How I Found Livingstone, Henry M. Stanley [best fantasy books to read txt] 📗

music the bosky

dells below, and enriched the populous district of Mpwapwa.

One felt better, stronger, on this breezy height, drinking in the

pure air and feasting the eyes on such a varied landscape as it

presented, on spreading plateaus green as lawns, on smooth rounded

tops, on mountain vales containing recesses which might charm a

hermit’s soul, on deep and awful ravines where reigned a twilight

gloom, on fractured and riven precipices, on huge fantastically-worn

boulders which overtopped them, on picturesque tracts which

embraced all that was wild, and all that was poetical in Nature.

 

Mpwapwa, though the traveller from the coast will feel grateful for

the milk it furnished after being so long deprived of it, will be

kept in mind as a most remarkable place for earwigs. In my tent

they might be counted by thousands; in my slung cot they were

by hundreds; on my clothes they were by fifties; on my neck

and head they were by scores. The several plagues of locusts,

fleas, and lice sink into utter insignificance compared with this

fearful one of earwigs. It is true they did not bite, and they

did not irritate the cuticle, but what their presence and numbers

suggested was something so horrible that it drove one nearly

insane to think of it. Who will come to East Africa without

reading the experiences of Burton and Speke? Who is he that

having read them will not remember with horror the dreadful

account given by Speke of his encounters with these pests?

My intense nervous watchfulness alone, I believe, saved me

from a like calamity.

 

Second to the earwigs in importance and in numbers were the white

ants, whose powers of destructiveness were simply awful. Mats,

cloth, portmanteaus, clothes, in short, every article I possessed,

seemed on the verge of destruction, and, as I witnessed their

voracity, I felt anxious lest my tent should be devoured while

I slept. This was the first khambi since leaving the coast where

their presence became a matter of anxiety; at all other camping

places hitherto the red and black ants had usurped our attention,

but at Mpwapwa the red species were not seen, while the black

were also very scarce.

 

After a three days’ halt at Mpwapwa I decided of a march to

Marenga Mkali, which should be uninterrupted until we reached Mvumi

in Ugogo, where I should be inducted into the art of paying tribute

to the Wagogo chiefs. The first march to Kisokweh was purposely

made short, being barely four miles, in order to enable Sheikh

Thani, Sheikh Hamed, and five or six Wasawahili caravans to come

up with me at Chunyo on the confines of Marenga Mkali.

 

CHAPTER VII. MARENGA MKALI, UGOGO, AND UYANZI, TO UNYANYEMBE.

 

Mortality amongst the baggage animals.—The contumacious Wagogo—

Mobs of Maenads.—Tribute paying.—Necessity of prudence.—Oration

of the guide.—The genuine “Ugogians.”—Vituperative power.—A

surprised chief.—The famous Mizanza.—Killing hyaenas.—The Greeks

and Romans of Africa.—A critical moment.—The “elephant’s back.”—

The wilderness of Ukimbu.—End of the first stage of the search.—

Arrival at Unyanyembe.

 

The 22nd of May saw Thani and Hamed’s caravans united with my own

at Chunyo, three and a half hours’ march from Mpwapwa. The road

from the latter place ran along the skirts of the Mpwapwa range;

at three or four places it crossed outlying spurs that stood

isolated from the main body of the range. The last of these hill

spurs, joined by an elevated cross ridge to the Mpwapwa, shelters

the tembe of Chunyo, situated on the western face, from the stormy

gusts that come roaring down the steep slopes. The water of Chunyo

is eminently bad, in fact it is its saline-nitrous nature which has

given the name Marenga Mkali—bitter water—to the wilderness which

separates Usagara from Ugogo. Though extremely offensive to the

palate, Arabs and the natives drink it without fear, and without

any bad results; but they are careful to withhold their baggage

animals from the pits. Being ignorant of its nature, and not

exactly understanding what precise location was meant by Marenga

Mkali, I permitted the donkeys to be taken to water, as usual

after a march; and the consequence was calamitous in the extreme.

What the fearful swamp of Makata had spared, the waters of

Marenga Mkali destroyed. In less than five days after our

departure from Chunyo or Marenga Mali, five out of the nine donkeys

left to me at the time—the five healthiest animals—fell victims.

 

We formed quite an imposing caravan as we emerged from inhospitable

Chunyo, in number amounting to about four hundred souls. We were

strong in guns, flags, horns, sounding drums and noise. To Sheikh

Hamed, by permission of Sheikh Thani, and myself was allotted the

task of guiding and leading this great caravan through dreaded

Ugogo; which was a most unhappy selection, as will be seen

hereafter.

 

Marenga Mali, over thirty miles across, was at last before us.

This distance had to be traversed within thirty-six hours, so that

the fatigue of the ordinary march would be more than doubled by this.

From Chunyo to Ugogo not one drop of water was to be found. As a

large caravan, say over two hundred souls, seldom travels over one

and three-quarter miles per hour, a march of thirty miles would

require seventeen hours of endurance without water and but little

rest. East Africa generally possessing unlimited quantities of

water, caravans have not been compelled for lack of the element

to have recourse to the mushok of India and the khirbeh of Egypt.

Being able to cross the waterless districts by a couple of long

marches, they content themselves for the time with a small gourdful,

and with keeping their imaginations dwelling upon the copious

quantities they will drink upon arrival at the watering-place.

 

The march through this waterless district was most monotonous,

and a dangerous fever attacked me, which seemed to eat into my very

vitals. The wonders of Africa that bodied themselves forth in the

shape of flocks of zebras, giraffes, elands, or antelopes,

galloping over the jungleless plain, had no charm for me; nor

could they serve to draw my attention from the severe fit of

sickness which possessed me. Towards the end of the first march

I was not able to sit upon the donkey’s back; nor would it do,

when but a third of the way across the wilderness, to halt until

the next day; soldiers were therefore detailed to carry me in a

hammock, and, when the terekeza was performed in the afternoon,

I lay in a lethargic state, unconscious of all things. With the

night passed the fever, and, at 3 o’clock in the morning, when the

march was resumed, I was booted and spurred, and the recognized

mtongi of my caravan once more. At 8 A.M. we had performed the

thirty-two miles. The wilderness of Marenga Mkali had been passed

and we had entered Ugogo, which was at once a dreaded land to my

caravan, and a Land of Promise to myself.

 

The transition from the wilderness into this Promised Land was

very gradual and easy. Very slowly the jungle thinned, the cleared

land was a long time appearing, and when it had finally appeared,

there were no signs of cultivation until we could clearly make out

the herbage and vegetation on some hill slopes to our right running

parallel with our route, then we saw timber on the hills, and broad

acreage under cultivation—and, lo! as we ascended a wave of

reddish earth covered with tall weeds and cane, but a few feet from

us, and directly across our path, were the fields of matama and

grain we had been looking for, and Ugogo had been entered an hour

before.

 

The view was not such as I expected. I had imagined a plateau

several hundred feet higher than Marenga Mkali, and an expansive

view which should reveal Ugogo and its characteristics at once.

But instead, while travelling from the tall weeds which covered

the clearing which had preceded the cultivated parts, we had entered

into the depths of the taller matama stalks, and, excepting some

distant hills near Mvumi, where the Great Sultan lived—the first

of the tribe to whom we should pay tribute—the view was extremely

limited.

 

However, in the neighbourhood of the first village a glimpse at

some of the peculiar features of Ugogo was obtained, and there

was a vast plain—now flat, now heaving upwards, here level as a

table, there tilted up into rugged knolls bristling with scores of

rough boulders of immense size, which lay piled one above another

as if the children of a Titanic race had been playing at

house-building. Indeed, these piles of rounded, angular, and riven

rock formed miniature hills of themselves; and appeared as if each

body had been ejected upwards by some violent agency beneath.

There was one of these in particular, near Mvumi, which was so

large, and being slightly obscured from view by the outspreading

branches of a gigantic baobab, bore such a strong resemblance to

a square tower of massive dimensions, that for a long time I

cherished the idea that I had discovered something most

interesting which had strangely escaped the notice of my

predecessors in East Africa. A nearer view dispelled the illusion,

and proved it to be a huge cube of rock, measuring about forty

feet each way. The baobabs were also particularly conspicuous on

this scene, no other kind of tree being visible in the cultivated

parts. These had probably been left for two reasons: first, want

of proper axes for felling trees of such enormous growth;

secondly, because during a famine the fruit of the baobab furnishes

a flour which, in the absence of anything better, is said to be

eatable and nourishing.

 

The first words I heard in Ugogo were from a Wagogo elder, of

sturdy form, who in an indolent way tended the flocks, but showed

a marked interest in the stranger clad in white flannels, with a

Hawkes’ patent cork solar topee on his head, a most unusual thing

in Ugogo, who came walking past him, and there were “Yambo, Musungu,

Yambo, bana, bana,” delivered with a voice loud enough to make

itself heard a full mile away. No sooner had the greeting

been delivered than the word “Musungu” seemed to electrify his

entire village; and the people of other villages, situated at

intervals near the road, noting the excitement that reigned at

the first, also participated in the general frenzy which seemed

suddenly to have possessed them. I consider my progress from the

first village to Mvumi to have been most triumphant; for I was

accompanied by a furious mob of men, women, and children, all

almost as naked as Mother Eve when the world first dawned upon her

in the garden of Eden, fighting, quarrelling, jostling, staggering

against each other for the best view of the white man, the like of

whom was now seen for the first time in this part of Ugogo. The

cries of admiration, such as “Hi-le!” which broke often and in

confused uproar upon my ear, were not gratefully accepted,

inasmuch as I deemed many of them impertinent. A respectful

silence and more reserved behaviour would have won my esteem;

but, ye powers, who cause etiquette to be observed in Usungu,*

respectful silence, reserved behaviour, and esteem are terms

unknown in savage Ugogo. Hitherto I had compared myself to a

merchant of Bagdad travelling among the Kurds of Kurdistan, selling

his wares of Damascus silk, kefiyehs, &c.; but now I was compelled

to lower my standard, and thought myself not much better than a

monkey in a zoological collection. One of my soldiers requested

them to lessen their vociferous noise; but the evil-minded race

ordered him to shut up, as a thing unworthy to speak to the Wagogo!

When I imploringly turned to the Arabs for counsel in this strait,

old Sheikh