that it is impossible to

exaggerate the effect of disturbing the equilibrium at even a single

centre. But, like a river, a slave-caravan has to be fed by

innumerable tributaries all along its course--at first in order to

gather a sufficient volume of human bodies for the start, and

afterwards to replace the frightful loss by desertion, disablement,

and death.

Many at home imagine that the death-knell of slavery was struck with

the events which followed the death of Livingstone. In the great

explorer's time we heard much of slavery; we were often appealed to;

the Government busied itself; something was really done. But the

wail is already forgotten, and England hears little now of the open

sore of the world. But the tragedy I have alluded to is repeated

every year and every month--witness such recent atrocities as those

of the Upper Congo, the Kassai and Sankaru region described by

Wissmann, of the Welle-Inakua district referred to by Van Gele. It

was but yesterday that an explorer, crossing from Lake Nyassa to Lake

Tanganyika, saw the whole southern end of Tanganyika peopled with

large and prosperous villages. The next to follow him found not a

solitary human being--nothing but burned homes and bleaching

skeletons. It was but yesterday--the close of 1887--that the Arabs

at the north end of Lake Nyassa, after destroying fourteen villages

with many of their inhabitants, pursued the population of one village

into a patch of tall dry grass, set it on fire, surrounded it, and

slew with the bullet and the spear those who crawled out from the

more merciful flames. The Wa-Nkonde tribe, to which these people

belonged, were, until this event, one of the most prosperous tribes

in East Central Africa. They occupied a country of exceptional

fertility and beauty. Three rivers, which never failed in the

severest drought, run through their territory, and their crops were

the richest and most varied in the country. They possessed herds of

cattle and goats; they fished in the lake with nets; they wrought

iron into many-patterned spearheads with exceptional ingenuity and

skill; and that even artistic taste had begun to develop among them

was evident from the ornamental work upon their huts, which were

themselves unique in Africa for clever construction and beauty of

design. This people, in short, by their own inherent ability and the

natural resources of their country, were on the high road to

civilization. Now, mark the swift stages in their decline and fall.

Years ago an almost unnoticed rill from that great Arab stream, which

with noiseless current and ever-changing bed has never ceased to flow

through Africa, trickled into the country. At first the Arab was

there on sufferance; he paid his way. Land was bought from the

Wa-Nkonde chiefs, and their sovereignty acknowledged. The Arab force

grew. In time it developed into a powerful incursion, and the Arabs

began openly to assert themselves. One of their own number was

elevated to the rulership, with the title of "Sultan of Nkonde." The

tension became great, and finally too severe to last. After

innumerable petty fights the final catastrophe was hurried on, and

after an atrocious carnage the remnant of the Wa-Nkonde were driven

from their fatherland. Such is the very last chapter in the history

of Arab rule in Africa.

The Germans, the Belgians, the English, and the Portuguese, are

crying out at present for territory in Central Africa. Meantime

humanity is crying out for some one to administer the country; for

some one to claim it, not by delimiting a frontier-line upon a map

with colored crayons, but by seeing justice done upon the spot; for

some one with a strong arm and a pitiful heart to break the Arab yoke

and keep these unprotected children free. It has been reserved for a

small company of English gentlemen to arrest the hand of the raider

in the episode I have just described. While Germany covets

Nyassa-land, while Portugal claims it, while England has sent a

consul there, without protection, to safeguard British missionary and

trading interests, two agents of the African Lakes Company, two

missionaries, the British Consul at Mozambique, with two companions

who happened to be in Nyassa-land on scientific work, have, at the

risk of their lives, averted further war, and with their own rifles

avenged the crime.