Leaving his desolate home, Livingstone proceeded on his journey.  On the way he met Sechele, who was going, he said, to see the Queen of England.  Livingstone tried to dissuade him.

“Will not the Queen listen to me?” asked the chief.

“I believe she would listen, but the difficulty is to get to her.”

“Well, I shall reach her.”

And so they parted.  Sechele actually made his way to the Cape, a distance of a thousand miles, but could get no farther, and returned to his own country.  The remnants of the tribes who had formerly lived among the Boers gathered around him, and he is now more powerful than ever.

It is slow traveling in Africa.  Livingstone was almost a year in accomplishing the 1500 miles between Cape Town and the country of the Makololo.  He found that Mamochisane, the daughter of Sebituane, had voluntarily resigned the chieftainship to her younger brother, Sekeletu.  She wished to be married, she said, and have a family like other women.  The young chief Sekeletu was very friendly, but showed no disposition to become a convert.  He refused to learn to read the Bible, for fear it might change his heart, and make him content with only one wife, like Sechele.  For his part he wanted at least five.

Some months were passed in this country, which is described as fertile and well-cultivated—­producing millet, maize, yams, sweet potatoes, cassava, beans, pumpkins, water-melons, and the like.  The sugar-cane grows plentifully, but the people had never learned the process of making sugar.  They have great numbers of cattle, and game of various species abounds.  On one occasion a troop of eighty-one buffaloes defiled slowly before their evening fire, while herds of splendid elands stood, without fear, at two hundred yards’ distance.  The country is rather unhealthy, from the mass of decayed vegetation exposed to the torrid sun.

After due consideration, Livingstone resolved to make his way to Loanda, a Portuguese settlement on the western coast.  Sekeletu, anxious to open a trade with the coast, appointed twenty-seven men to accompany the traveler; and on the 11th of November, 1853, he set out on his journey.

Three or four small boxes contained all the baggage of the party.  The only provisions were a few pounds of biscuits, coffee, tea, and sugar; their main reliance being upon the game which they expected to kill, and, this failing, upon the proceeds of about ten dollars’ worth of beads.  They also took with them a few elephants’ tusks, which Sekeletu sent by way of a trading venture.

The river up which they paddled abounds in hippopotami.  These are in general harmless, though now and then a solitary old bull who has been expelled from the herd vents his spleen by pitching into every canoe that passes.  Once their canoe was attacked by a female whose calf had been speared, and nearly overturned.  The female carries her young upon her back, its little round head first appearing above the surface when she comes up to breathe.