■64 LIVINGSTONE'S LAST JOUENALS. [Chap. III. 



The natives are just as prone to perpetuate Zambezi or 

 Lufira in Africa as we are to multiply our Avons and 

 Ouses in England.] 



Mh October, 1870. — A trading party from Ujiji reports 

 an epidemic raging between the coast and Ujiji, and very 

 fatal. Syde bin Habib and Dugumbe are coming, and 

 they have letters and perhaps people for me, so I remain, 

 though the irritable ulcers are well-nigh healed. I fear 

 that my packet for the coast may have fared badly, for 

 the Lewale has kept Musa Kamaal by him, so that no 

 evidence against himself or the dishonest man Musa bin 

 Saloom should be given: my box and guns, with despatches, 

 I fear will never be sent. Zahor, to whom I gave calico to 

 pay carriers, has been sent off to Lobemba. 



Mohamad sowed rice yesterday, and has to send his 

 people (who were unsuccessful among the Balegga) away 

 to the Metambe, where they got ivory before. 



I cannot understand very well what a " Theoretical Dis- 

 coverer" is. If anyone got up and declared in a public 

 meeting that he was the theoretical discoverer of the philo- 

 sopher's stone, or of perpetual motion for watches, should we 

 not mark him as a little wrong in the head ? So of the Nile 

 sources. The Portuguese crossed the Chambeze some 

 seventy years before I did, but to them it was a branch of 

 the Zambezi and nothing more. Cooley put it down as the 

 New Zambesi, and made it run backwards, up-hill, between 

 3000 and 4000 feet ! I was misled by the similarity of 

 names and a map, to think it the eastern branch of the 

 Zambezi. I was told that it formed a large water in the 

 south-west, this I readily believed to be the Liambai, in 

 the Barotse Valley, and it took me eighteen months of toil 

 to come back again to the Chambeze in Lake Bangweolo, 

 and work out the error into which I was led — twenty-two 

 months elapsed ere I got back to the point whence I set out 



