STANLEY’S SEARCH FOR LIVINGSTONE 
339 
Day by day the caravans proceeded, marching a few hours at a 
time, and covering but a few miles in a day. Although the outbreak 
of the rainy season or Masika, as it is called, was expected, the weather 
continued fine. Through a rich and rolling country, extremely fertile, 
producing numberless varieties of grain and fruit; across open plains 
and shallow valleys which were covered with an exuberant wilderness 
of growth, save in the cultivated neighborhood of villages; through 
glades of mighty trees—the ebony, the calabash, and the mango; over 
seas of grasses of many kinds, and amid islands of tree-clumps or 
tangled thickets, Stanley’s caravans proceeded on their course two or 
three days’ march behind each other. All went well until they came 
in for the first taste of the Masika when encamped at Kingaru. The 
place itself was unhealthy, and when Stanley renewed his march, most 
of his men were enfeebled by ague, fever, or dysentery, and the two 
valuable horses he had were dead. 
On the 8th of April, 1870, between Imbiki and Msuwa, the expe¬ 
dition had their first experience of jungle. Added to the obstacles 
which “a wall of thorny plants and creepers” bristling on each side 
of a narrow path—but a foot in width—across which projecting 
branches stretched with “knots of spiky twigs stiff as spike-nails, 
ready to catch and hold anything,” would naturally present to a train 
of donkeys laden with large bales, there arose from the decayed vege¬ 
tation around such a breath of miasma, mingled with the poisonous 
stench of the rank undergrowth, that Stanley momentarily expected 
to find himself and his men succumb to an attack of jungle fever. This 
jungle was happily soon left behind’, and on the succeeding days the 
road proved excellent. They had now reached an elevated and fertile 
country, where sugar corn, Indian corn and other plants grew luxuri¬ 
antly and the banana flourished in abundance. 
The expedition reached the country of Useguhha on April 16th, 
and at Muhalleh, the first 'settlement in this country, Stanley met a 
huge Arab caravan on the downward journey to Bagamoyo, from 
Tanganyika, and for the first time had tidings of Livingstone. The 
Arab Sheikh, Salim Bin Rashid, told him that he had actually lived 
for two weeks in a hut next to that in which Livingstone dwelt at 
Ujiji; that the great traveler looked aged and ill, and that his hair 
