44o DA VID LIVINGSTONE. [chap. xxii. 



and increasing sponges, — making progress a continual 

 struggle. Yet, as he passes through a forest, he has an 

 eye to its flowers, which are numerous and beautiful : — 



" There are many flowers in the forest ; marigolds, a white jonquil- 

 looking flower without smell, many orchids, white, yellow, and pink 

 asclepias, with bunches of French-white flowers, clematis — Methonica 

 gloriosa, gladiolus, and blue and deep purple polygalas, grasses with 

 white starry seed-vessels, and spikelets of brownish red and yellow. 

 Besides these, there are beautiful blue flowering bulbs, and new flowers 

 of pretty delicate form and but little scent. To this list may be added 

 balsams, compositae of blood-red colour and of purple ; other flowers 

 of liver colour, bright canary yellow, pink orchids on spikes thickly 

 covered all round, and of three inches in length ; spiderworts of fine 

 blue or yellow or even pink. Different coloured asclepiadeae ; beautiful 

 yellow and red umbelliferous flowering plants ; dill and wild parsnips ; 

 pretty flowering aloes, yellow and red, in one whorl of blossoms ; peas 

 and many other flowering plants which I do not know." 



Observations were taken with unremitting diligence, 

 except when, as was now common, nothing could be seen 

 in the heavens. As they advanced, the weather became 

 worse. It rained as if nothing but rain were ever known 

 in the watershed. The path lay across flooded rivers, 

 which were distinguished by their currents only from the 

 flooded country along their banks. Dr. Livingstone had 

 to be carried over the rivers on the back of one of his men, 

 in the fashion so graphically depicted on the cover of the 

 Last Journals. The stretches of sponge that came before 

 and after the rivers, with their long grass and elephant- 

 holes, were scarcely less trying. The inhabitants were, 

 commonly, most unfriendly to the party ; they refused 

 them food, and, whenever they could, deceived them as 

 to the way. Hunger bore down on the party with its 

 bitter gnawing. Once a mass of furious ants attacked 

 the Doctor by night, driving him in despair from hut to 

 hut. Any frame but one of iron must have succumbed to 

 a single month of such a life, and before a week was out, 

 any body of men, not held together by a power of disci- 

 pline and a charm of affection unexampled in the history 



