116 LIFE OF DA VID LIVINGSTONE, LL.D. 



stamping makes a cloud of dust around, and they leave a deep ring in the 

 ground where they have stood. If the scene were witnessed in a lunatic 

 asylum, it would be nothing out of the way, and quite appropriate even as a 

 means of letting off the excessive excitement of the brain ; but the grey headed 

 men joined in the performance with as much zest as others whose youth might 

 be an excuse for making the perspiration stream off their bodies with the 

 exertion. . . . The women stand by clapping their hands, and occasionally 

 one advances into the circle composed of a hundred men, makes a few move- 

 ments, and then retires." 



The effect the experience gained in this journey had upon him, and the 

 reflections induced thereby, are indicated in the following extract. " I had 

 been," he says, "during a nine weeks' tour, in closer contact with heathenism 

 than I had ever been before ; and though all, including the chief, were as 

 kind and attentive to me as possible, and there was no want of food, yet to 

 endure the dancing, roaring, and singing, the jesting, anecdotes, grumbling, 

 quarreling, and murdering of these children of nature, seemed more like a 

 severe penance than anything I had before met with in the course of my mis- 

 sionary duties. I took thence a more intense disgust at heathenism than I had 

 before, and formed a greatly elevated opinion of the latent effect of missions 

 in the south, among tribes which are reported to have been as savage as the 

 Makololo. The indirect benefits which, to a casual observer lie beneath the 

 surface, and are inappreciable, in reference to the probable wide diffusion of 

 Christianity at some future time, are worth all the money and labour that 

 have been expended to produce them." 



The following account, written by the great traveller of his first passage 

 up the Leeambye, forms a very valuable supplement to the brief narrative we 

 have already given. It is dated Town of Sekeletu, Linyanti, 20th Septem 

 ber, 1853:— 



" As soon as I could procure people willing to risk a journey through the 

 country lately the scene of the gallant deeds of the Boers, I left Kuruman ; 

 and my companions being aware of certain wrathful fulminations uttered by 

 General Piet Scholtz to deter me from again visiting the little strip of 

 country which the Republicans fancy lies between Magaliesberg and Jeru- 

 salem, our progress was pretty quick till we entered lat. 19°, at a place that I 

 have marked on my map as the Fever Ponds. Here the whole party, except 

 a Bakwain lad and myself, was laid prostrate by fever. He managed the 

 oxen and I the hospital, until, through the goodness of God, the state of the 

 invalids permitted us again to move northwards. I did not follow our old 

 path, but froni Kamakama travelled on the magnetic meridian (N.N.W.), in 

 order to avoid the tsetse (fly). This new path brought us into a densely 

 wooded country, where the grass was from 8 to 10 feet high. The greater 

 leafmess of the trees showed we were in a moist climate, and we were most 



