CHAPTER XXI. 



APPROACHING NYASSA. 



A Guest of Mataka — The Waiyau — Livingstone and the Arabs — The Town of 

 Moerabe — Iron Smelting — Causes of Desolation — Waiyau Described — Living- 

 stone's Desires — Slave-Trade : Does it Pay ? — Sepoys sent back — Mountains — 

 Springs — Iron — Approaching Nyassa — Livingstone's Review of his Route — 

 The Watershed — Geological Formations — Kindness of the People — The Single 

 Curse — An Example of Christians — Inconvenience of being English — Arabs 

 as Settlers — A Doubtful Question Settled — Pota Mimba — Around the Foot of 

 the Lake — No Earthquake Known — Sites of Old Villages — Brooks — The First 

 European Seen — " God Took Him " — Wikatani Finds Relatives — Salt-Making 

 — Eighty-five Slaves in a Pen — Work Honorable. 



In our comfortable homes, surrounded by the conveniences 

 and extravagances afforded by culture and wealth, the prospect 

 of two weeks' recreation in an African village where no white 

 man had ever been before, with only a hut of wattle and daub 

 to shield us from the rays of a tropical sun and the prying gaze 

 of curious barbarians, only the rude fare of people who followed 

 the simplest suggestions of nature in their culinary art, and the 

 society of the most untutored heathen, would hardly be called 

 delightful ; but after the weariness and anxiety of a long march 

 across a thoroughly desolate country, after having been deprived 

 of every comfort, travelling many days with hardly food enough 

 to sustain life, Dr. Livingstone was fully prepared to appreciate 

 the kindness of Mataka very highly. The chief proved himself 

 a very generous, hospitable ma#, and received kindly the sug- 

 gestions of Dr. Livingstone, and seemed to enjoy exceedingly 

 conversation about the customs and improvements of the coun- 

 try of the white man. He had been a very active participant 

 in the slave-trade, and winced sometimes under the arguments 

 of his visitor, which seemed to convict him of great folly and 

 wrong in that matter. His town is not far from the Nyassa 

 country, toward which Livingstone was journeying. The 

 Waiyau have been pretty generally supplied with guns and 

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