and Portuguese half-castes had appeared with Manchester goods.  These excited the intense wonder and cupidity of both nations.  They listened to the story of cotton-mills as fairy dreams, exclaiming:  “How can iron spin, weave, and print?  Truly ye are gods!” and were already inclined to steal their neighbors’ children—­those of their own tribe they never sold at this time—­to obtain these wonders out of the sea.

Happily Livingstone had brought back with him several Balonda children who had been carried off by the Makololo.  This, and his speeches to Manenko, the chieftainess of the district and niece of Shinte, the head chief of the Balonda, gained them a welcome.  This Amazon was a strapping young woman of twenty, who led their party through the forest at a pace which tried the best walkers.  She seems to have been the only native whose will ever prevailed against Livingstone’s.

He intended to proceed up to her uncle Shinte’s town in canoes:  she insisted that they should march by land, and ordered her people to shoulder his baggage in spite of him.  “My men succumbed, and left me powerless.  I was moving off in high dudgeon to the canoes, when she kindly placed her hand on my shoulder, and with a motherly look said, ‘Now, my little man, just do as the rest have done.’  My feeling of annoyance of course vanished, and I went out to try for some meat.  My men, in admiration of her pedestrian powers, kept remarking, ’Manenko is a soldier,’ and we were all glad when she proposed a halt for the night.”

Shinte received them in his town, the largest and best laid out that Livingstone had seen in Central Africa, on a sort of throne covered with leopard-skin.  The kotla, or place of audience, was one hundred yards square.  Though in the sweating stage of an intermittent fever, Livingstone held his own with the chief, gave him an ox as “his mouth was bitter from want of flesh,” advised him to open a trade in cattle with the Makololo, and to put down the slave-trade; and, after spending more than a week with him, left amid the warmest professions of friendship.  Shinte found him a guide of his tribe, Intemese by name, who was to stay by them till they reached the sea, and at a last interview hung round his neck a conical shell of such value that two of them, so his men assured him, would purchase a slave.

Soon they were out of Shinte’s territory, and Intemese became the plague of the party, though unluckily they could not dispense with him altogether in crossing the great flooded plains of Lebala.  They camped at night on mounds, where they had to trench round each hut and use the earth to raise their sleeping places.  “My men turned out to work most willingly, and I could not but contrast their conduct with that of Intemese, who was thoroughly imbued with the slave spirit, and lied on all occasions to save himself trouble.”  He lost the pontoon, too, thereby adding greatly to their troubles.