CHAPTER XX. 



fir. Livingstone's Account of his Explorations. — His theory of the connection between 

 the Lualaba and the Nile. — Horrors of Slave-Trade. — A Man-Eating Tribe. — 

 Massacre of the Mani/ema, etc., etc. 



THE story of Dr. Livingstone's wanderings to and fro over the vast extent 

 of country, the watershed of which, according to his belief, goes to form 

 the Nile and the Congo, cannot be better told than in his own words. Letters 

 to Mr. James Gordon Bennett, and to Lords Clarendon and Granville, succes- 

 cessively Foreign Ministers in the English Government, supply ample mate- 

 rials, and tell the story of his trials and difficulties, and the geographical con- 

 clusions he had arrived at up to the period of Mr. Stanley's meeting with him, 

 in a far more graphic and telling manner than any paraphrase of ours could 

 pretend to. As the letters were sent to different individuals, there is consi- 

 derable repetition, which we have endeavoured, by excisions, to render as 

 little noticeable as possible. In his first letter to Mr. Gordon Bennett, he 

 records his thanks for the great service rendered to him by that gentleman: — 



" It is, in general, somewhat difficult to write to one we have never seen. 

 It feels so much like addressing an abstract idea ; but the presence of your 

 representative, Mr. H. M. Stanley, in this distant region, takes away the 

 strangeness I should otherwise have felt, and in writing to thank you for the 

 extreme kindness that prompted you to send him, I feel quite at home. 



" If I explain the forlorn condition in which he found me, you will easily 

 perceive that I have good reason to use very strong expressions of gratitude. 

 I came to Ujiji off a tramp of between four hundred and five hundred miles 

 beneath a blazing vertical sun, having been baffled, worried, defeated, and 

 forced to return, when almost in sight of the end of the geographical part 

 of my mission, by a number of half-caste Moslem slaves, sent to me from 

 Zanzibar instead of men. The sore heart, made still sorer by the truly woe- 

 ful sights I had seen of l man's inhumanity to man,' reacted on the bodily 

 frame, and depressed it beyond measure. I thought that I was dying on 

 my feet. It is not too much to say, that almost every step of the weary 

 sultry way I was in pain, and I reached Ujiji a mere ruckle of bones. Here 

 I found that some £500 worth of goods I had ordered from Zanzibar had 

 unaccountably been entrusted to a drunken half-caste Moslem tailor, who, 



