1866-69.] FROM ZANZIBAR TO UJIJI. 373 



Then, in the Waiyau country, west of Mataka's, came a 

 splendid district 3400 feet above the sea, as well adapted 

 for a settlement as Magomero, but it had taken them 

 four months to get at it, while Magomero was reached in 

 three weeks. The abandonment of that mission he would 

 never cease to regret. As they neared Lake Nyassa, 

 slave parties became more common. On the 8th August 

 1866 they reached the lake, which seemed to Livingstone 

 like an old familiar friend which he never expected to see 

 again. He thanked God, bathed again in the delicious 

 water, and felt quite exhilarated. 



Writing to his son Thomas, 28th August, he says : — 



" The Sepoj^s were morally unfit for travel, and then we had hard 

 lines, all of us. Food was not to be had for love or money. Our 

 finest cloths only brought miserable morsels of the common grain. 

 I trudged it the whole way, and having no animal food save what 

 turtle-doves and guinea-fowls we occasionally shot, I became like one 

 of Pharaoh's lean kine. The last tramp [to Nyassa] brought us to a 

 land of plenty. It was over a very fine country, but quite depopulated. 

 . . . The principal chief, named Mataka, lives on the watershed over- 

 hanging this, but fifty miles or more distant from this ; his town con- 

 tained a thousand houses — many of them square, in imitation of the 

 Arabs. Large patches of English peas in full bearing grew in the 

 moist hollows, or were irrigated. Cattle showed that no tsetse existed. 

 When we arrived, Mataka was just sending back a number of cattle 

 and captives to their own homes. They had been taken by his people 

 without his knowledge from Nyassa. I saw them by accident : there 

 were fifty-four women and children, about a dozen young men and 

 boys, and about twenty-five or thirty head of cattle. As the act was 

 spontaneous, it was the more gratifying to witness. . . . 



" I sometimes remember you with some anxiety, as not knowing 

 what opening may be made for you in life. . . . Whatever you feel 

 yourself best fitted for, ' commit thy way to the Lord, trust also in 

 Him, and He will bring it to pass.' One ought to endeavour to devote 

 the peculiarities of his nature to his Redeemer's service, whatever 

 these may be." 



Resting at the lake, and working up journal, lunars, 

 and altitudes, he hears of the arrival of an Englishman at 

 Mataka's, with cattle for him, " who had two eyes behind 

 as well as two in front — news enough for a while." Zoology, 

 Botany, and Geology engage his attention as usual. He 



