6o Central Africa. 
see a solitary man, woman, or child who had ever heard the 
Gospel ! He gazed on the faces of men representing tribes 
numbering many millions; but to none of them had the 
message of mercy ever been proclaimed, to none of them 
had the glad tidings of salvation and eternal life, through 
Jesus Christ, ever been carried." 
Lake Nyassa is a long and somewhat narrow body of 
water lying to the south of the Equatorial lakes. Consul 
Elton, Dr. Livingstone, Mr. Young, Mr. Cotterill, and Drs. 
I^aws and Stewart, have all successively explored this lake. 
The swamps of the surrounding region furnish homes for 
large herds of elephants. Livingstone, on one occasion, saw 
eight hundred of them ; while soon after, he records passing 
''two miles of elephants." Nyassa is encircled by hills, 
broken by deep gullies and bays, down which, sudden and 
furious storms sometimes sweep, threatening shipwreck to 
all the craft upon the lake. The elephant-marshes afford 
fine sport to the explorers, and some of them experienced 
hair-breadth escapes. It was in this district that Dr. Living- 
stone was robbed of his medicine chest by two slaves on 
whom he had taken compassion. He knew what that loss 
meant ; and writing in his diary, he says, " I felt as if I had 
received sentence of death." Henceforth, he was at the 
mercy of African fever, which attacked him time after time 
until he succumbed. Nor was he the only explorer who 
got disabled, and finally conquered by the malarious in- 
fluences of the Nyassa country. Bishop Mackenzie, of the 
Universities' Mission, died in the Shire swamps, having lost 
his quinine through the upsetting of a canoe. Roscher, 
the German explorer, was murdered at a little village near 
Nyassa. Mrs. Livingstone died of fever near the river Shire, 
which flows into the lake ; and Consul Elton sank into the 
arms of death at a spot to the north of it. Other explorers 
