520 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
in Europe or America, who would not feel a curious 
pleasure in, and envy me the opportunity of, exploring 
the beautiful and endless solitudes of this region, were 
they but certain that they would be sustained the while 
by nourishing food, and be secure from fatal harm. For 
in all civilized countries that I have travelled in, I have 
observed how very large a number of people indulge 
this penchant for travel in such unfrequented corners 
and nooks of wild woodland, glen, or heath as present 
themselves near home. I myself was conscious that the 
table-land on both sides of the Livingstone, with its 
lofty ridges, which ran away north or south to some 
complicated watershed, enclosing, no doubt, some awe- 
some glens and solemn ravines, or from whose tops I 
might gaze upon a world of wild beauty never seen 
before, presented to me opportunities of exploring such 
as few had ever possessed : but, alas ! all things were 
adverse to such pleasure ; we were, to use a Miltonian 
phrase, subject to the “ hateful siege of contraries.” The 
freshness and ardour of feeling with which I had set out 
from the Indian Ocean had, by this time, been quite 
worn away. Fevers had sapped the frame ; over-much 
trouble had strained the spirit ; hunger had debilitated 
the body, anxiety preyed upon the mind. My people 
were groaning aloud ; their sunken eyes and unfleshed 
bodies were a living reproach to me ; their vigour was 
now gone, though their fidelity was unquestionable ; 
their knees were bent with weakness, and their backs 
were no longer rigid with the vigour of youth, and life, 
and strength, and fire of devotion. Hollow-eyed, sallow, 
and gaunt, unspeakably miserable in aspect, we yielded 
at length to imperious nature, and had but one thought 
only — to trudge on for one look more at the blue ocean. 
Founding, after a long stretch of tolerably calm 
water, a picturesque point, we view another long reach, 
and half-way on the left bank we camp. Maddened by 
sharp pangs of hunger, the people soon scatter about 
the district of Kilolo. What occurs I know not. Likely 
enough the wretched creatures, tormented by the in- 
sufferable insolence of the aborigines, and goaded by a 
